Recording brings children's favourite to life

The only known recording of AA Milne reading his children’s classic Winnie The Pooh is being released on CD.

Milne’s reading from the book’s third chapter, “In which Pooh and Piglet go Hunting and nearly catch a Woozle”, was one of the earliest commercial spoken-word recordings made.

It is included alongside a JRR Tolkien reading from The Hobbit on the spoken-word collection of children’s writers issued by the British Library from its vast archive.

Milne wrote the celebrated tale of Pooh after creating a series of stories to tell his son Christopher Robin at bedtime.

The story is among the finalists for the BBC2 hunt for Britain’s favourite book The Big Read.

The Spoken Word: Children’s Writers CD, which costs £9.95, is the third of a series of releases made by the library from its archives.

It brings together 10 writers from the extensive drama and literature collection of the library’s sound archive.

Three of the writers are dead – Milne, Tolkien and Roald Dahl, who is heard reading from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1975.

It spans nearly 75 years and is designed to show how succeeding generations of writers have kept the tradition of children’s storytelling alive.

Some have been recorded especially for the CD.

They include Michael Bond’s rendition of an extract from Paddington Helps Out, made earlier this year.

And Penelope Lively reads from the first chapter of her most popular children’s book, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, the first time she has been recorded and published.

Other authors featured include Raymond Briggs, Jacqueline Wilson and current children’s laureate Michael Morpugo and Whitbread Prize winner Philip Pullman.

British Library Sound Archive curator and recording producer Richard Fairman said: “There is nothing to equal the author’s voice reading children’s stories, as AA Milne did to his son, Christopher Robin, and JRR Tolkien to his children.

“Too many of the great children’s writers died without leaving us any recording of their voices – for example, Kenneth Grahame and Arthur Ransome, or others who left very little, such as Mary Norton and Enid Blyton.

“But we believe that the range of authors on this CD provides a unique and fascinating reflection of the changing world of children’s story-telling over the past 100 years.”