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Arthur Ransome, the son of Cyril Ransome and Edith Boulton, was born in Leeds on 18th January, 1884. Educated at Rugby, Ransome was a reluctant student. He studied science at Yorkshire College (later to become Leeds University) but left before taking his degree.

Ransome moved to London where he scraped a living writing stories and articles for various literary journals. In the summer of 1913 he was commissioned to write an English guide on St. Petersburg. While in Russia he began work on Old Peter's Russian Tales.

With the outbreak of the First World War, Ransom was recruited by the Daily News to report on the Eastern Front. Later he was also employed by J. L. Garvin, to write for the Observer. During this period he worked closely with Hamilton Fyfe, a journalist employed by the Daily Mail.

After the Russian Revolution, Ransome remained in the country and became friendly with Vladimir Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. His reports provided a sympathetic view of the revolution and when he arrived back in England in 1919 he was arrested by the police. After being interviewed by Sir Basil Thomson, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Ransome was released after he convinced the authorities that he was not a communist revolutionary.

While in England he wrote Six Weeks in Russia (1919), an account of the revolution and an explanation for the signing of the Brest-Litovsk. Upset by what he had written, the Foreign Office refused him permission to leave the country. Eventually, with the help of C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, he got his passport back and returned to Russia.

For the next five years Ransom reported on Russia for both the Manchester Guardian and the Observer and also wrote the book, The Crisis in Russia (1921). In 1924 Ransom married, Evgenia Shelepin, who had previously worked for Leon Trotsky.

In 1924 C. P. Scott sent Ransome to Egypt. This was followed by two years reporting for the Manchester Guardian in China (1925-26).

In 1929 Ransom began writing novels for children. Although not immediately successful, his books eventually became best-sellers. The twelve books include Swallows and Amazons (1930), Swallowdale (1931), Peter Duck (1932), Winter Holiday (1933), Coot Club (1934) and Pigeon Post (1936).

Arthur Ransome died on 3rd June 1967. The Autobiography of Arthur Ransom, edited by Rupert Hart-Davies, was published in 1976.

 

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Arthur Ransome

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(1) Arthur Ransome, Autobiography (1976)

It was March 1916 before I was given my first limited permission to visit the Russian front as a war correspondent. We went to Kiev and thence to the South Western Army Headquarters at Berditchev, where we met for the first time General Brusilov, the smartest-uniformed and most elegant of all Russian generals, later to be famous for his break-through in the west, and for the disasters his armies suffered in retreat.

I remember interminable driving in vehicles of all kinds along roads that war had widened from narrow cart-tracks to broad highways half a mile wife. Drivers had moved out of the original road to ground on either side of it not yet churned to mud. As each new strip turned to a bog, the drivers steered just outside it, so that in many places two carts meeting each other going in opposite directions would be out of shouting distance.

 

(2) Arthur Ransome made several visits to the Eastern Front in 1916 and 1917.

I saw a great deal of that long-drawn out front and of the men who, ill-armed, ill-supplied, were holding it against an enemy who, even in his anxiety to fight was no greater than the Russian's, was infinitely better equipped. I came back to Petrograd full of admiration for the Russian soldiers who were holding the front without enough weapons to go round.

 

(3) In 1916 Arthur Ransome visited the Eastern Front by air.

In August I had flown along the front in one of the old two-seated Voisin machines in which the passenger sat as if in an open canoe with a foot on each side of the pilot, in whose stupidity he had the utmost confidence. It was cold in the air and I well remember beating my hand against the outside of the canoe to get my fingers warm enough to take a photograph.

Our real trouble, such as it was, began when just before dusk we flew black to the place from which we had started. We began to spiral down and instantly there appeared puff after puff of smoke from shells sent up to meet us. The pilot suddenly turned the nose of the machine up, pointing with a grin to a small new tear in one wing. Presently he spiralled down again and again was greeted with shells from below. Once more we sheered off, this time with curses, and on coming back yet again we were, at last, recognised as friends and allowed to land.

I dined that night with the battery that had done the shooting, and sat next to the officer in charge. I complained that I did not think he had given me a very hospitable reception. "Perhaps not," he replied. "I'm very sorry, but really you ought to count yourself lucky, for usually when we fire at our own machine we hit it." He explained that the aeroplanes had been given to the Russian army because they were not good enough for the French. They were very slow and therefore easy targets.

 

(4) Arthur Ransome, Autobiography (1976)

Our Military Attaché in Bucharest was Colonel Thomson, who blamed himself a good deal for his share in bringing Romania into the war. "They told me at home that I could ask for anything I liked if I brought Romania in," he said ruefully when disaster was looming near," but I think it would be a little tackless if I asked for anything now."

