You can go and look at most of the cast
Nearly everyone in the FOREST was a real object. Christopher Robin Milne's nursery toys — the BEAR, PIGLET, EEYORE, KANGA and TIGGER — were bought mostly from Harrods between 1920 and 1928, and A.A. Milne wrote the stories around whatever the boy already owned and had already given voices to.
Five of them survive. They were taken to America on a publicity tour in 1947, stayed, and have been in the New York Public Library since 1987, where they sit in a case looking considerably more battered than any illustration suggests. ROO was lost in an apple orchard in the 1930s and never found. OWL and RABBIT are the two Milne invented outright, so they talk more than the others and are the only ones who behave like animals rather than toys.
Winnie was a bear from Winnipeg
The name came from a black bear at London Zoo. A Canadian army vet, Harry Colebourn, bought her as a cub at a railway station in Ontario in 1914 for twenty dollars while travelling east with his regiment, named her Winnipeg after his home city, and took her to England as an unofficial mascot. When the regiment shipped to France he left her at the zoo, and after the war he let her stay.
She was unusually gentle and children were allowed into the enclosure to feed her. Christopher Robin was one of them, liked her enormously, and renamed his own BEAR — previously Edward — after her. Pooh was the name of a swan. So the most famous bear in children's literature is called Winnie after a real bear named after a Canadian city, plus a swan.
What it cost the real boy
Christopher Robin Milne wrote later that his father had got where he was by climbing on his son's shoulders, and had then taken the empty fame and left him with the name. He was bullied at boarding school with recordings of Vespers played at him. He came to resent the books thoroughly, ran a bookshop in Devon and refused for years to have anything to do with them.
He softened somewhat in old age, though never completely, and the books he wrote about it are unusually clear-eyed. It is a useful thing to know about a very gentle series: the child in it was a real person who did not get a say, and the four stories were finished by 1928 partly because his father could see what was happening.
The wood is a real wood
Ashdown Forest in Sussex is the Hundred ACRE Wood, and it is open to the public. The Milnes had a house on its northern edge and walked there constantly. The bridge where Poohsticks was invented is signposted; visitors drop so many twigs from it that the original had to be rebuilt in 1979 and again in 1999.
Poohsticks works, incidentally, and is a decent small lesson in moving water — a stick thrown into faster midstream flow beats one dropped near the bank, where friction slows everything down. Our forest page has more on what lives in a wood like that one. The rest of the grid is the cosy furniture: HONEY spelled hunny, a BALLOON, the imaginary HEFFALUMP, EEYORE's lost TAIL and his THISTLE, TIGGER's BOUNCE, a BLUSTERY day in the WOODS, and a STUFFED bear with his FRIENDS.