“Secret Water” August 10, 2011
.An Arthur Ransome Trust “Camp Fires” Public Lecture
This is a review of “Secret Water” a public lecture by Roland Chambers at Abbott Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, on August 10, 2011.
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In this lecture Roland Chambers presented a highly-informed personal view of Arthur Ransome’s life and relationships, emphasising the complexities of Ransome’s personality and decisions. These included a number of influential mentors, including his mother, Edith, Ruskin’s secretary WG Collingwood, and the renowned journalist and linguist Harold Williams.
Roland also examined Ransome’s relationships with the Russian Cadet party during the First World War, and then with the Bolshevik leadership, emphasising Ransome’s romantacism and pragmatism. He also looked at the ways that Ransome’s Russian experiances influenced his Swallows and Amazons novels. Overt references are few, limited to the travel labels on Captain Flint’s trunk. But Roland contended that many of Swallows and Amazons’ plot points – including civil war, alliances, secret plans and the possibility of resolving conflict – owed much to the Russian Revolution and subsequent history.
In an interesting question and answer session, Roland asked his 60 strong audience to consider whether Ransome was an innocent subject of circumstances, or actively engaged in influencing the world around him. Roland took the latter view, feeling that the former would diminish Ransome as a person.
We’re very grateful to the Lakeland Arts Trust for hosting and co-sponsoring this lecture at Abbott Hall Art Gallery.
Roland Chambers
Roland Chambers’s biography of Arthur Ransome, The Last Englishman: the Double Life of Arthur Ransome, won a Jerwood award from the Royal Society of Literature and the Biographer’s Club prize for best first biography.
