White River is the origin of Winnie the Pooh. On 24 August 1914 a Canadian soldier, Lieutenant Harry Colebourn, got off a troop train here and paid a hunter $20 for a black bear cub. He called her ‘Winnie’ after his home town, Winnipeg.
Harry was a vet with the Fort Garry Horse, which explains the bear a little, but not entirely. Winnie went with him to the training camp at Valcartier in Quebec, then across the Atlantic to Salisbury Plain, where she became the mascot of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade.
In December 1914, before Harry was sent to France, he left her at London Zoo for safekeeping. The plan was to take her home to Winnipeg after the war. By then, though, she’d become the zoo’s favourite, so in 1919 he donated her to the zoo instead.
One of her regular visitors was a small boy called Christopher Robin Milne. He liked her so much he renamed his teddy bear, previously Edward, after her. The ‘Pooh’ part came from a swan he used to feed. His father, AA Milne, published Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926. You can guess the rest.
Winnie died at the zoo in 1934, aged 20. Not bad going for a $20 bear.
White River, population about a thousand and known locally as the coldest spot in Canada, has not let anyone forget its famous resident. In 1989 the town asked Disney, who by then owned the rights, for permission to put up a Pooh statue. Disney’s lawyers said no and suggested a statue of an ordinary black bear instead. The town kept asking, Disney gave in, and Pooh now sits in the park beside the tourist information centre. Every August the town throws Winnie’s Hometown Festival. We missed it by about two months. Story of our lives.
Right behind the Winnie the Pooh monument we set up camp in White River.
No camping site but there was a grassy area behind the tourist info building. The six Canadian girls, Bill, Susan and myself along with two other chaps from England. A busy makeshift campsite.
If you want the whole story, Harry’s great-granddaughter Lindsay Mattick wrote it up as a children’s book, Finding Winnie, which won the Caldecott Medal in 2016.
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