Abstract
The connection between Arthur Ransome’s ‘Swallows and Amazons’ novels and the Royal Navy has long been remarked upon by readers and critics alike. Looking back on her own childhood reading, Michelle Landsberg recalls being drawn to the solid dependability of John Walker and his sense of obligation to a moral code that is ‘part naval and part familial’.1 Similarly Victor Watson has argued that the structure of loyalty and morality in Ransome’s Walker family ‘derives from naval discipline’.2 The naval discipline and codes within Ransome’s novels stem from late Victorian high navalism and navalist discourses that flourished in the years leading up to the First World War, both in Britain and across the globe.3 The effects on writing for children were significant. Although Ransome wrote some years after the peak of high naval ideology in Britain, the character and development of both John and Roger Walker, and indeed the entire Walker family, were shaped by navalist ideology. The principles of service, duty and responsibility were core tenets of high navalism and so it particularly appealed to many among the ascetic or professional middle classes. What Ransome did in ‘Swallows and Amazons’, and which was entirely original, was to take the Nelson Tradition and the service ethos and transfer it to the family sailing story.
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Notes
Michelle Landsberg, The World of Children’s Books (London: Simon and Shuster, 1988), p. 123.
Victor Watson, Reading Series Fiction: From Arthur Ransome to Gene Kemp (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 14.
Peter Hunt, Approaching Arthur Ransome (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 164.
According to Andrew Lambert, it was Laugh ton’s biography that began the process of rehabilitating Nelson’s character and reputation, which began around 1890. In Laughton’s biography only two pages are given over to the time Nelson spent in Naples and his subsequent relationship with Emma Hamilton, a period of his history that had substantially damaged Nelson’s reputation, particularly in light of Robert Southey’s influential Life of Nelson (1810). See Andrew Lambert, The Foundation of Naval History. John Knox Laughton, the Royal Navy and the Historical Profession (London: Chatham, 1998), p. 173.
Barry Gough argues that many historians have been daunted by the task of linking the Royal Navy to the Empire. Barry Gough, ‘The Royal Navy and the British Empire’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 5, Historiography, ed. by Robin W Winks and Alaine M. Low (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 331.
Frank Eyre, 20th Century Children’s Books (London: The British Council, 1952), p. 17.
Joseph A. Kestner, Masculinities in British Adventure Fiction, 1880–1915 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 3.
Accordingly to Law, the three leitmotils of British maritime island nationalism are Britain as the besieged island, the island as exemplar of civilisation and the navy as national protector. See Alex Law, ‘Ol Navies and Navels: Britain as a Mental Island’, Geografiska Annaler, Series B. Human Geography, 87.4 (2005), 267–77 (268).
J. S. Bratton, ‘Ol England, Home, and Duty: The Image of England in Victorian and Edwardian Juvenile Fiction’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. by J. M. Mackenzie (Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 73–94 (83).
The other portraits in Sabatini’s Heroic Lives were King Richard I, St Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson and Florence Nightingale. See Ralael Sabatini, Heroic Lives (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1934).
W. C. Berwick Sayers also recommended James Baikie’s Peeps at the Royal Navy (1928), Sir Henry Newbolt’s The Book of the Blue Sea (1914; 1922) and
Frank C. Bowen’s The King’s Navy (1925).
Faraday’s list included: Charles Boll’s Boy’s Book of the Sea (1937),
Frank C. Bowen’s Ships for All (1923), John Irving’s ‘Dick Valliant’ series of naval cadet stories,
John Maselield’s The Bird of Dawning; or, The Fortune of the Sea (1933),
Ernest Prothero’s The Book of Ships (1929),
Stanley Rogers’s Sea Lore (1929) and Ships and Sailors (1928) and the many novels of Percy Westerman.
Mark W. Hamillton, ‘The “New Navalism” and the British Navy League, 1895–1914’, Mariner’s Mirror (1978), 37–43 (42).
On the activities of the Navy League see Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh: Pearson Education, 2005), pp. 44–55.
Archibald Hurd, ‘Why We Have a Navy’, in The Wonder Book of the Navy for Boys and Girls, ed. by Harry Golding, 4th edn (London and Melbourne: Ward, Lock & Co., 1920), unpaginated.
Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game. Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 257.
