Re: John Young, Northern River Pirate


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Posted by PeterH on November 26, 2006 at 18:50:47 from 86.130.137.195 user Peter_H.

In Reply to: Re: John Young, Northern River Pirate posted by Jock on November 25, 2006 at 23:46:26:

John Young was a member of the original Northern River Pirates, the name that AR's young friends used when they accompanied him on his sailing holidays on the Northern Rivers of the Norfolk and Suffolk Broads.


Jock - many thanks. I should have known this. For some reason the AR significance of the term 'Northern River Pirates' had escaped me. By way of penance, I have consulted the AR biogs etc this afternoon. Brogan mentions the Norfolk holidays, but a livelier account is given by C Hardyment in AR&CFT. Best of all, if you want a day by day diary of what they got up to, is George Russell's 1938 Holiday Diary, excerpts from which are in Ransome Broadside published by Amazon Publications. This mentions the 'young Youngs' (which included John) and the 'elder Youngs'. You can see where some of the SW and BS inspiration came from. The TarBoard Literalists and Reverse-Engineers might like to explain to us why AR did not use the following dufferish Wroxham Broad episodes (as reported by G Russell, 11th April 1938):

'in an effort to hoist all our flags, two went o.b. . . . then as we gybed, the hook on the gaff jumped off and the whole sail was pulled up against the mast, being held in place only by the signal halyards.'

'We spent the night between some hymn-singing girls to starboard and yelling schoolboys to port.'

It is heartening to note that the people in AR's real life could not match the S&A's sailing excellence but were merely human . . .


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