ArthurRansome wrote the famous "Swallow's and Amazon's" series of childrens books. It's been so long that I can't remember if my dad found them for me because I was interested in sailing or if they were originally responsible for my interest in sailing. Regardless they are wonderful children's stories and they always made me wish that I'd grown up in such a time and place.
There is a great fan site at:
A Biography of ArthurRansome
By Peter and Donna Thomson
Arthur Ransome is one of the best-loved of all children's writers, and his books about the Lake District are known all over the world. A flourishing Society in his name was formed in 1990 and is based at The Abbot Hall Museum of Lakeland Life and History, Kendal, England, where there is a special room devoted to Ransome memorabilia, including his desk, his favourite books, first editions in many different languages, and the Swallow and Amazon pennants themselves.
There are also close links with the Windermere Steamboat Museum at Bowness, where you can see the original Amazon, together with the Esperance, one of the prototypes for Captain Flint's houseboat.
Arthur Ransome was born on January 18, 1884, in Leeds, where his father was a Professor of History. His father was a lover of the hills and lakes of Furness, and carried the baby Arthur up to the top of Coniston Old Man (later to become 'Kanchenjunga' in the books) when he was only a few weeks old. Every summer, he took his family by train to Greenodd, complete with their belongings packed into a large tin bath, and then by cart along the valley to Lowick and, finally, to Nibthwaite, on the shores of Coniston Water.
The unnamed lake of Arthur Ransome's books is an amalgamation of Coniston and its sister Windermere, but it is on Coniston, close to Nibthwaite, that you will find the promontory where the Swallows planned their first expedition, and Wildcat Island, exactly as drawn in the books. Many of the incidents in the stories are drawn from Ransome's own childhood memories and fantasies - the Knickerbockerbreaker, where his trousers were worn out and darned in situ by Annie Swainson, the tickling of trout, the collecting of fox-moth caterpillars and meetings with the charcoal-burners.
It was to be a long time before the memories came to life in Swallows and Amazons and the rest of the books about the children who sailed and explored the lakes and mountains of England. Always fired by ambition to be a writer, Arthur Ransome took his first job with a London publisher and then with the famous newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, for whom he worked for many years as a foreign correspondent.
As a young man, Ransome spent many more happy holidays on the shores of Coniston with his friends the Collingwood family. Mr and Mrs Collingwood treated Arthur as a son and he pays them grateful recognition in his autobiography by saying 'My whole life has been happier for knowing them'. He spent hours on Peel Island, which was to become famous all over the world as Wildcat Island, picnicking there with the Collingwood daughters Dora and Barbara.
More friends shared Arthur's love of the Lakes and he talks of walks over to Ambleside, stopping at the Drunken Duck for bread and cheese and beer; of Cartmel, where he lodged at a farmhouse called Wall Nook; of more lodgings at Low Yewdale, where water was dipped from a beck running by the cottage and you might easily find a minnow swimming in the jug. He camped a little further up the valley and made friends with a group of gipsies, who taught him their language and customs.
Fascinated by languages, he went to Russia and reported at first-hand the events of the Revolution in 1917. He grew to love Russia and its folklore, rewriting many of the ancient fairytales in English, and there he met and married his second wife Evgenia, who was Trotksy's secretary. (Ransome's first marriage was a disaster.)
In 1925 the Ransomes bought Low Ludderburn, an old farmhouse at the head of the Cartmel Fell valley with views as far as Ingleborough, in Yorkshire, and Helvellyn in the Lakes. This was by no means retirement - before long Arthur was off to China to report on the volatile political situation there. Much later, the Swallows and Amazons recorded his memories in Missee Lee, where the dragon processions are those he watched parade through the streets of Hankow.
So much of Arthur Ransome's life has gone into his children's books. The triangular, square and diamond-shaped signals of Winter Holiday were first used at Low Ludderburn, where he and his fishing friend Colonel Kelsall, who lived across the valley, would invite each other to go fishing. A new home at Pin Mill, Suffolk, taken in the hope that the sea air would improve Arthur's health, provided the settings for We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea and Secret Water. From here, he visited the Norfolk Broads and - of course - sailed there and evolved the stories of Coot Club and The Big Six, with Dick and Dorothea forming the link between the Death and Glory boys and Tom Dudgeon of the Broads, and the Swallows and Amazons in the north.
Why are Arthur Ransome's books so enduringly popular? Today's politically-correct might label them as too middle-class, written about privileged children whose parents could afford to take them on long holidays and provide them with boats. But the children who read them come from all walks of life, and don't seem to mind. (And even the p.c.s must concede that the Death and Glories are among Ransome's liveliest creations.) The settings are (with the exception of Missee Lee and Peter Duck) totally British and might be expected to have no appeal at all for readers in other countries. Yet they have been published all over the world and are nowhere more popular than in Japan, from where visitors come to the Lake District every year to visit the scenes in the books.
I think Ransome's appeal lies in his understanding of the fantasies of the child's mind. Wild creations like serpents, monsters and other-worldly beings may have their place, but there is also a great longing to play at 'explorers', to see oneself as a follower of the great mountaineers and the navigators who discovered this world. Sailing at night, roaming through the woods, camping where and when one wishes, are experiences children all over the world long to share. Through the books of Arthur Ransome, they can do just this, in a world where these things could be done in safety.
It was my privilege, a few years ago, to meet 'Titty', whose real name is Mavis and who still lives close to Coniston. She was still quite recognisable as the imaginative Able-Seaman who served aboard Swallow, but she told me that as children she and her family grew tired of being linked with the books because 'we didn't do all those things'. Nevertheless, Arthur Ransome must have seen in them the qualities that he identified with his own imaginary family, and bestowed upon them his own memories and dreams of childhood. Dreams and memories which give his books a magic that has captured children all over the world.
From Kanchenjunga to Wildcat Island, Arthur Ransome's Lake District is alive and well.
The above biography text © Peter & Donna Thomson. All rights reserved.
Source: http://www.arthur-ransome.org/ar/arbio.html