Less than 50 miles south of London, a newly listed Airbnb in a luscious stretch of countryside looks like the find of all vacation finds.
The tastefully restored six-bedroom, at least five-bathroom house dates to the 16th century and has expansive, manicured gardens. The nightly price isn’t wild, either—from around $1,250 a night at off-peak times of the year—which comes as a surprise because the house has first-class literary and rock ’n’ roll connections.
For some 30 years, Cotchford Farm was where the author A. A. Milne lived and wrote and set Winnie-the-Pooh, basing the stories on his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and a cast of the boy’s stuffed toys. A short walk away are all the real-life Pooh Bear landmarks, such as the Hundred Acre Wood, the Enchanted Place, and Poohsticks Bridge.
But there’s more. Cotchford Farm was later the home of the founder of the Rolling Stones, the virtuoso guitarist Brian Jones, whose affinity for Christopher Robin we’ll come to in a moment.
The clincher for vacationers seeking a truly unique holiday rental is that Cotchford Farm has a very fine outdoor pool. As the Airbnb blurb points out, “This is one of the few places in the area with a pool.” No wonder the property, available since only May, is already being booked for weeks at a time.
But there’s one minor point regarding the pool that neither the Airbnb listing nor Cotchford Farm’s own Web site finds space to mention.
It’s not that they ignore the fact that Jones, his girlfriends, and his rock ’n’ roll pals liked the pool, which was installed by American owners after the Milne family sold the estate. “The swimming pool,” the Cotchford Farm site reads, “where he [Jones] took refreshing dips, remains as a reminder of his time spent here.”
What the Web site neglects is that there was a particular “refreshing dip” that didn’t end so well: the nighttime swim in July 1969, which culminated in Jones, aged 27, either drowning or, as Stones-ologists allege—and not without some evidence—being drowned by a disgruntled builder working on house renovations.
From a distance, the thought of Jones, off his head on drugs and booze, drowning in the Cotchford Farm pool 54 years ago might seem like a glamorous event in rock history. But murder most foul is more likely to leave a faintly icky feeling for those planning a fun, luxurious break in a bucolic setting. Especially if those renters are in love with the cutesy stories of Christopher Robin, Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, and so forth.
The Brian Jones murder theory was widely publicized in a 1994 book, Who Killed Christopher Robin?, by the music writer Terry Rawlings. Rawlings dug up the next best thing to an admission of murder by the builder, Frank Thorogood, who supposedly hadn’t been paid for his services. Rawlings interviewed a friend of Thorogood’s, Tom Keylock, who had been one of the Stones’ road managers. Keylock said that Thorogood confessed on his deathbed, “It was me that done Brian.”
What the Web site neglects is that there was a particular “refreshing dip” that didn’t end so well.
In the wake of Rawlings’s revelation, the owner of Cotchford Farm sought to materially change the pool—or exploit its gruesome secret, depending on your viewpoint—by selling pool tiles from Jones’s day for $150 a piece. But, replacement tiles or not, the pool remains in the exact same position and shape as when it was central to one of music’s great tragedies.
If that’s not enough to spook prospective renters, perhaps the apparent parallels between Christopher Robin Milne and Brian Jones will be.
For starters, both had notably troublesome relationships with their father. Jones’s threw him out of the family home when he was 17 because he disapproved of Brian’s lifestyle and career choice. They never properly reconciled. The younger Milne loathed being known as a children’s-book character, from the moment he started to be bullied over it at boarding school until the end of his life, in 1996. He always felt taken advantage of by his father and was estranged from both his parents as an adult.
Both the younger Jones and Milne were also quite odd, spiky characters: Jones was embittered after being ejected from the Rolling Stones shortly before he died; Milne, about always living in the shadow of his fictionalized boyhood self.
There’s something else curious, too: the two men’s hairstyles. Jones’s bouffant bubble of blond was quite different from the other Stones’ lanker, greasier locks, but uncannily similar to the young Christopher Robin’s, both as they appeared in the E. H. Shepard line drawings that accompanied the Winnie-the-Pooh stories and in existing photographs of the child Milne.
“It was me that done Brian.”
So is it possible that Brian Jones bought Cotchford Farm in 1968 because he was fascinated by the Winnie-the-Pooh connection, and because he empathized with Christopher Robin?
Rawlings, who knows more about the story than almost anyone alive, says he doubts that Jones bought the house because of the Milne connection. “There’s no question at all, though, that by the time he lived there, he was convinced that it was his destiny to live in Christopher Robin’s house,” Rawlings tells AIR MAIL.
One of the most famous photos of Jones shows him, blond bob flowing, kicking the statue of Christopher Robin that still stands next to the house. It’s unclear whether the kicking is affectionate, antagonistic, or just the meaningless posing of a strung-out rocker. In two other photos from the same series, Jones alternately throttles and impersonates the statue.
The eerie coincidences end there, but Rawlings has a final point that might be enough to frighten more tentative potential renters.
“Brian didn’t actually have a bedroom,” Rawlings says. “He would sleep in whichever of the six he fancied on a given night.”
Would Rawlings, nonetheless, want to spend the night at Cotchford Farm?
“Absolutely no way, thanks,” Rawlings says.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s Tech Columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology