Posted by Adam Quinan on February 05, 2012 at 10:56:10 user Adam.
In Reply to: Another problem with dates posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on February 05, 2012 at 09:03:53:
I believe the Bawdsey towers were not built until 1937. But this sort of thing adds to the problem of trying to use incidentals as dating or location tools.
Ransome used his experiences and added incident or description to his books without really thinking that he was trying to nreproduce real life exactly as it was in 1931 or 1932. After all while he might have doubted the possibility, I am sure he would have been glad to know that the books would still be enoyed by children born six decades after they were written and who would be very unlikely to know when the radar towers were built or the Pommern docked in the river.
Similarly, he liked the secret harbour on Peel Island but seems to have imagined rest of the island as more like Blake Holme. So he put them together, not worrying whether a child on another continent would wonder exactly where that place was and whether it was in Coniston or Windermere.