Posted by Andy Morley on September 02, 2000 at 21:35:27 from 212.159.1.6:
In response to some of the comments in this forum about Pauline Marshall's relationship to the Amazons in Ransome's books, I must say that I can't see why there can be any reasonable doubts raised about the points she has covered in her recent broadcast and elsewhere. I'm aware that there is plenty of unreasonable doubt around, which I used to just dismiss as part of the eccentricity of Ransome fans.
It was not until I sent fairly a light-hearted article to Mixed Moss a few years ago and got a very emotional reaction from one of the editors that I began to suspect that there was rather more to all of this. You can judge the content of my scribbling yourselves:
http://www.morley45.freeserve.co.uk/Andy/Resources/Amazon.html
I certainly didn't think that my piece deserved the telephoned reply, which was:
"Never, while I am editor of Mixed Moss will an article appear that celebrates Pauline Marshall as an Amazon Pirate". Fortunately, other editors of the same publication have taken a more enlightened approach and the article by Pauline in which she describes her childhood encounter with Ransome gives a viewpoint which I don't think anyone can fairly call into question. Not, that is, unless they have some rather peculiar axe to grind. (mixed Moss v.3 no 3, p. 36)
That article contains the considered judgement of Pauline Marshall, the woman:
"Of course, in writing about the Swallows and Amazons, AR would have drawn on his own experiences sailing our family's boats from Tent Lodge, the original Swallow and Jamrack, with the Collingwood girls, […] All writers draw on their own experience, that is how they work. But the Collingwood girls certainly never looked like boys in shorts. And when you come to look at it, AR never seemed to invent a character or place out of his own head, he always took inspiration from living models and real places[…] Naturally AR developed the characters of Nancy and Peggy in his own way".
The article also conveys the childhood emotions that were the result of being told by her father that she and her sister were the Amazon pirates. This was after Ransome visited her father, with whom he'd been at school. The visit took place when the Rawdon Smiths were living at Bank Ground and Ransome wanted to examine the buildings and farm to incorporate into his book. It's interesting to read Pauline's account of meeting him and how he "made a very positive impact on my consciousness - ping!" which is exactly the effect that Pauline had on me when I first met her.
Pauline's emotions in response to this information were probably not dissimilar to those of the Altounyans when they discovered that some of their first names had been used in Swallows and Amazons. Ransome may have been a great children's writer but he appears to have been a rather naïve man, particularly in some of his relationships. The impression that I carried away from hearing Taqui Altounyan speak was that Ransome's gesture had become something of a poisoned chalice for them after the books became famous. I certainly recall reading somewhere that the whole thing ended in tears with Ransome threatening to sue Ernest Altounyan for claiming that his children were the model for the Walkers. So in view of that, I suppose it's not surprising that Pauline should have likewise encountered some frustration in dealing with the Swallows and Amazons phenomenon and the Ransome Society in particular.
I hope however that all this is clearly understood now by all those who are interested in fact as well as emotion. Obviously the Rawdon Smiths were not literally the Amazons just as the Altounyans were not literally the Swallows. After all, the Walkers were the children of an English Naval Commander and an Australian Mother whereas the Altounyans were the offspring of a Syrian doctor and the English receipient of Ransome's unrequited love. Similarly, the Rawdon Smith sisters had a brother who was a dead ringer for Dick Callum (or vice versa if you prefer), so if you took the whole thing literally, that would make his sisters both candidates to be Dorothea, all of which just illustrates the nonsense of taking too literal a view of these things. However there can be little doubt that the tomboy Rawdon Smith sisters made an important contribution to the evolution of the Amazon characters when their escapades were recounted to Ransome by their father during his visit to Bank Ground to gather material. They also looked the part, and Ransome would have seen the photographs of the two girls, dressed unconventionally (for the time) in shorts before being taken down to the lake and introduced to the Christopher Robin-like figure of Pauline who was fishing for perch off the Bank-Ground jetty.
The reason that I've gone into this at such length is the wish to put the matter into perspective as an interesting but comparatively minor part of a much bigger story. I find Pauline's frustration quite understandable. Having grown up with something as part of your own background, it must be irritating to a considerable degree when a bunch of dotty middle-aged men (and some women) emerge from nowhere and start pontificating with great confidence about things that happened before they were even born, particularly when they call into question the circumstances of your own childhood. More than that it's a great shame because it diverts attention from far more interesting matters.
Pauline Marshall is a fascinating woman in many ways, and much of this has nothing at all to do with Arthur Ransome. Her whole life seems to have been one great adventure as she travelled the World earning a living as best she could as a single woman and later, the widowed mother of a young child. Her experiences ranged from spotting German planes as part of an anti-aircraft crew in the London Blitz, through consorting with film-stars when she was roped in to assist with film production, to running a business renting sailing dinghies to drunken French Foreign Legionnaires in Corsica. She witnessed Donald Cambell's last and fatal run in Bluebird on Coniston. She 'manned' a lock gate that she opened for Paul Ghetty, coming up the Thames, and was handsomely tipped by him. She met Quentin Crisp, Zsa Zsa Gabor and numerous other prominent characters of the 20th Century.
As far as the Ransome connection is concerned, she is probably the last person left alive who can speak authoritatively about Coniston and its boats in Ransome's day. Pauline had an elderly relative, first cousin to her grandmother who was an important figure in Coniston from the later years of the 19th Century. "Cousin Emma" was a formidable though kindly presence, a maiden lady who owned or rented an number of houses on the East side of the lake. She provided not only houses but also the boats used by Ransome and the Collingwoods in the early years of the 20th century - the 1st Swallow, Jamrach and Toob. Later on in the 1920s, Pauline's father bought the Beetle. Ransome, the Collingwoods and the Altounyans all enjoyed the largesse of Pauline's "Cousin Emma", as she has described:
'the First Swallow that Ransome sailed also belonged to the Holts: the boat went with the house. Taqui wrote: "The Collingwoods never had much money, but Miss Emma Holt, of the Liverpool shipping line, gave them Lanehead to live in, rent free. Miss Holt's Queen Mary figure was familiar to us as children, and in Aleppo we looked forward with particular eagerness to 'Miss Holt's presents' of knitted suits; to us she symbolised wealth." To us too![Pauline adds] Though I don't remember as a child thinking of her in those terms. To us, Cousin Emma and her houses and her boats and her chauffeur-driven Daimler and her gardener and maidservants were simply a taken-for-granted part of our happy young lives and spoiled us all dreadfully.' (Where it all Began © Pauline Marshall 1991)
These stories of Coniston boats together with Pauline's later adventures are far more interesting than the diversions created by silly people who try to cast doubt on her identity for reasons that are impossible to fathom. If I can find the time, I intend to create a web site for some of her material, meanwhile I shall be posting some of the more detailed stories of boats to an email group that I started at the beginning of this year, if the other members agree to it. I received another consignment of original material from her through the post yesterday. When I spoke to her on the phone just now about this piece for Tarboard, she asked me to mention that she is making considerable progress on her memoirs for which she is about to start seeking a publisher. Regardless of her success in venturing into the world of conventional publishing, I hope to persuade her to allow me to put them on the Web for her.
Cheers,
Andy Morley