Posted by Robin Selby on April 17, 2025 at 04:39:08 user RobinSelby.
I was looking through some old Percy Westerman books on Gutenberg, when I came across a couple of passages which reminded me of similar incidents in the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ books.
In Chapter I of ‘The Fritz Strafers’ (published 1918), two young friends are sitting in a train. They are due to be joined by a third, Slogger, who is late. The train sets off, there is a shout ‘Stand back, sir’. ‘The next instant the door was thrown open, and with an easy movement the missing Slogger swung himself into the compartment and waved a friendly salute to the baffled porter who had vainly attempted to detain him’. Slogger is carrying an accumulator which spills acid as he boards the train.
In Chapters XI and XII of ‘The Boys of the ‘Puffin’ (published 1925), ‘Puffin’ is moored to the quay with an anchor out, and only one Sea Scout aboard to keep anchor watch. The mooring ropes part and the anchor starts to drag. The Sea Scout lets out more chain but loses control. He is not worried because he knows that the chain is shackled inside the chain locker. But the yacht jerks and the shackle breaks. The yacht drifts outside the harbour and goes aground.
I do not have reference books handy but I do not recall that Percy Westerman’s name is associated with that of Arthur Ransome. Percy Westerman (1876-1959) and Arthur Ransome (1884-1967) were near-contemporaries, but Westerman was well ahead of Ransome in terms of writing novels for children. Westerman published his first children’s novel in 1908. By the time Ransome published ‘Swallows and Amazons’ in 1930 Westerman was publishing books 79-81. Westerman carried on writing at a ferocious rate, and the bibliography lists 178 books by 1959 compared to Ransome’s twelve and a bit.
The train incident is obviously reminiscent of the similar incident in ‘Coot Club’. There are the same warnings from railway employees, and Tom’s tin of paint stands in for the accumulator. But whereas Slogger’s bravado is pointless. Tom’s is a seminal moment in the book, because it introduces Tom to Dick and Dorothea. It is also the moment when Dorothea takes a shine to Tom (‘He looked, she thought, most awfully strong…’).
The anchor incident is again reminiscent of the similar incident in ‘We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea’. There is also a jerk in the latter book, but this time it explains why John lost control of the anchor chain. ‘And just at the very worst moment there came a jerk’. He did not know what happened, but the chain went flying out. He tried to stop it with his foot but was flung onto his back. He did not know if the chain was fastened but there was just a bit of frayed rope, which is rather more credible than the broken shackle in Westerman. Again, this is a seminal moment in the book, whereas in Westerman it is just one incident of many.
I do not recall what we know about the genesis of the ‘Swallows and Amazons’ book apart from the slippers incident and the fact that someone advised Ransome to write some children’s books for a pension. Assuming that the two incidents are not a coincidence, it is possible that Ransome read some Percy Westerman in an attempt to understand his market, and the two incidents stuck in his memory.
This would have made sense. Westerman’s books are all about boats and ships. The books about Sea Scouts would have been closest to the market which Ransome had in mind. The Scout Masters are the equivalent of Captain Flint, often with experience of motor boats in the Great War, but without Captain Flint’s weaknesses. There is a relentless flow of incidents, which would have reminded Ransome that on occasion, less can be more. There are no girls. The Sea Scouts are more mechanically minded than the Swallows and Amazons, and can be relied upon to get recalcitrant engines going, in contrast to Roger. There are always baddies to provide tension. The Sea Scouts are one-dimensional and more or less interchangeable, versus the more rounded characters in Ransome’s books. As in Ransome, the Royal Navy is never far away. So Westerman would have provided Ransome with a good starting place to develop ideas for his own books.
The next question is where Ransome obtained his copies of Westerman’s novels, assuming that he did not buy them or get them as presents from his literary friends. The answer is surely Boots Booklovers Library, which is where I got my Westerman novels from in the 1950’s.
According to ‘Clegg's International Directory of the World's Book Trade’ published in 1940-1941, Boots Booklovers Library was located at the corner of Main Road, and Crescent Road in Windermere. Its phone number was 93. Today, Boots is located at 10 Crescent Road, Windermere. Its phone number is 01539-443093, which still retains the number 93 after all these years. It is a double fronted shop which should have provided enough space for the lending library. It is next door to United Utilities which is responsible for leakages of sewage into Windermere.
Aficionados of ‘Brief Encounter’ will be disturbed to learn that Clegg’s Directory does not list a branch of Boots Booklovers Library in Carnforth.
As I say, I do not have volumes of letters, biography or autobiography to hand so I do not know if there is anything to support these conjectures, or indeed whether they are old hat.
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