Ransome, China, Swallows, Amazons, Spies

It’s amazing how people and subjects suddenly repeatedly pop up. Case in point – I hadn’t read anything by or about Arthur Ransome since I was a kid and loved the Swallows and Amazons books. Then a while back he popped up as a character I needed to research for my history of foreign correspondents in China – Through the Looking Glass (Ransome spent some time in China covering the Kiangse Soviet and also had a keen interested in warlords and coined the terms the ‘Shanghai Mind’ to describe the closed minds of the Shanghailanders). Then I chanced upon a DVD of the Swalllows and Amazons movie, watched it and found it’s still fun. Earlier this year I was writing a piece on pirates in the South China Sea and finally read the Swallow and Amazons story where the kids end up in China and meet a pirate queen – Missee Lee. Now I’ve just picked up a copy of what looks like a great new biography of Ransome by Roland Chambers – The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome.

What most people don’t appreciate about Ransome is that the Swallows and Amazons series that made him popular with kids across the world was first started when Ransome was 45. Arguably the best was behind him – his trip to Russia in 1913 as a struggling young freelance writer and association with the Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks as well as falling in love with a young Russian woman, Yevgenia. After this, and with a short stop in Sweden, he arrived in China and spent time in Shanghai where due to his supposed pro-Bolshevism and anti-war activities between 1914-18 Special Branch kept him under close watch. It was also thought that his Russian love interest Yevgenia was trading smuggled diamonds to raise funds for the Comintern.

All of which leave the question, which I didn’t answer in my book and Chambers tries to grapple with, of whether or not Ransome was a British agent, a Russian agent or a double agent. As I’ve yet to read the book I don’t know the answer but Ransome was a fascinating character and well deserves a new biography as well as being remembered as a journalist who wrote some interesting article on the Kiangse Soviet, Shanghai and Chinese warlords. By the way you can listen to an interview with the author on the Guardian books podcast (here)