Swallows, Amazons and a passion for angling

For me, more than any other series of books, the Swallows and Amazons canon of a dozen stories of Cumbrian children who occasionally venture to the Broads (and notably once, by accident, to sea) are the defining tales of my juvenile forays into the world of literature. I'd never been to the Lake District or the Broads, nor sailed a dinghy or yacht, but these children, part refined and privately educated, part feral, were miniature heroes and heroines to stir the spirit. I read the whole collection, and have never been able to bring myself to watch the 2016 film adaptation of the novels, as, for me, the 1974  original remains the definitive cinematic version, and to watch any other would be tantamount to heresy. 

It wasn't until much later, in adulthood, that I discovered that Arthur Ransome, the author of the stories, was not just a keen sailor (that much was obvious from the books), but am impassioned angler with a colourful life story. In fairness, I shouldn't have been entirely surprised, as the Swallows and Amazon books see the children fishing for perch and pike in the Lake District, and catching a monstrous pike on the Broads in another of the stories (my memory is slightly vague on which one, but I lean towards thinking it was either "Coot Club" or "We didn't mean to go to sea."

Ransome, who was born in 1884, a Victorian, and who died the year before my birth, in 1967, was once described as a "Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist who could always be relied upon to champion the underdog." In the First World War he'd been a newspaper correspondent covering the war on the Eastern Front, and was a sometime spy for the British during the Russian Revolution, although he possessed some sympathy for the Bolsheviks, knew Lenin and Trotsky well, and eventually married Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia.

After the war he became the Manchester Guardian's first angling correspondent, and his short fishing essays (available in print as "Rod and Line" or "Arthur Ransome on Fishing") are superior even to his children's novels. His turn of phrase is evocative, and like Chris Yates today, he then, was the possessor of that rare gift of being able to explain in perfect prose  why we love to fish.

Of carp anglers he wrote "a man who fishes habitually for carp has a strange look in his eyes, as if he had been in heaven and hell." (this, remember, was in the days before bolt rigs and overstocked commercials, when carp were considered all but uncatchable.) He also observed, correctly, that "no man who has ever travelled with a fishing rod ever finds himself able to travel as happily without one." Ransome was eclectic in his angling tastes, as happy to fish for trout with a worm, or bream with a maggot (which he would doubtless have described as a "gentle") as for salmon with a fly, and was totally devoid of angling snobbery.

The historian AJP Taylor wrote of him that "Arthur Ransome was one of the most gifted and attractive literary figures of all time", and Ransome certainly knew the value of a good fishing book, noting that "to read a fishing book is the next best thing to fishing." A sentiment with which all right minded fisher folk must surely concur.

A doyen of both angling and angling writing, I guess like another angler of literary fame once quipped, it might also be said of Ransome, that he was double blessed in that he "he made a recreation of a recreation", and you can't say fairer than that.