Posted by andy bolger on November 16, 2002 at 01:19:20 from 213.122.243.118 user beardbiter.
In Reply to: Re: HULLABALOOS posted by Jonathan Labaree on November 15, 2002 at 17:37:19:
David Matless has discussed the Hullabaloos in an article published in “Body and Society two years ago. He argues that the Broads are a “moral landscape” in which different forms of out door activity are disputed; the bird watcher, the old eel man with his tales of shooting bitterns, the tripper etc. all have their own and incompatible ways of responding to Broadland nature. Matless sees AR as one of a number of writers ( the earliest he quotes is George Davies’ 1876 boys adventure story The Swan and Her Crew) who have seen the Broads as an “improving landscape” where for example in “The Swan” “the sickly and bookish Dick Merrivale” is transformed “from a pale, delicate aesthete into a sturdy lover of beauty”. He defends “non improving fun” as exemplified by the Hullabaloos or George Formby but points out that “vulgarity is not only ascribed to the socially low”.
This takes us back to our thread on AR and elitism, the kind of elitism that I am certainly guilty of which allows me as a sailor a climber and a walker to look down on “mere” coach trippers.
Here is a taste of what Matless has to say about AR. He also has a nice passage on Dorothy’s “horny hands”
“In Coot Club (1969) and The Big Six (1940) Arthur Ransome provided children with adventure stories‘symbolic of the forces contesting the future of the Broads’ (Brogan, 1984: 337).Ransome holidayed on the Broads throughout the 1930s, and Coot Club, especially,presents an environmental morality tale where the adventuring children of the professional class ally with good locals against bad locals and bad visitors to defend nature against the wrong kind of culture. Dick and Dorothea Callum, the visiting offspring of an archaeologist, join with Tom Dudgeon, son of a Horning doctor,to act as vigilantes for the local wildlife. Tom is in a Bird Protection Society, and defends nesting coots against thoughtless trippers who speed and make waves. Such people, ‘Real Hullabaloos’ (Ransome, 1969: 42), perform like characters from a later Public Information Film on how not to behave on the river, with the chief villain of the piece being a large cruiser, the Margoletta, carrying a mixed company of fashionably blithe trippers fond of playing a gramophone on deck and ignorant of the nature of the region. Tom sets them adrift when they moor by a coot’s nest.
The tripper here, as in much later commentary, appears as a kind of polluting
pond-skater, slipping across the surface of local ecology and having no meaningful connection to it, but managing to destroy it in the process. A culture of nature is defined against another way of being, though it should be stressed that this is not simply a local/non-local story. George Owden, a local working-class boy in league with the Hullabaloos, betrays the children and the coots in both of Ransome’s Broads tales, while Ransome’s particular social democratic philosophy of improvement through nature demands that the Coot Club itself is a cross-class alliance including locals and visitors. Neither the forces of good nor those of evil are specific to one class or locale. The Hullabaloos come to grief in the end, holed after ramming a post in the middle of the expansive Broaden Water, and Ransome stages a local version of the Titanic disaster, with the gramophone ‘pouring out its horrible song’ as the boat begins to sink (Ransome, 1969: 327). The Hullabaloos are rescued, and humbled, by the ‘Death and Glories’, three boat-builder’s sons from Horning”.148
Matless, A. 2000, Action and Noise over 100 years the Making of a Nature Region, Body and Society Vol 6 (3-4) 141- 165