LIFE OF ARTHUR RANSOME
His passions: The Lake District and buying up books
wrote Old Peter’s Russian Tales. But he filed news reports back home about the increasingly volatile political situation.
He visited the Eastern Front a few times, and slowly got on “tea drinking terms” with a number of high-ranking Bolsheviks, even sharing a flat with Karl Radek, who would become the Comintern’s chief propagandist. “He played chess with Lenin,” says Hugh.
Although Ransome famously later insisted his only politics was “fishing”, Hugh explains, “he became the British journalist most sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause.”
Lenin believed the amiable writer was useful to him in supplying information from the West. But, more than that, it seems, he also actually liked him.
Roland Chambers, who examined Ransome’s time in Russia in his biography The Last Englishman: The Double Life Arthur Ransome, gained access to KGB archives and discovered the author definitely worked for the Bolshevik secret intelligence services.
He says he and Lenin genuinely got on: “Lenin talked about ‘useful idiots’, westerners who could be used.
“But I think Lenin genuinely respected Ransome.” Chambers also made another discovery in previously classified British archives that, simultaneously, from 1918 Ransome was also employed by MI6, who were suspicious of the time he spent in Russia, and wanted to use him to boost their own intelligence.
It is reported Evgenia secretly gave him access to important documents.
But Chambers is convinced Ransome did it all for his own interests rather than any particular political passion.
And not just his own, but those of the woman he had fallen in love with.
Ultimately, his need to protect Evgenia led him to risk everything. By 1919, her life was in danger during the civil war between the Bolsheviks and the antiCommunist White Army.
She took the plunge and escaped with the writer.
It is believed she later took the smuggled diamonds to Paris to fund a new political party committed to the spread of Communism. Hugh says: “It was the most extraordinary journey. They got on a train in Moscow but only got so ARTHUR Ransome was born in Leeds, the son of a history lecturer. The family had regularly holidays in the Lake District, triggering his deep love of the area.
He studied chemistry at his father’s college before leaving Yorkshire to pursue a career in writing in London.
First he was a publisher’s errand boy before he began to earn a living writing articles for literary magazines.
He is said to have spent every penny on books, often putting them before food.
far because the railway tracks had been blown apart. So then they hired a horse and cart and a boy to lead it.”
He says they avoided capture and death three times. The first time was when Evgenia gave a widow a kettle so the woman’s sons would not turn them in. Hugh says: “The widow was so delighted she sent her sons away and that saved their lives. Then she sent the couple away with a piece of cheese.”
Later, Ransome pulled rank on a gang of peasant soldiers who had confronted them. Hugh says: “Ransome, knowing he was wearing an Imperial fur coat and fur hat boomed, ‘Do you have an officer with you? Where are you going?’”
Hugh says: “When they told him, he said ‘When you get there tell them I am coming!’
“They were so taken aback they saluted him and galloped off. When they got to the village there was military lined up waiting for them and they were offered lodgings.”
Finally, it was Ransome’s love of chess that saved their lives. They encountered a White Army division in Estonia, who
OSTRAIN
Ransome married Ivy Constance Walker in 1909 but despite having a daughter, Tabitha, they never found happiness.
He wrote studies of major literary figures, including Oscar Wilde in 1912, and was later unsuccessfully sued for libel by Lord Alfred Douglas, an ex-love of Wilde’s.
The strain of the case, and his marriage, led him to Russia, where he filed regular reports for The Manchester Guardian.
The author may have drunk tea with Trotsky and Lenin, but he also lays claim to a modern-day connection too.
His brother-in-law, Hugo Lipton, was cousin to Kate Middleton’s greatgrandmother Olive, a society beauty and daughter of a wealthy Yorkshire wool merchant, making Ransome and the Duchess of Cambridge distant relatives.
would have shot them – had the officer not recognised Ransome. “It turned out they had once had a game of chess,” laughs Hugh. “Ransome had won and the officer had laid out the board for another game and then got called away.
“On seeing Ransome the only thing on his mind was finishing that game, so he whipped out a board and they played there and then – and Ransome let him win.
“He was so delighted he gave the couple the papers they needed to get them safely to the Baltic.”
In Britain, Ransome divorced his first wife and married Evgenia in 1924. They settled in the Lake District and never spoke of their past.
Hugh, also a writer, says: “I was told to never mention Russia. I think Evgenia was worried if it got out she was living in England her family in Russia might be at risk.”
Ransome was more than content to remain in the place his lucky pebble had come from, alongside “his racks of pipes and fishing rods.” Hugh says: “He always had a pull back to the Lake District. That was where his heart was.”
Swallows and Amazons is in cinemas. The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome is published by Faber.