Abstract
It has become commonplace to say that after 1918 the national imaginative connection to the sea was replaced by a retreatist one to the idea of ‘deep England’.1 Family sailing stories belie this view and demonstrate the ways in which children’s writers not only sought to project British maritime culture as alive and legitimate but also tried to pass it on to the next generation. Not only did Arthur Ransome, Aubrey de Sélincourt, and Gilbert Hackforth-Jones present sailing as something real, as something that modern children could and should do, they also suggested that sailing was both democratic and meritocratic. In other words, their books are infused with the idea of democracy outlined by Peter Hunt (1992), one that ‘does not ignore the trappings of class but [which] is really concerned with something else: mutual respect gained by mutual interest’.2 Respect in sailing communities appeared to be based on knowledge and skill, the true conferrers of status, hence, in these books, it is a way of life being legitimised rather than any single class. This chapter demonstrates how this sailing culture was created in family sailing stories, and positions it within constructions of local and national identity — after all, what was Britain, the island nation, if not one large sailing community? Resisting the simplistic opposition of middle-class cultural legitimacy and working-class cultural illegitimacy, this chapter interrogates the sailing cultures that were presented in these stories.
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Notes
Peter Hunt, Approaching Arthur Ransome (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 8.
Frank Eyre, 20th Century Children’s Books (London: The British Council, 1952), p. 56.
See H. E. Marshall, Our Island Story: A Child’s History of England … With Pictures by A. S. Forrest (London: T. C. & E. C.Jack, 1905), chapter 1.
Andrew Thompson for example has questioned the difficulty of assessing working-class identification with imperialism in relation to national identity. See Andrew S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Longman, 2005), p. 39.
Britain’s reliance on sea trade and imports was a common subject of both pre- and interwar writing about the sea and the Royal Navy. See for example, Percival A. Hislam, The Navy, Shown to the Children (London and Edinburgh: T. C. & E. C.Jack, 1917), p. 4. As late as 1950, children’s books still stressed Britain’s reliance on imported foodstuffs and their transportation by sea. See The Golden Picture Book of Ships (London and Melbourne: Ward, Lock & Co., 1950).
On the rejection of militarism after 1918, see Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End. A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1950), p. 269.
According to Andrew Marr, 840 British Warships had been struck off the Royal Naval register by 1946 and a further 727 were cancelled in construction. Furthermore, ‘Of 880,000 men and women serving in the Royal Navy towards the end of the war, nearly 700,000 had left two years later.’ Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Pan Books, 2008), p. 15.
This trend was apparent in books such as Sir George Aston, The Navy of To-day (London: Methuen & Co., 1927), p. 98. On the attempts to promote consciousness of imperial foodstuffs and to promote their purchase, see David Meredith, ‘Imperial Images: The Empire Marketing Board, 1926–32’, History Today, 37 (January 1987), 30–6.
Mike Stammers, ‘Shiplovers, a Cultural Phenomenon of the Interwar Years’, in Mariner’s Mirror, 82.2 (1996), 213–16 (214).
Roger Ryan, ‘The Emergence of Middle-Class Yachting in the North-West of England from the Later Nineteenth Century’, in Recreation and the Sea, ed. by Stephen Fisher (University of Exeter Press, 1997), pp. 150–81 (176).
Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales: Children’s Books and Their Authors from 1800 to 1964, 4th edn (London: Edmund Ward, 1965), p. 263.
The Walkers are planning to go on an extended sail with their parents at the start of Secret Water when Captain Walker is ordered to return to duty. See Arthur Ransome, Secret Water (1939; London: Jonathan Cape, 1942), chapter 1.
Aubrey de Sélincourt, One More Summer (London: George Routledge, 1944), p. 32.
Aubrey de Sélincourt, Kestrel (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 8.
Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 53–4.
Cyril Ionides and John Black Atkins, A Floating Home … With Illustrations by Arnold Bennett (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918), p. ix.
Aubrey de Sélincourt, Calicut Lends a Hand (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1946), pp. 159, 13, 159.
Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 175.
Arthur Ransome, Coot Club (1934; London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), p. 22.
Aubrey de Sélincourt, Three Green Bottles, illus. by Guy de Sélincourt (London: George Routledge, 1941), p. 26.
Martin Pugh, ‘We Danced All Night’: A Social History of Britain between the Wars (London: The Bodley Head, 2008), p. 34.
Arthur Ransome, Great Northern? (1947; London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 11, and Ransome, Coot Club, p. 72.
Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Pritchard, The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 113.
See Gilbert Hackforth-Jones, Green Sailors and Blue Water (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955), pp. 92–115, and
Hackforth-Jones, Green Sailors, Ahoy!, or, Wanted: A Crew (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), p. 21.
Andrew Jackson, ‘Labour and Leisure — the Mirror Dinghy and DIY Sailors’, Journal of Design History, 19 (Spring 2006), 57–67 (57).
Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theatre on the Bounty (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 56.
Captain Marryat, Peter Simple (1896; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1915), p. 32. Michelle Landsberg writes that when she sat at a tiller, thirty years after reading Ransome for the first time, she felt that she had long inhabited this nautical world.
See Michelle Landsberg, The World of Children’s Books (London and New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), p. 123.
Eyre, 20th Century Children’s Books, p. 58; Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales, p. 262. Not all critics have agreed with this view. Geoffrey Trease, for example, argues that Ransome created ‘a fantasy world, disguised under a wealth of realistic practical detail’. Geoffrey Trease, Tales Out Of School, 2nd edn (1949; London: Heinemann Educational, 1964), p. 139.
Hackforth-Jones, ‘A New Angle on Uncle George’, in Green Sailors and Blue Water, pp. 53–91 (88–9, 91; emphasis in original).
Sheila G. Ray, Children’s Fiction. A Handbook for Librarians (1970; Leicester: Brockhampton Press, 1972), p. 57.
Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales, p. 263. While this division between Ransome’s ‘realistic’ and ‘fantasy’ novels has been challenged recently by Sarah Spooner, it is still a widely accepted idea. See Sarah Spooner, ‘Landscapes: “Going Foreign” in Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck’, in Children’s Literature, New Approaches, ed. by Karin Lesnik-Oberstein (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004), pp. 206–28.
Arthur Ransome, Peter Duck (1932; London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 18.
Arthur Ransome, Missee Lee (1941; London: Jonathan Cape, 2008), pp. 162, 61.
Victor Watson, Reading Series Fiction: From Arthur Ransome to Gene Kemp (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 35.
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© 2014 Hazel Sheeky Bird
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Bird, H.S. (2014). The Family Sailing Story. 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_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407436_6
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