Sir George Aston, The Navy of To-day (London: Methuen, 1927), p. 98.
Percy Westerman, The Keepers of the Narrow Seas A Story of the Great War (1918; London: S. W. Partridge, 1931), p. 14.
On the relationship between service and interwar middle-class identity see Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, p. 10, and Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, England 1918–1951 (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 58.
The book is recommended in Mrs Charles Bridge, The Catalogue of the Circulating Library (1934).
Taffrail, Pincher Martin, O. D. A Story of the Inner Life of the Royal Navy (1916; London and Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1934), p. 11.
Percival A. Hislam, The Navy, Shown to the Children (London and Edinburgh: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1917), p. 35.
John Irving, Dick Valliant, Naval Cadet (London: Seeley Service & Co., 1928), p. 25.
Collins writes that in 1914 Royal Naval Dartmouth cadets were sent to finish their training at sea. When the cruiser HMS Aboukir was torpedoed and sunk off the Dutch coast on 22 September 1914, 13 teenage cadets were lost, along with 1500 crew members. L J. Collins, Cadet. The Impact of War on the Cadet Movement (Oldham: Jade, 2001), p. 34.
John Irving, Dick Valliant, in the Dardanelles (London: Seeley, Service & Co., 1929), p. 84.
Dempster Heming, Peter Clayton, Midshipman (London: The Epworth Press, 1938), p. 37.
Arthur Ransome, Missee Lee (1941; London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), p. 217.
Gilbert Hacklorth-Jones, Green Sailors Ahoy!, or, Wanted: A Crew (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), p. 127.
Gilbert Hacklorth-Jones, Green Sailors and Blue Water (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955), p. 100.
The incident referred to involved Churchill’s overturning of the decision to tail three candidates’ entry to Dartmouth ‘on the grounds that one had a slightly Cockney accent and the other two were sons of a chief petty officer and a merchant navy engineer’. Collins, Cadet, p. 81. On this subject see also Brian Lavery Empire of the Seas (London: Conway, 2009), p. 246.
Stephen King-Hall, My Naval Life, 1906–1929 (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), p. 24. Stephen King-Hall came from a long line of naval officers. In his broadcasts lor the BBC Children’s Hour as ‘Uncle Steve’, King-Hall sometimes featured conversations with his lather, Admiral George King-Hall, talking about naval life at the end of the previous century.
See Derek McCulloch, ed., The Children’s Hour Annual (London: Hutchinson, 1936), pp. 33–5, and
Commander Stephen King-Hall, Here and There Broadcast Talks for Children (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1932).
Ransome, We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea (1937; London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 64.
Ransome, Secret Water (1939; London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), p. 17.
Margery Fisher, Who’s Who in Children’s Books: A Treasury of the Familiar Characters of Childhood (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), p. 159.
Ransome, Swallows and Amazons (1930; London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 17.
John Rowe Townsend, Written for Children: An Outline of English Children’s Literature (London: Garnet Miller, 1965), p. 109.
Arthur Ransome, Swallowdale (1931; London: Jonathan Cape, 1953), p. 73.
Brian Doyle, The Who’s Who of Children’s Literature (London: Evelyn, 1968), p. 101.
C. S. Forester, The Happy Return (1937; London: Michael Joseph, 1965), p. 299.
Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language. Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 19.
Arthur O. Cooke, Ships and Sea-faring Shown to the Children (London: T.C & E.C. Jack, 1917), p. 12.
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (1906; London: Methuen, 1950), p. 45.
Commander Geoffrey Penn, R.N., Snotty. The Story of the Midshipman (London: Hollis & Carter, 1957), p. 54.
Ransome, Great Northern? (1947; London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 158.
Alan Ereira, The Invergordon Mutiny: A Narrative History of the Last Great Mutiny in the Royal Navy and How It Forced Britain off the Gold Standard in 1931 (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 16–17.
Hannen Swaffer, What Would Nelson Do? (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), p. 54.
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© 2014 Hazel Sheeky Bird
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Bird, H.S. (2014). England Expects: The Nelson Tradition and the Politics of Service in Naval Cadet and Family Sailing Stories. In: Class, Leisure and National Identity in British Children’s Literature, 1918–1950. Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407436_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407436_7
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