Winnie The Pooh Is A Girl! New Book Reveals Truth Behind Famous Disney Bear

You can keep believing Winnie The Pooh is a boy if it makes you happy but thanks to Lindsay Mattick’s new book “Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear” the world makes sense again.

Before Winnie The Pooh became the honey loving bear we all love and adore, there was a real life bear named Winnie. In 1914, Harry Colebourn (Mattick’s great-grandfather) rescued a bear on his way to tend horses during World War I and named her Winnie, after his hometown of Winnipeg.

“I’m still blown away that, while a lot of people in Canada certainly know the story and know the history now, around the world it’s really still not known,” Mattick told Winnipeg Free Press. “People don’t even realize that there was a real bear. I want people who love Winnie the Pooh to understand that the real story behind her is just as beautiful and just as amazing.”

In her book, Mattick tells the story about how her great-granddad met a man sitting with a gentle black bear cub and gave him $20 for it, thinking that he could take the little bear with him in his journeys and provide good care for her.

Eventually, Winnie bonded with the soldiers and became the mascot of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade. But Colebourn soon realized that he would have to give her up. That’s when he decided to take her to the London Zoo, where a young boy named Christopher Robin Milne grew to love her and their bond inspired the tale we all know through Disney’s animations.

Lindsay shared some of the illustrations and family pictures as the book developed and we’ve gathered some of our favorites. Meet the real Winnie in the photos below.