On August 24, 1914, at a rail siding in White River, Ontario, a young army veterinarian named Harry Colebourn stepped off a troop train and bought an orphaned black bear cub from a hunter for $20. His regiment was bound for a training camp in Quebec, then for a war in Europe, and a bear cub had no obvious place in either. He named her Winnipeg, after the city he had adopted as home, and smuggled her aboard anyway.Winnie, as the men soon called her, became the unofficial mascot of the Second Canadian Infantry Brigade. She sailed for England on October 3, 1914, and trained alongside the soldiers on Salisbury Plain, fed on condensed milk and whatever apples the men could spare.In the winter of 1914-15, with orders to deploy to France, Colebourn could not take a bear into the trenches. So, he left her at London Zoo. He visited whenever he had leave. By the time he was demobilised, Winnie had become one of the zoo’s most popular residents, gentle enough that keepers let children ride on her back and feed her by hand. Colebourn let her stay, and formally donated her to the zoo in 1919.Meanwhile, Christopher Robin Milne, the son of the writer AA Milne, received a teddy bear from Harrods on his first birthday. He called it Edward. A few years later, once he began visiting the real Winnie at the London Zoo, he renamed his bear after her and then borrowed a second name, Pooh, from a pet swan that appears in his father’s earlier poetry collection When We Were Very Young.Milne wrote him into a set of stories built around a bear “of very little brain”. The character’s first print appearance came a year before the book, in the short story The Wrong Sort of Bees, published in 1925. The full collection, Winnie-the-Pooh, followed on October 14, 1926, with EH Shepard’s illustrations giving the bear his now-familiar shape.Milne’s original 1926 text, not Disney’s version, entered the US public domain on January 1, 2022, ninety-five years after publication. Free of copyright, it was promptly turned into a slasher film, Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey, and has since come up in wider arguments about what AI systems can freely train on and generate.Milne, a veteran of the Somme who had returned from the war with what would now be called post-traumatic stress, found in the Hundred Acre Wood a register far gentler than the one he had lived through. He came to resent it.He had written poetry, mysteries and West End plays, and wanted to be remembered for the range of that work rather than for one children’s book.The toys that inspired the stories left England too. Christopher Robin, increasingly uneasy with a fame he had never asked for, gave his original bear and four of the other animals to his father’s American publisher, EP Dutton, partly to help promote the books in the US. They have been on public display at the New York Public Library since 1987.A wartime vet’s practical decision not to abandon an animal he couldn’t keep became, by a string of accidents, one of the most translated books in the English language.The centenary is already being marked worldwide — new editions from the original publisher, an exhibition in London, events from Winnipeg to Kansas City, and now New York.Timeless appealWhat explains the hold Pooh still has, a hundred years on? The stories lean on a deliberately plain vocabulary and a title character who openly distrusts long words, which may be part of why they travel so easily across languages and ages. Kathryn Aalto, who has written a literary history of the real Hundred Acre Wood, argues that “Pooh survives because the books are genuinely good,” not merely because of nostalgia or merchandising.There may be a simpler explanation too. Pooh’s world has almost no adults in it, no deadlines, no ambition, nothing more urgent than a stuck door or a missing tail. In a year when so much news is about speed — how fast everything is changing, how fast machines can now write or draw or decide, a book with nothing more pressing than a honey shortage might be popular simply because it is the opposite of all that.