Valediction 19: On Windermere

In which we discover how Swallows and Amazons was born.

Come 1929 Arthur Ransome found himself at a cross-roads. He had returned from Moscow with his Russian wife, Evgenia, and they had bought a cottage at the southern end of the Lake District not far from the much-loved holiday resort of earlier years by Coniston Water. What he had by way of income came from his regular work for the Manchester Guardian but he was resisting the editor’s attempts to make him a salaried commentator on political affairs, even though C.P. Scott and his son were close friends. Following the success of Racundra’s First Cruise with Allen and Unwin in 1923, Jonathan Cape was inveigling him to write a set of essays on his other passion, fishing, with perhaps other books to follow, while seemingly out of nowhere had come the thought of a story for children.

Storytelling had indeed also been a passion and he was an authority on the subject and a masterly executant as witness, the tale-teller’s voice behind Old Peter’s Russian Tales the stories that had taken him to Russia in 1916.

It seems though that the idea had originated when he had seen two girls in red caps playing on the shore of Coniston and a trial had been furthered by his meeting the family of a Syrian doctor, Ernest Altounyan who had married one of the daughters of Ransome’s ‘second father’ W.G Collingwood. (We have met them before in Valediction 9 which was about the rather lacklustre Peter Duck but it was included because it had been inscribed to Ursula Collingwood.)

At the start of their visit, Ernest Altounyan had made an investment in two dingies and although Ransome was notorious for not caring much for children as a tribe, he found himself co-opted as joint master of the good ship Swallow with some relish teaching his youthful crew the rudiments of sailing. (As a young man he had himself been taught by Collingwood on an earlier Swallow.)

At this time he would have been working on the first draft of his children’s story which he found to his joy was almost writing itself and he called upon the Altounyans for the naming of his Walker family, moving them the while to an adventure on the greater potentialities of Windermere. Since there was a shortage of boys in the family, the eldest girl, Taqui, had to be transgendered into John while Bridget, the baby was too young to take part, but the other girls became Susan and Mavis, nicknamed Titty.  Roger was the ship’s boy. An added zest was lent to the writing when, just before their departure for home at Aleppo the children paid a surprise visit to the cottage bearing a good-bye – but also a birthday present of a magnificent pair of scarlet Turkish slippers.

Realising that he could hardly decide which road to take, Ransome encountered Jonathan Cape at a party and was commissioned for the book of essays which became Rod and Line. He also showed Cape some notes on the proposed children’s book for which Cape, not knowing what the future held, commissioned for an off-hand hundred guineas.

And so it was that Swallows and Amazons was born.

* * * * *

Soon after the London edition of the book appeared an offer was made for an American edition by the Philadelphia publisher of children’s books J P Lippincott. He, however, worrying about three hundred pages without pictures was allowed to commission a set of illustrations by the American artist Helene Carter. It is hardly likely that Ransome would have liked these for they lacked any sense of the book’s setting, despite a colourful jacket [pic 2]. She was to continue to illustrate his American editions down to The Big Six when the Macmillan Corporation of New York took over publication.

Cape must have realised the value of illustrations in sales terms and so Ransome agreed to a third issue of Swallows and Amazons illustrated by the well-known children’s book illustrator Clifford Webb. He met Webb and introduced him to the background of the story to which he responded positively. He found himself taking on more than he expected however, since by 1931 Ransome had written Swallowdale and he had to do a second set of illustrations simultaneously. There can be little to criticise in his work although Ransome was rather grumpy about it. As a result Webb was dropped in 1932 for Peter Duck which attributed the drawings to the children themselves – Ransome’s first appearance as illustrator of his own books. Round about 1936 he went back and himself illustrated Swallows and Amazons and Swallowdale.                                                                                          

Brian Alderson is a long-time and much-valued contributor to Books for Keeps, founder of the Children’s Books History Society and a former Children’s Books Editor for The Times. His most recent book The 100 Best Children’s Books is published by Galileo Publishing, 978-1903385982, £14.99 hbk.

Biblio details:

Arthur Ransome Swallows & Amazons. Dec vignette. London: Jonathan Cape. Toronto: Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith New York.  200X120mm. 322pp. ([1] half-title, [2] Also by AR, [3] blank,  [4]line frontis, [5] tp, [6] Printed in Great Britain by  J and J Gray, Edinburgh, [7-8] Contents, [9] dedication:  ‘To the six for whom it was written in exchange for a pair of slippers, [10] blank, [11] second half title, [12] blank, 13- [320] text , [321-2] blank. Dark green cloth, gilt titling to front and spine. Endpaper dec3-colour maps by Stephen Spurrier front and rear. Wrap-round dust jacket after the artist1