A.A. Milne and the torturous task of writing

For those of us lucky enough to have been regular contributors to Punch magazine, April is a slightly crueller month than most, since it was on 8 April 32 years ago that the last edition collapsed, exhausted, on to the newspaper stands. By then it was way past its best, but in its day it had employed some of the very best brains in the business, led by some of the very best editors.

I was lucky enough to be around when Alan Coren was in his prime. He led the magazine from the front, literally, and set a standard that the rest of us did our hardest to emulate, but rarely achieved. If ever.

One of Punch’s most famous writers was in no doubt about the effort required to succeed at the humorous coalface. ‘I know no work, manual or mental,’ confessed A.A. Milne in his 1939 autobiography It’s Too Late Now ‘to equal the appalling, heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.’

His assertion that being funny was harder that it looked did little to appease his schoolmaster father for whom his son’s choice of career had been a disappointment from the start. Milne had already upset him by leaving Cambridge in 1903 with a third-class degree. So much so that Milne senior didn’t speak to his youngest son for a week after the results were published. But he still harboured hopes that the boy might yet make it into the civil service, serve his country well and end up with a knighthood.

Milne, however, had been writing humorous stuff all through his time at Cambridge, ending up as editor of the student magazine Granta, and it had long been his ambition to write for Punch.