Three things you may not have known about Winnie the Pooh

The original teddy crossed the Atlantic after the Second World War where he became a book-touring celebrity, eventually inspiring Disney to make him an international film star. He never returned and now receives about 750,000 visitors a year at his adopted home in the New York Public Library, where he lives in a bullet-proof glass case!

The forest, where Pooh lived, is based on Ashdown Forest, near Hartfield, East Sussex, close to where the Milnes lived. It has its own Five (not Four) Hundred Acre Wood, and although much of the area is now privately owned, a local shop sells maps of the walk to Poohsticks Bridge, where you can still play the game of racing floating sticks through the arches according to the strict rules. In the ‘sport’ of Poohsticks, competitors drop sticks into a stream from a bridge and then wait to see whose stick will float across the finish line first. This game was played for real by Christopher Robin it was also played by Pooh and his friends in the book The House At Pooh Corner.

Pooh’s friend Tigger’s favourite food was extract of malt, which Kanga gives to Roo as medicine in the books. Spoonfuls of the thick syrup, a by-product of brewing, were given to school children every morning just after the Second World War to build them up after food rationing.

Winnie the Pooh was 90 this year – Happy Birthday Pooh (maybe that's four things you didn't know?)

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