Posted by Katharine Edgar on July 25, 2003 at 17:43:07 from 81.96.140.67 user Katharine.
In Reply to: Re: posted by Laurence Monkhouse on July 25, 2003 at 06:09:39:
I think Lawrence and Andrew are right that we would be wrong to imagine a generally resentful populace, both because, as Andrew says, a lot of the local people would have benefited from the tourist industry in the region and because the majority may not have been what Lawrence calls 'imbued with Marxist nonsense.'
However I am uncomfortable with the idea of a completely apolitical population. Many working class people in the 20s and 30s were, of course, keenly aware of class differences and resentful of them, even without going so far as to embrace full-on communism. This is not a side of life Ransome deals with in the SA books and there is no reason why he should, but I think a lot of childrens' writers of the time were indeed living in a fantasy world - take, for example, the idyllic village inhabited by Joyce Lancaster Brisley's Milly Molly Mandy. (For those of you haven't read Milly Molly Mandy, MMM is a working class child who lives with parents, grandparents, aunt and uncle in a 'nice little white cottage with a thatched roof' and has occasional interactions with the little girl Jessamine who lives in the big house with iron railings - for example when the bus breaks down and all the village children are given a lift to the cinema in a motor car!)
My guess is that there would indeed have been at least a few people (had the SAs been real!) who would have asked themselves why some people got to sail around on boats all summer and others had to go to work.
I found Lawrence's references to working classes actually taking part in similar activities themselves extremely interesting because of course this kind of activity could itself become politicised - I'm thinking of the ramblers and the Kinder Scout mass trespass in (I think) 1932. Ewan McColl's folk song 'The Manchester Rambler' was supposed to have been written for the occasion. The chorus goes something like,
'I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler, from Manchester way
I get all my pleasure the hard moorland way.
I may be a wage slave on Monday
But I am a free man on Sunday'.
The radical politics comes out in the verse where he describes being stopped by a keeper:
'He said, 'All this land is my master's'
At this I stood shaking my head
No man has the right to own mountains
Any more than the deep ocean bed.'