Winnie

A woman tells her young son the true story of how his great-great-grandfather, Captain Harry Colebourn, rescued and learned to love a bear cub in 1914 as he was on his way to take care of soldiers' horses during World War I, and the bear became the inspiration for A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh.

Varina Anne ôWinnieö Davis was born into a war-torn South in June of 1864, the youngest daughter of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his second wife, Varina Howell Davis. Born only a month after the death of beloved Confederate hero General J.E.B. Stuart during a string of Confederate victories, WinnieÆs birth was hailed as a blessing by war-weary Southerners. They felt her arrival was a good omen signifying future victory. But after the ConfederacyÆs ultimate defeat in the Civil War, Winnie would spend her early life as a genteel refugee and a European expatriate abroad. After returning to the South from German boarding school, Winnie was christened the ôDaughter of the Confederacyö in 1886. This role was bestowed upon her by a Southern culture trying to sublimate its war losses. Particularly idolized by Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Winnie became an icon of the Lost Cause, eclipsing even her father Jefferson in popularity. Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause is the first published biography of this little-known woman who unwittingly became the symbolic female figure of the defeated South. Her controversial engagement in 1890 to a Northerner lawyer whose grandfather was a famous abolitionist, and her later move to work as a writer in New York City, shocked her friends, family, and the Southern groups who worshipped her. Faced with the pressures of a community who violently rejected the match, Winnie desperately attempted to reconcile her prominent Old South history with her personal desire for tolerance and acceptance of her personal choices.

Reproduction of the original: Witch Winnie by Elizabeth W. Champney

The story of Winnie, the real Canadian bear that captured the heart of Christopher, son of A.A. Milne, is told against the backdrop of the First World War.

Winnie and George tells the true and previously untold story of two individuals who lived remarkable lives, both before and after they crossed paths. Enhanced with dramatised dialogue, it is a powerful lesson in how love, once discovered, can be greater than the sum of all our divisions. Maria Winifred Carney, known to her friends as ‘Winnie’, and George McBride came from different backgrounds and lived opposing lives. She was a Roman Catholic. He belonged to the Church of Ireland. She was a republican. He was a unionist. She was a member of Cumann na mBan. He had been in the Young Citizen Volunteers loyalist group. She became James Connolly’s secretary and carried a Webley gun in the GPO during the Easter Rising. He fought for the British Army at the Somme during the Great War. Both shared a passion for fairness and the rights of the working class. Despite living in a Belfast rife with sectarian tension and opposition from both their families a very unlikely yet successful marriage occurred.