When A A Milne wrote When We Were Very Young (1924) he was looking for an illustrator. It was E V Lucas, head of Methuen that suggested Ernest Shepard. Originally Milne didn’t enjoy Shepard’s illustrations for his book of Poems but Shepard had been an illustrator for Punch and would have been familiar to young parents. The first illustration of Winnie the Pooh appeared in this volume in the thirty-eighth poem Teddy Bear.
Shepard encouraged Milne to write more about his son and toys and two years later Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) was published. The authors hope was that the illustrator would observe his son and use them for the drawings, however Shepard used his own son Graham as the basis for Christopher Robin and used Graham’s teddy bear Growler as the inspiration for Mr Saunders aka Winnie the Pooh.
While Christopher Robin lived until 1996, Graham Shepard joined the Navy in the Second World War and died when HMS Poyanthus sunk by a U-Boat in the Atlantic while rescuing the crew of sunk HMCS St. Croix in 1943.
This isn’t the only link to tragedy that linked Shepard to an author; in 1931 Shepard illustrated a new edition of Wind in the Willows (1907) by Kenneth Grahame based on stories written for his son Alistair, a child born partially blind but whom Graham educated well enough to get him a place at Oxford University. But sadly aged 19 he committed suicide by laying down on the London to Oxford train tracks. Shephard’s illustrations have remained the most popular for Wind in the Willows, being reprinted continuously.