I liked him very much and was shocked one morning to hear someone say that one of last night's bombs had fallen on the Military Mission. I went round at once. The bomb had blown away half the bathroom, which was on the upper floor, but had left the bath itself in the open, projecting over the ruins. The water-supply was still working, so Thomson was having his bath as usual.

Later, when it was clear that nothing could prevent a general retreat, Thomson picked me up in his car, and I found my knees lifted to my chin. "Have a look," said Thomson and I lifted the carpet to see that the floor of the car was covered with bottles of champagne. Thomson laughed. "Well," he said, "if it has got to be a retreat, I don't see why it should be a dry one.

Years later, in London, I met Thomson hurrying towards the Strand in civilian clothes and carrying a delicately tinted pair of gloves. He told me he was on his way to address a Trade Union meeting. I suppose I must have smiled and he must have noticed my glance at his gloves. "Yes," he said, "I know I don't look much of a Trade Unionist, but that can't be helped." He became Lord Thomson, Secretary of State for Air in the first Labour Government, and to the sorrow of all who knew him was killed on the first flight of the airship R.101.

 

(5) Hamilton Fyfe began reporting the war on the Eastern Front with Arthur Ransome in 1915.

The Russian officers, brutal as they often were to their men (many of them scarcely considered privates to be human), were as a rule friendly and helpful to us. They showed us all we wanted to see. They always cheerfully provided for Arthur Ransome (a fellow journalist), who could not ride owing to some disablement, a cart to get about in.

 

(6) In 1916 Arthur Ransome was employed by J. L. Garvin of the Observer.

Soon after I came back to Petrograd from the northern front, J. L. Garvin telegraphed asking me to become correspondent for the Observer. I was delighted and found things much easier. As correspondent for a Conservative newspaper I found doors wide open that would have been scarcely ajar for the correspondent of the Radical Daily News.

 

(7) Arthur Ransome was an enthusiastic supporter of the February Revolution.

It is impossible for people who have not lived here to know with what joy we now write of the new Russian Government. Only those who knew how things were only a week ago can understand the enthusiasm of us who have seen a miracle take place before our eyes. We knew how Russia worked for the war in spite of her Government. We could not tell the truth. It is as if honesty had returned. Russia had broken her chains and stands as the greatest free nation in Europe with republican France and liberal England. Nowhere outside Germany had Prussianism gone so far as here. Nowhere has it been so absolutely defeated.

 

(8) Arthur Ransome was in Russia during the October Revolution.

Before the end of August it was obvious that there would be a Bolshevik majority in the Soviets that would be reflected in the composition of the Executive Committee. During the 'July Days' the weakness of the Government had been manifest. Kerensky had been weakened by the double failure, military and diplomatic, disasters in Galicia and failure to bring the warring powers together in conference at Stockholm. Both these failures had brought new strength to the Bolsheviks, and a swing to the left was inevitable.

 

(9) Arthur Ransome, Autobiography (1976)

On February 19, 1918, the Soviet Government sent out a wireless message offering to renew negotiations with Germany. In an article in Pravda, Lenin disclosed his main line of argument (for signing a peace agreement with Germany). This was that the international war was the source of the revolution and that, since the international war would continue, it would continue to feed revolution, and that the Russians must at all costs preserve as much as they could of the Russian Revolution itself until such time as "the bourgeois power bled to death" and the Russian people were joined by revolting peoples in the West.

 

(10) Arthur Ransome, The Daily News (29th December, 1917)

I arrived in Petrograd to find that the reports of disorder appearing in the English press are based mainly on wilful misrepresentation by the opposition newspapers here. The city is more orderly than it had been for some months before the Bolsheviks took control. For the first time since the Revolution the Government in Russia is based on real force. People may not like the Bolsheviks, but they obey them with startling alacrity.

 

(11) Arthur Ransome, The Daily News (15th January, 1918)

The central power station is not working owing to the complete absence of coal. Electric light, which is supplied by various separate companies, is increasingly irregular. In some parts of town it only begins at seven in the evening, while other parts yesterday had none at all. No candles are to be found and it is difficult to secure oil. The bread allowance is at a minimum and that minimum is sometimes unobtainable.

Petrograd has long forgotten the taste of milk, though now and again it is possible to secure inferior butter at twenty one shillings a pound. Naturally the absence of lighting helps thieves who pay most attention to those shops with any kind of food for sale and ready-made clothes shops. Also for the sake of warm clothes they have the unpleasing habit of holding up people and stripping them naked in the street.

