Henry Reads Winnie-the-Pooh
(Including an actual recording!)
When I [Henry’s daughter Andrea] was a child, Henry read to me most evenings, and later did the same with my sister Tina. Later still, Henry read to his grandchildren.
We loved A.A. Milne’s Pooh Bear stories, which Henry read to us from a copy of The World of Pooh. The World of Pooh included two Pooh Bear books: Winnie-the-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner.
I was fortunate enough to find a cassette tape containing a recording of Henry reading Chapter VII from Winnie-the-Pooh: “In which Kanga and Baby Roo come to the Forest, and Piglet has a Bath”. The cassette had been sent to me sometime in the mid-eighties after I had left home, and was recorded while Henry was reading to Tina.
I approached the Curtis Brown Group who handle Winnie-the-Pooh licensing to ask if I could put the recording on this website and they very kindly and generously gave me permission to do so.
“In which Kanga and Baby Roo come to the Forest, and Piglet has a Bath”
Read by Henry Tribe.
from Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
Copyright (c) Pooh Properties Trust 1926
Reproduced with permissions from Curtis Brown Group Ltd on behalf of The Pooh Properties Trust.
The bang at the end of the recording is Henry closing the book – he always did this at the end of a story!
The story “In which Kanga and Baby Roo come to the Forest, and Piglet has a Bath” includes one of Pooh’s poems entitled “Lines Written by a Bear of Very Little Brain”. Pooh recites the poem in an attempt to distract Kanga so that baby Roo can be kidnapped. Each verse is about a day of the week. Pooh recites the verses relating to Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but when he gets to Friday Kanga cuts him off, so we never get to hear what happened on Friday.
Henry and Tina decided to write their own version of the missing lines, as follows:
On Friday, when the sky is grey
And the sun’s away all day,
It’s very possible to say
That they are where but where are they?
These were written out by Tina and stuck into the back of our copy of The World of Pooh.
It was a habit of Henry’s to stick things into the backs of books. Photos, articles … anything relevant to the story or the author. He called his additions the “backispiece”.
Below are the “backispiece” pages in our copy of The World of Pooh: