Arthur Ransome and his yachts For a man of the world (reporting clear sightedly on the Russian Revolution, as well as surviving it) Ransome could be surprisingly naive and impulsive. When he encountered real people, like George Martin, he rarely got the better of them. He also rarely won out in attempting to strike a bargain. In a new study of Ransome (Sunlight and Shadows, Arthur Ransome’s Hidden Narratives by Mike Bender) the author describes him as a ‘complex and insecure individual’. Despite his considerable political under- standing, his personal life was littered with ruinous miscalculations, and undermined by what he felt was his failure, as a boy, to earn the approval of his father. No wonder he blithely expected
few bits and pieces lying about that were wheelbarrowed down to the hard, so Arthur restarted the car.
Then the chill hand of worry gripped him. Looking back he saw a little boat leave the side of Griffin. It stopped along- side Selina and several people stepped aboard. He and his wife ran down to the water’s edge, grabbing the first boat they could reach, rowing in desperation against the ebb tide. It was a beast of a dinghy, the bows cocked up out of the water – and they were too late. The boats had returned to Griffin before they could reach Selina. ‘We’ve taken eight pigs,’ said Mr King. George saw them approach, but said nothing and went below. They rowed to
a fellow-sailor to see things his way. When he bought Nancy Blackett in 1935 (failing to strike a reduction in the asking price), his first yacht since Racundra in the early 20s, he was 51 and probably undergoing what we’d now see as a mid-life crisis. Once he’d put her, as Goblin, into his book, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, he put her up for sale and commissioned what was to be his finest yacht, Selina King. He was understandably desperate to start enjoying her, though he could hardly have foreseen that just a year after her launch the outbreak of World War II would force all private yachts to be laid up for the duration. Nor that by the end of it his health would have deteriorated to the extent that his doctor forbade
shore, passing Selina on the way, her rudder once more showing above the water, her trim destroyed. ‘We were back once more where we had been three weeks before. No sailing for us that weekend.’ As a row it was silent but deadly. To George, Arthur Ransome must have seemed little more than a thief. It was his lead. Harry King knew he was coming for it. George was often short of money and he felt he had been more than fair to wait a couple of days, paying his skipper all the while. Someone trying to short-change him was just not going to happen. No working bargeman would put up with that. As for Arthur, he licked his wounds and wrote about the event in a book he never
him to handle her big mainsail. He was forced to sell her and instead ordered, from Laurent Giles, a small ketch with a more easily handled sailplan. This was Peter Duck. He never really took to her, describing her as ‘a marine bath-chair for my old age’. Soon after taking delivery in 1946 he sold her to Giles, then bought her back again (at a loss, of course), then soon sold her again. Later he bought two Hillyard six- tonners, the first a centre-cockpit design which he replaced after one season with an aft-cockpit version. Peter Duck has fared best of all of Ransome’s yachts; she was bought in 1957 by yacht broker George Jones, who saw her potential as the basis for a successful 39-boat production class of the same name.
published. The last lost book of Arthur Ransome. He acknowledged George had been correct in law, entirely within his rights, but could never understand how the man could have done such a thing to another sailor.
Like all disagreements there were two sides to the story, and in the middle of the row, polite, trying to assist, was Harry King – privately no doubt recognising it had the makings of a good yarn with which he could regale his friends in Pin Mill’s Butt and Oyster, the men who had lived and worked the River Orwell all their lives in the days when barges and sailing boats, and the foibles of human personali- ties, underpinned so many fireside tales.
SLIDE.
THESE DAYS, LET’S JUST LET A LITTLE MORE
SEAHORSE 55
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