 

(12) In his book Six Weeks in Russia, Arthur Ransome argued strongly against an Allied invasion of Russia.

Unwin published Six Weeks in Russia in 1919 and sold enormous quantities of it at the lowest possible price. No one could read the plain statements of fact without feeling that the Russian war could not be justified, if only because the people in the book, from Lenin downwards, were quite obviously human beings and not the fantastic bogies that the Interventionists pretended. The little book makes no claim to knowledge of politics or economics, but it does give a clear picture of what Moscow was like in those days of starvation, high hope and unwanted war.

 

(13) Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent (1932)

Nor must I forget to mention Arthur Ransome, who, if not a member of our mission, was something more than a visitor. He lived in our hotel and we saw him almost daily. Ransome was a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist who could always be relied upon to champion the underdog, and a visionary whose imagination had been fired by the revolution. He was on excellent terms with the Bolsheviks and frequently brought us information of the greatest value. An incorrigible romanticist, who could spin a fairy-tale out of nothing, he was an amusing and good-natured companion. As an ardent fisherman, who had written some charming sketches on angling, he made a warm appeal to my sympathy, and I championed him resolutely against the secret service idiots who later tried to denounce him as a Bolshevik agent.

 

(14) David Pallister, Arthur Ransome, The Guardian (1st March, 2003)

The debate about the true political affiliations of the children's writer and journalist Arthur Ransome has been going on for nearly a century.

Was he, when reporting the Russian revolution and its aftermath - latterly for the Manchester Guardian - a committed Bolshevik or a romantic ingenu caught up by the momentous events?

Or was he a British agent getting valuable information from his Kremlin contacts?

Or, perhaps, a double agent?

His later Swallows and Amazons series of idyllic childhood sailing adventures in the Lake District give no clues. Neither did his 1976 autobiography.

But files released by MI5 at the National Archives put some flesh on the enigma. The answer seems that this complex man - shortsighted, fat, ruddy-faced, with a magnificent moustache - was an amalgam of all these personae.

An indication of his close relationship with the British authorities in Russia came in an application to the passport office in October 1915. He had first gone to Russia, at 28, in 1912 to research folklore and escape a disastrous marriage.

At the outbreak of war he was taken on by the radical Daily News. After one of his brief returns to England, his application has the note: "Has certificate from (ambassador) Sir George Buchanan that he has worked for the embassy for three years." Come the revolution of 1917, Ransome made friends with Bolshevik leaders - Lenin, Radek and Trotsky - and his dispatches were seen as unduly sympathetic to the regime. He also fell in love with - and later married - Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina.

An MI5 note, written 10 years later, begins: "This man first came to our notice in 1917 as representative of the Daily News in Petrograd. His articles were considered to be most detrimental, as he frequently applauded the Bolshevik government and one was forced to the conclusion that he had probably become imbued with their sentiments himself."

By 1918 he was"a keen supporter of Trotsky" and a courier for Lenin. Nevertheless, that year the British helped him smuggle Evgenia to Sweden, the head of mission, Robert Bruce Lockhart, describing her intriguingly as "a very useful lady". The MI5 note signalled the changed perception, saying: "At a later stage in 1918 it appeared that Ransome was quite loyal and willing to help the British by giving information, and that the appearance of his working against us was due to his friendship with Bolshevik leaders, not by any means to any sympathy with their regime. It was decided to give him a chance to prove whether or not he was reliable."

In 1919, the year he joined the Manchester Guardian, he returned to Britain. Files show that the intelligence community remained divided on his loyalties. The most sympathetic note came in an MI6 report, in which he has the code S.76: "I do not think that, pending investigations, much credence should be attached to the various reports which have been made regarding any definitive activities which S.76 is allegedly to have been engaged in on behalf of the Bolsheviks.

"S.76 is not a Bolshevik. His interest in, association with various Bolshevik leaders has always been literary rather than political. He has, I think, no special political views.

"His association with the Bolsheviks was begun, and has been continued throughout, at the direct request of responsible British authorities ..."

That did not stop MI5 and Special Branch attacking him. When the Guardian's editor, CP Scott - who described the revolution as a "wonderful and glorious event" - asked permission to employ him, the Home Office reacted violently. Sir Ernley Blackwell, its legal adviser, even suggested that he should hang for treason.

Finally MI5 relented. "Lord Curzon [the foreign secretary] thinks there is no objection to permission being granted [to go to Russia] as long as the conditions upon which it is given are quite explicitly explained to Mr Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian.

"Mr Scott has already given Sir Basil Thomson (head of Special Branch) an undertaking not to insert anything from Mr Ransome which might be detrimental to our interests ..."