Dr Radford gave us fascinating account of Arthur Ransome’s life (1884-1967) before he wrote the “Swallows and Amazons” books when in his forties, and what an eventful life it was!
His father was an English professor with whom he had an uneasy relationship. His father had thrown him in the water as a small boy in order to teach him how to swim! As a child he was sent to prep school and bullied. He suffered from poor eyesight and tried to run away. He failed scholarship entry to Rugby and Shrewsbury but did attend Rugby as a day boy.
He abandoned a Science degree in Leeds after one year, announcing he wanted to be a writer, much to the dismay of his father. He worked as an office clerk in London collecting manuscripts from writers, wrote reviews and ‘ghost ‘wrote for sportsmen. He met William Collingwood, an established writer and artist who became a friend and took him sailing and to stay with his family in the Lake District. He met and married Ivy Constance Walker (1909) but the marriage was not a happy one. They had a daughter Tabitha.
In France he interviewed friends of Oscar Wilde and his publisher asked him to write a biography of Wilde around 1912. Unfortunately, he got into trouble over this for using communications between Wilde and his lover , Alfred Douglas, without permission and was sued 20 years later by Lord Alfred Douglas. Friends helped Ransome defend himself and he was acquitted.
After this scandal Ransome fled to Stockholm and on to Russia (1913) – to St Petersburg. He learned Russian and wrote his first successful book of folk tales “Old Peter’s Russian Tales” (1916). After the outbreak of war in 1914 he wrote newspaper reports for the Daily News. In 1917 he was sent back to Russia to report on the Russian Revolution and got an interview with Trotsky and met his secretary Evgenia, who helped him with contacts and an interview with Lenin. He covered several years of the Civil War and eventually escaped from Russia dressed as a Russian Soldier. He then worked in Sweden at the Propaganda Office until Sweden decided to close it down and he was sent back to Russia. There was some suspicion about Arthur Ransome being a spy for the Russians and he was sent back to UK and subsequently cleared of spying. He and Evgenia went to live in Estonia and in 1924 his first wife agreed to a divorce and he and Evgenia were married. They then lived happily on Coniston water in the Lake District from where he wrote articles, mostly about fishing for the Manchester Guardian. Sailing trips with the grandchildren and the gift of a boat called “Amazon” from his friend Collingwood gave him the idea of writing the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ books (12 in all) about a group of children’s sailing adventures, which first appeared in 1928.
Numerous slides and amusing anecdotes made this a very entertaining presentation delivered with aplomb and entirely without notes.
Lois Coulthart