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 of our copy of The World of Pooh:
Other Stories
Besides Pooh Bear, other favourite stories that Henry read to us included:
The Saga of Noggin the Nog
by Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin
My favourite Noggin the Nog book was The Monster, in which court inventor Olaf the Lofty creates a fantastical musical instrument called the Grottophoneum. The series baddie, Nogbad the Bad, is wonderfully wicked and wonderfully drawn.
Ant and Bee
by Angela Banner
I particularly remember Around the World with Ant and Bee (where Ant and Bee travel around the world looking for Bee’s lost umbrella); Ant and Bee and the Rainbow (about colours); and Ant and Bee and the Doctor (where Bee catches a cold and Ant catches red lumps, and is very grumpy).
Animals on the Ceiling
by Richard Armour, with illustrations by Paul Galdon
This is a story about a boy who sees animal shapes in brown water stains on the ceiling. Henry had a special word – wetties – for these stains, presumably having considerable experience of them. Certainly we had them on the ceilings from time to time when I was growing up.
Pelican Park
by Mary Cockett, with illustrations by Frank Francis
Pelican Park is about two pelicans who live in St James’s Park, London. After reading this book St James’s Park was always known as “Pelican Park” and we always looked out for the pelicans when we visited it.
365 Goodnight Stories
published by Paul Hamlyn (6th impression 1968)
This book contains a short story or poem for every night of the year. One of the stories is called The Lost Moustache, where a General wakes up in the morning with only half a moustache. Henry always read this story with a degree of horror!