Posted by Alan Hakim on December 02, 2006 at 13:14:59 from 212.137.172.122 user awhakim.
In Reply to: Re: Arthur Ransome manuscript and books for auction posted by Mike Field on November 29, 2006 at 22:58:04:
Can anyone provide any details of Tabitha's later life?
Ted Alexander gave an excellent talk entitled Ransome's Ladies at the TARS Literary Weekend in 2003. TARS members can read it in the Proceedings, which you can buy from Ted's TARS Stall. Tabitha's life occupies three A4 pages alone, so I can't do more here than pick out a few salient points.
"She represents, it would seem, an example of someone who was separated in early life from her father, and dominated by her mother," he says. AR wrote her a letter for her 21st birthday, which is reproduced in Signalling from Mars, but Ted found that her mother wrote a more positive letter on the same occasion. She left home in 1933, married Harold Lewis and lived in Falmouth, close to Ivy. She had a daughter Hazel in London in March 1936, and a son in 1940, but her marriage ended in 1944.
In 1947 she moved with her family to Stoke Gregory near Taunton. When Hazel was 18, and at University in Bristol, Tabitha invited Arthur to visit her on a pretext, and produced Hazel without warning. AR was furious - "he got up in a rage, muttering something like 'Same old lunatic asylum' and stomped out of the house."
"Tabitha did keep some loose lines of communication open, in the hopes that her father might soften his attitude as he aged, but it never happened and the position still remained unresolved when he died."
Once the children had grown up, she moved to Teignmouth, first into a traditional three-bedroom house, and sometime in the late 70s or early 80s into an "exceptionally small" cottage. "This end of terrace property is up on a cutting alongside the main railway line to Cornwall, and must have shaken every time a train thundered through the nearby station."
Finally she moved into sheltered accommodation in Dawlish Road, Teignmouth, and died there on July 23rd, 1991, aged 81. She is buried in the local cemetery.