Posted by Roger Wardale on April 03, 2014 at 08:29:44 user RogerW.
In Reply to: Re: A SWALLOW'S TALE posted by Duncan on April 03, 2014 at 06:44:09:
What follows are the conclusions I have reached after considerable research into the events of that so important summer of 1928.
Myth: That Arthur Ransome taught the young Altounyans to sail during their stay at Coniston in 1928.
Fact: There is no contemporary written evidence to support this. Not in letters, AR's diary, Evgenia's diary or Dora Altounyan's Journal.
Myth: That Taqui and Titty sailed Mavis and Susie and Roger sailed Swallow.
Look at the drawing that I made from a snapshot. It shows the children in 1928 at Coniston.
Do they look as if they could handle two heavy dinghies on their own? Swallow had a large sail and Mavis a small one, but Mavis had a very heavy iron centreboard. When they WERE sailing Mavis from 1933, Oscar Gosspelius constructed a 'miner's wheel' to make it possible for them to raise and lower the centreboard.
Taqui wrote a wonderful book (In Aleppo Once) but she mixed years together and is not reliable. When she stayed with me for the Chichester AGM, she confided that the received version never happened.
As I said in an earlier post, I believe that the children sailed with their parents, in Swallow and Amazon, 'learning the ropes'. There is a diary entry to suggest that this is what happened. And what with the parents being away for much of the summer, and the wet and windy weather, according to Met Office records and the Coniston rain gauge, I don't believe they had a chance to become proficient; that came later on the lake in Syria.
Fact: the Altounyans could never have turned Swallow over. Fiction: the Walkers did.
Rough quote: `We never did any of those things, they are what we would have liked to do.'