Re: Nancy and Peggy


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Posted by Roger Wardale on June 19, 2011 at 17:47:31 user RogerW.

In Reply to: Re: Nancy and Peggy posted by Magnus Smith on June 19, 2011 at 12:40:39:

In my 'ordeal by interview' for the BBC the other day I said that it was chiefly Robin C who taught AR to sail (though both Dora C and Barbara C could handle a sailing boat and it was to Barbara that AR appealed for sailing tips when he started to sail in the Baltic).
The Nancy-Peggy creation is full of pitfalls for anybody who starts to look for 'originals'.
Going back to Hugh Shelley, writing in 1959, he says 'Arthur Ransome does remember a sudden glimpse he once had when sailing on the lake of two little girls in identical red woollen hats sitting on the bank.' Shelley is not completely reliable and AR was fiercely critical of his monograph — 'more or less illiterate pamphlet' but Shelley must have got something along those lines when he interviewed AR. The passage was cut by Evgenia when the monograph was reprinted in 1967.
In the Autobiography published after AR's death ' he says Nancy and Peggy 'sprung to life one day when, sailing on Coniston, I had seen two girls playing on the lake shore'.
So far so good. But who were the two girls? If we discount the woolly hats and take it at face value, they are more likely to have been Edwardian youngsters, for AR did precious little sailing on Coniston during the Ludderburn years.
If AR spotted them around 1928 they could have been Georgie and Paulie Rawdon-Smith for there were few children around the lake at that time according to Pauline Marshall and Taqui Altounyan.
However, there was a family that camped on the shore of Coniston Water during the 1920s and known to AR. And the names of the children? John, Nancy, Margaret known as Peggy...
If Shelley is to be believed, and they were LITTLE girls, Nancy born 1919 and Peggy born 1924 are the more likely sighting.
I believe that we now know the origin of the NAMES of the S and As.
Dora and Barbara could very well have been at the back of AR's mind when he began to conceive he idea of some other children for his Swallows to meet in an amusing way.


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