ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 22, 1996 TAG: 9604230061
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LONDON
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Associated Press
Christopher Robin Milne, immortalized as the young friend of Winnie the Pooh in the children's stories by his father, A.A. Milne, has died, the Times of London reported today. He was 75.
The newspaper said Christopher Robin Milne died Saturday, but did not say where he died or give the cause of death.
Milne was born in London in 1920, and as an adult was known to resent the melding of his real childhood and the fictional one in his father's tales.
In 1924, Alan Alexander Milne, already well-known for his light hand at literature and fiction, published a book of verse inspired by his 4-year-old son, ``When We Were Very Young.''
His son's affection for a bear named Winnie at the London zoo became the model of hugely successful children's books - ``Winnie-the-Pooh'' (1926), ``Now We are Six'' (1927) and ``The House at Pooh Corner'' (1928). The stories were later brought to film by Disney.
In photographs, it was clear how closely Milne modeled the fictional Christopher Robin on his son: the same wide, inquisitive brown eyes, the same carefully cropped mop top, the same gingham smock.
But the grown Christopher Milne displayed a tendency to counter his father's wishes. He dropped out of Cambridge in 1939 to enlist in the army; he was wounded in Italy during World WarII.
He married his cousin Lesley de Selincourt in 1949 - not his father's choice for his bride - and became a bookseller, settling in Stoke Fleming on England's southwestern coast.
He endured countless parents pressing Pooh books into his hands and asking for an autograph; in return he asked for a donation for his favorite charity, Save the Children.
In private, he pursued his passion for carpentry, building special furniture for his daughter, who suffered from cerebral palsy.
His father died in 1956, and he remained silent about the effect of the series' immense popularity on his life until 1974, when he published ``The Enchanted Places.'' It was followed by ``The Path Through the Trees'' in 1979 and ``The Hollow on the Hill'' in 1982.
Milne described his father as a man who used his small son's youth to stave off his own middle age.
``When I was three, my father was three. When I was six, he was six ... he needed me to escape from being fifty,'' he wrote.
He said his father kept his only child at a distance: ``His heart remained buttoned up all through his life.''
He also resented the confusing of his childhood with popular legend. He could not remember, he said, whether it was the real or fictional Christopher Robin who invented the game of ``pooh-sticks,'' dropping sticks from a wooden bridge into a flowing stream.
Nonetheless, he was not averse to exploiting his own name when he thought the cause was worthy. He backed campaigns against deforestation invoking the lands that housed his father's creations.
Besides Pooh, other characters were based on stuffed animals belonging to a childhood friend, Anne Darlington. In December, Darlington sold two of the toys, Kanga and Roo, at auction to a teddy bear museum.
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Milneby CNB