Extract from Daily Telegraph
(Click for the full item)

 

The Last Englishman:
The Double Life of Arthur Ransome
By Roland Chambers: review

Roland Chambers's The Last Englishman shows that before 'Swallows and Amazons’ came Bolshvism and spying. Ian Thomson on an author with an adventurous past

By

6:00AM BST 16 Aug 2009

Arthur Ransome, the sailing enthusiast, amateur angler and author of Swallows and Amazons, was a shadowy figure keen to protect his privacy. Over the half-century of his writing career he contrived some elaborate autobiographical fictions; this makes him a difficult subject for a biographer. Roland Chambers, wisely, has chosen to construct a life of Ransome not found in his books, and relied instead on documentary sources.

In 2005, 40 years after he died, MI5 released its files on Ransome. These revealed an Edwardian adventurer of confused political allegiances and moralities, who compared Lenin to Oliver Cromwell and denied the Soviet Red Terror. As a young man, Ransome may have acted as a double agent for Great Britain and Bolshevik Russia. With Machiavellian adroitness he infiltrated the Kremlin’s top brass in Moscow and, alone among British citizens, attended the inauguration of the Comintern established by Lenin in March 1917 to foment revolution abroad. That was not all.

In 1924, in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, Ransome married Leon Trotsky’s private secretary, Evgenia Shelepina. Chillingly, he had congratulated Trotsky on his 'merciless’ suppression of the White Guards and other 'bloodsucking’ counter-revolutionaries. This same apologist for Bolshevism later wrote a series of children’s adventures set in the Lake District which, with their pastoral, old-fashioned view of Britain, shaped the imagination of a generation. If there was a trace of Bolshevik intransigence in the rules and regulations devised by the Walker children for their Lakeland utopia, Ransome did not want it to show. His anxiety about how his youthful Russian escapades might be construed in later years never left him; The Last Englishman is the story of his Soviet double life and Soviet sympathies.

Ransome first visited Russia in 1913, arriving at St Petersburg by steamer from Copenhagen with the intention of gathering material for a collection of Russian folk stories. At 29, he was disgruntled with England and his disastrous marriage to a solicitor’s daughter, and hoped that Russia might provide an escape. His love affair with Russia intensified after the First World War broke out and the red flag of revolution was seen to fly over the Winter Palace. With journalistic commissions from the London Daily News, Ransome began to file reports on the 1917 uprising. At this stage his purpose was simply to communicate Soviet views to the British public and vice versa; only later, when Lenin triumphed over the Kerensky government, did his political loyalties clarify.

A deep-dyed conservative, Ransome would have abhorred the notion of revolution in England, says Chambers. Yet in the prospect of Bolshevik mob rule he found a purpose and, it seems, vindication for childhood humiliations. Ransome’s father, a professor of history at Leeds, was an oppressive man, who tried to teach his son to swim, apparently, by throwing him over the side of a boat. At Rugby public school young Arthur was wretchedly unhappy. He developed a prickly, confrontational personality that made him hostile in the presence of authority. Among the Bolsheviks, however, in his Russian army great coat and astrakhan hat, he felt puffed out with rank and self-importance. Six Weeks in Russia in 1919, Ransome’s report on the conditions and characters of the revolution, was circulated by Soviet agents among Allied troops. His journalism meanwhile sought to reassure British readers about the levels of blood shed by the Bolsheviks. Soldiers were shooting their officers, yes, but they did so with admirable restraint.

As a token Red, Ransome was able to hobnob with most of the great revolutionaries of the time: Bukharin, Rykov, Zinoviev, Vorovsky, almost all in the end murdered. He was mixing with top officials on the other side, too, and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was quick to recruit him to its ranks. Few Englishman had such impeccable Bolshevik contacts or insider knowledge of the Kremlin. Whether Ransome also secretly served the interests of a power hostile to MI6 – Soviet Russia – is impossible to say as there is no evidence. As a rash, exuberant character of wavering convictions, however, he might easily have switched allegiances.

Tallinn was the ideal base for Ransome while Russia was in the news. It was the Baltic port closest to St Petersburg and known to be a centre for espionage, infiltrated by White Russian intriguers intent on blocking Soviet access to Baltic territories. Ransome stayed there in the Golden Lion Hotel (where Graham Greene would stay 10 years later in 1934) and continued his affair with Evgenia, his Bolshevik sweetheart. After Lenin’s death in 1924 and the emergence of Stalin as leader, however, his long drawn-out involvement with Russia began to dwindle.

Instead, he went boating in the Gulf of Finland and fished off the Tallinn archipelago during the pike-run. Much of his sailing experience in Baltic waters went into the children’s books he spent the rest of his life writing, but it would be 30 years before he set down the story of his Soviet adventures in a book, and another 20 before he realised he would never finish it. The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, was published posthumously in 1967; according to Chambers, the Russian chapters are a tissue of fabrication. Still, no other Englishman had seen the Bolshevik Revolution from such close quarters, or from such unusually confused allegiances, and this sombre biography absorbs from start to finish.

The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome

By Roland Chambers

FABER, £20, 352pp

Available from Telegraph Books 0844 871 1516