The man who drew Pooh: E.H. Shepard

One hundred  years ago, in October 1926, Winnie-the-Pooh, one of the classics of  children’s literature, was published. It was an extraordinary collaboration between the author A.A. Milne (1882-1956) and the illustrator, E.H. Shepard (1879-1976). The history of  British children’s literature is full of such partnerships between writers and illustrators: Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel, Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, Julia Donaldson and Axel Stehler, Jacqueline Wilson and Nick Sharratt. But the greatest of all were Milne and Shepard.  

Ernest Howard Shepard was born at 55 Springfield Road, St John’s Wood, London, on 10 December 1879, the youngest of the three children of the architect and amateur watercolourist, Henry Dunkin Shepard, and his wife, Jessie, the daughter of the watercolourist, William Lee. Sheppard’s mother died when Ernest was only ten and he and his siblings were initially brought up by their four aunts. “Her early death,” he wrote in his first book of memoirs, “cut short our happy family life.” His father also died prematurely at 56 after a long illness.

While Milne went to Westminster, Shepard attended St. Paul’s School, part of an extraordinary cohort which included the poet Edward Thomas, the publisher Leonard Woolf and the novelist Compton Mackenzie. His uncle was a master at St. Paul’s, but curiously the school barely  features in Shepard’s two books of memoirs, receiving fewer than ten pages, less than Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

While at St Paul’s, he took additional Saturday classes at the Heatherley School of Fine Art in Chelsea. He won the John Watson Prize for Drawing in 1895 and 1896. He left St. Paul’s to study full-time at Heatherley’s before winning a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools. Shepard exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts for the first time in 1901. He went on to exhibit  regularly at the RA until the 1920s. He illustrated books from the turn of the century and had his first cartoon accepted by  Punch  in 1906. It was the beginning of a long relationship with Punch lasting almost half a century until 1953.

Shepard’s collaboration with A.A. Milne started at Punch , and in 1924 he illustrated Milne’s book of verse, When We Were Very Young Then came Winnie-the-Pooh (1926), Now We Are Six (1927) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Shepard illustrated more than sixty books during his career and later wrote two autobiographies:  Drawn from Memory  (1957) and Drawn From Life  (1961). He is remembered as one of the great illustrators of children’s books of the 20 th century.

Shepard’s most famous illustrations capture a sense of childhood innocence and English rural life, woods and rivers and unforgettable animals, in Winnie-the-Pooh, The House at Pooh Corner and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1931) . Shepard spent the interwar years in St. John’s Wood but in 1955 moved to West Sussex, where he spent  the rest of his life. He drew on the landscapes of Ashdown Forest as inspiration for many of the illustrations he provided for the Pooh books. The adult Christopher Robin commented: “Pooh’s Forest and Ashdown Forest are identical.” The fictional  Hundred Acre Wood  of the Pooh stories derives from Five Hundred Acre Wood in  Ashdown Forest  in East Sussex, where the Pooh stories were set. Milne lived on the northern edge of the forest at Cotchford Farm.

But there is  a  very  different, much darker  side to both men’s lives. Milne and Shepard both served in the First World War. Both fought at the Somme and Shepard also saw action at Passchendaele .  He was awarded the Military Cross, “for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty”. Not only did Shepard lose his mother when he was very young, but in 1943 his son, Graham, was killed during the Second World War when his ship was sunk by a U-boat.

As a testament to their close friendship, Milne inscribed a copy of Winnie-the-Pooh to Shepherd with the following verse:

When I am gone,
Let Shepard decorate my tomb,
And put (if there is room)
Two pictures on the stone:
Piglet from page a hundred and eleven,
And Pooh and Piglet walking (157) …
And Peter, thinking that they are my own,
Will welcome me to Heaven.

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