Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on May 05, 2003 at 15:58:43 from 195.93.32.8 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: Bob Blackett ??? posted by Peter H on May 04, 2003 at 14:45:48:
Of course there isn't! All that those of us who go in for these rather anorakish debates are doing is to innocently trace some outlines of Ransome's creative process. He creates two characters out of a single glimpse of two girls in red knitted caps sailing a dinghy, and he makes them orphans. He fills out their domestic circumstances in considerable detail. So I am prepared to assume that he killed off Bob Blackett for a reason more substantial than a conversation overheard at his Club!
My hypothesis is that since the 1920's contained a great many war widows raising orphans, in a society which, for the previous century at least, had expected every child to have two parents, it was an act of imaginative sympathy to make two of his principal characters such orphans. It also makes it easier to account for their tomboyishness and harum-scarum-ness, of course, which is vital to the plots, and it probably did sales no harm.
As to Bob Blackett being a putative member of the class from which officers were drawn by Kitchener's Army, how else would he have been allowed, by Maria Turner, no less, to play with Jim and Molly Turner in 1901? That the GA knew him is evidenced by the remark from SD cited above.