On Fishing. Brian Clarke

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       Arthur Ransome

      IT MUST be fascinating to have someone we thought we knew well, cast in a new light by a sudden turn of events. The mere possibility that long-held assumptions could be wrong would have us sitting bolt upright and curious.

      Even news about someone remote can, we all know, have this effect: for example, when damaging allegations surface about a national figure. The charges do not have to be based on fact to set the weevils at work – all they need to do is to appear. Ideally, for the media, they should surface about a revered figure who is long since dead and so cannot lodge a defence. Tarnished Idol Syndrome always makes news.

      IT’S NOT EVERY day that I get to think kindly about Lenin or Trotsky or even, come to think of it, about certain personages in mi5 and mi6. I mean it wouldn’t be, would it? We angling correspondents have plenty to do without getting mixed up in politics and revolutions and counter-intelligence, thank you very much.

      Still, credit where credit is due. Had it not been for the foregoing folk, Arthur Ransome would not have been making the news the way he has in recent years, at first identified and then exonerated as a possible Bolshevik spy – and then I would have had no peg on which to hang my own information about him.

      Of course, it had long been known that the famous foreign correspondent and children’s author got close to the revolutionary leaders while reporting from Russia around 1917. And we can assume that he got a lot closer still to Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, because he had an affair with her before the two eventually married.

      Yet the fact that Ransome might, just might, have been a spy or a double agent was not aired until some of his private papers came to light in 2002. In 2005, the National Archive released mi5 files relating to the time Ransome was a journalist in Russia, between 1913 and 1925 – and raised similar questions.

      The mi5 files made it clear that Ransome had been watched by the security services because they feared he had become a propagandist for the Bolsheviks while working in Petrograd, then the Russian capital. One informant claimed that Ransome was expected to move into the Kremlin to live. Another report said that Ransome had been considered such a potential risk to British interests that a top-secret paper on him was circulated to the ‘King and the War Cabinet’.

      As late as 1927, by which time he was back in England and domestically ensconced, a ‘confidential source’ was reporting that ‘Arthur Ransome is a traitor, married to a Bolshevik woman, he is an undoubted Communist and in the pay of the Russian Secret Service’.

      While all of this was being filed away by mi5, other material was giving rise in the agency to the contrary view: that Ransome was not only not a traitor but actually a spy for mi6, working against the new Russian leadership. (How, it must have seemed as reasonable to ask then as now, could mi5 not have known for certain, one way or the other? What does it tell us of communication between the two in those tumultuous times?).

      Whatever the truth, such exotic possibilities in Ransome’s background will have surprised many a reader of Swallows and Amazons. More prosaically, perhaps, some others may be surprised to learn of Ransome’s background as an angler. Ransome was not only a passionate angler but wrote extensively about his sport. He became one of the finest angling correspondents to write for a national newspaper in the 20th century.

      Though many aspects of Ransome’s life have been extensively chronicled, Ransome’s work as an angling correspondent has been as submerged from view of late as split-shot beneath a float.

      Fishing and fishermen stimulated some of Ransome’s best writing and led to one of the best collections of essays in a sporting literature that goes back to 1496. It led to a second collection of angling pieces and to a fine exploration of Ransome as both writer and angler by Jeremy Swift – Arthur Ransome on Fishing – published in 1994.

      Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884, the son of an angling professor of history who was himself the son of an angling father. Early family holidays were spent near Coniston, in the Lake District, walking, boating and learning to fish – experiences that were later to be deeply mined for his children’s books and which, between his travels, constantly drew him back.

      A somewhat chequered education that took in an unhappy spell at Rugby, eventually led to a place at Yorkshire College – later Leeds University – where Ransome surprisingly began to read science before dropping out. He headed for the bright lights of Chelsea, having determined to become a writer and threw himself into it with huge energy. By the time he had reached his mid-20s he had a string of books behind him – including a critical study of Edgar Allan Poe – and had married for the first time.

      This marriage, to Ivy Walker, of Bournemouth, was a disaster and Ransome was soon looking for an escape. From 1913 on, Ransome spent much of his time in Russia, writing the kinds of insider reports for the Daily News and the Observer that caused the security services to take an interest, dallying with Evgenia – and fishing wherever and whenever he could. He returned to England with Evgenia in 1925 and settled in the Lake District. The same year he began an angling column for the then Manchester Guardian.

      Between August that year and September 1929, Ransome produced 150 pieces, most of them as polished as gemstones. He wrote on people and places, tackle and trout, wet flies and the weather. He wrote on ‘Bulls and Kindred Phenomena’, on ‘Talking to the Fish’, on ‘Failing to Catch Tench’ and on scores of other subjects besides. He wrote about them all with knowledge and insight and warmth and wry humour. СКАЧАТЬ