Arthur Ransome
(1884 - 1967)

Arthur Mitchell Ransome, the British author, was born in Leeds as the oldest son of a professor of history at Leeds University (wihich was earlier known as Yorkshire College). His father was a fanatic fisher and used to take the whole family each summer to the Lake District. Arthur loved it there, sailed on the boat across the lake...anyway, he soon found out he was a disappointment to his father because he was not a good fisher (the skill he gained much later). In fact, he was never close to his father (his father was not particularly glad about Arthur's writer's attempts; strange enough, for he himself wrote a large number of books).

Arthur was sent to a school at Windermere but was not happy there. Later he attended the public school in Rugby but the situation was the same - he liked the outdoor activities but was not good at sport and was therefore bullied by others. he went to Leeds University to study chemistry but it was soon clear he wouldn't be able to pass the exams. Fianlly he left school and at the age of 17 he started working as an office boy.

He worked hard and found a better job. In his free time he was trying to "write something" and was soon paid for publishing stories and articles in various newspaper and magazines. At the age of 20 he decided to give up his job and build a career as a freelance writer. He became a friend with Edith Nesbit and other writers...in 1904 his first collections of essays was published. He wrote a critical essay about E. A. Poe (1910) and came with a few children's books (Highways and Byways in Fairyland - 1906).

In 1909 he married for the first time - his marriage was unhappy and he refered to it as "a bad, incredible dream"...his wife was neurotic and hysteric but refused to divorce him. In addition he was prosecuted by Lord Alfred Douglas because of his study of Oscar Wilde. Though he was vindicated, he decided to leave the country.

He went to Russia and lived there happily for some time. He learned about Russian folk tales and published a book called Old Peter's Russian Tales (1917). He also started working as a journalist for the Daily News and he reported on the Russian front and Russian Revolution. That brought him quite close to Lenin and Trotsky. Eventually he fell in love with Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Shelepin. They lived together for some time and got married in 1924.

As for his stay in Russia - he published a book about it called Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 (1919). It was written because he hoped that it might have changed the British attitude to the Soviets. Well, this result was uncertain but it caught the attention of C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian. He offered Ransome a job as an overseas correspondent in the Middle and Far East...and Ransome accepted. Anyway, journalism seemed always just a temporary affair for him...he wanted to become a full-time writer and finally in 1928 quit Manchester Guardian (though he went on writing a regular Saturday column).

He rediscovered his old weakness for boats and started sailing again. In 1923, he even published a log reporting on a Baltic cruise. In 1929 he began to write his most famous children's series Swallows and Amazons (which turned out to be twelve volume series). At first, it was not so successful...it took some time to get to the readers...but as it gained more and more popularity...as a result Ransome spent more and more time writing it.

There is some gossip about the inspiration for the book. Ransome had one daughter from his first marriage but his second marriage was childless. So where did he find models for his characters. Although he denied it, the probable models were the children of his old friend Dora Collingwood and Ernest Altounyan. Even the names might haver been derived from those children...but who cares, after all?

Anyway, Swallows and Amazon became sort of phenomena and was imitated in other books (especially by M. E. Atkinson).

Ransome's later years were affected by his poor healt. For the rest of his life he suffered from bad digestion. The very end of his life he spent with his wife in the Lake District. his last book Mainly About Fishing (1959) came out in 1959. He wrote it for he thought he owed it to the memory of his father.