Posted by Geraint Lewis on May 01, 2007 at 18:31:25 from 194.164.38.65 user Geraint_Lewis.
In Reply to: Re: Quotation from S & A Series-Callum Home posted by Owen Roberts on May 01, 2007 at 18:08:40:
Owen's list makes interesting reading, as I hadn't realised the Durham rink went back that far. Nor, sadly, does is still exist - it folded up in the early 1990s, soon after the Durham Ice Hockey team, at the time the leading one in the UK, was bought out and forcibly moved to Newcastle.
The rink building still exists and is now a bowling alley. It is in easy walking distance from the University Colleges and Departments. Matters of purely incidental and minor interest about it include the way they used to throw the surplus ice out through a side chute onto the river bank below, where I remember it made an excellent playground for practicing ice climbing for most of the year. Also the inside was very gloomy, perhaps because the spectators' terracing was constructed out of surplus World War 2 coffin lids...
Durham, incidentally, does have an archeology department. However, and to return belatedly to Ransome and Winter Holiday, I don't think there is the remotest reason to think that the Callums lived here. If nothing else, although Durham is legally a City (with one of the world's greatest cathedrals and the UK's third oldest university) its population, size and general feel is more that of a very small market town. This is still true today and must have been even more so in the 1930s. So hardly the place for Dick and Dot to grow up as "city children".
So I regret that Durham's significance in respect to Ransome remains the MA they gave him. As for the Callums, I'm inclined to think London is the option that makes sense.
Geraint