MysteryLegendary
The Real Wendy
A little girl's word for 'friend' became Peter Pan's Wendy.
See it clearly
- What's there
- A child's grave behind a poet's monument
- Legend from
- 1894
- Tone
- Curious
In Cockayne Hatley churchyard lies a little girl whose nickname for J. M. Barrie gave Peter Pan its Wendy.
In the churchyard at Cockayne Hatley lies Margaret Henley, the only child of the poet W. E. Henley, who died in 1894 aged five. She was devoted to her father's friend, the writer J. M. Barrie, and in her childish way she called him her fwendy. Barrie never forgot her, and the word became Wendy, the name he gave Wendy Darling in Peter Pan, which made it one of the best-known girls' names in the world. Her parents' ashes were later placed in her grave, beneath a listed monument to the poet, with her own small memorial set into the back of it.