Whatever the truth, such exotic possibilities in Ransome’s background will have surprised many a reader of Swallows and Amazons. More prosaically, perhaps, some others may be surprised to learn of Ransome’s background as an angler. Ransome was not only a passionate angler but wrote extensively about his sport. He became one of the finest angling correspondents to write for a national newspaper in the 20th century.
Though many aspects of Ransome’s life have been extensively chronicled, Ransome’s work as an angling correspondent has been as submerged from view of late as split-shot beneath a float.
Fishing and fishermen stimulated some of Ransome’s best writing and led to one of the best collections of essays in a sporting literature that goes back to 1496. It led to a second collection of angling pieces and to a fine exploration of Ransome as both writer and angler by Jeremy Swift – Arthur Ransome on Fishing – published in 1994.
Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884, the son of an angling professor of history who was himself the son of an angling father. Early family holidays were spent near Coniston, in the Lake District, walking, boating and learning to fish – experiences that were later to be deeply mined for his children’s books and which, between his travels, constantly drew him back.
A somewhat chequered education that took in an unhappy spell at Rugby, eventually led to a place at Yorkshire College – later Leeds University – where Ransome surprisingly began to read science before dropping out. He headed for the bright lights of Chelsea, having determined to become a writer and threw himself into it with huge energy. By the time he had reached his mid-20s he had a string of books behind him – including a critical study of Edgar Allan Poe – and had married for the first time.
This marriage, to Ivy Walker, of Bournemouth, was a disaster and Ransome was soon looking for an escape. From 1913 on, Ransome spent much of his time in Russia, writing the kinds of insider reports for the Daily News and the Observer that caused the security services to take an interest, dallying with Evgenia – and fishing wherever and whenever he could. He returned to England with Evgenia in 1925 and settled in the Lake District. The same year he began an angling column for the then Manchester Guardian.
Between August that year and September 1929, Ransome produced 150 pieces, most of them as polished as gemstones. He wrote on people and places, tackle and trout, wet flies and the weather. He wrote on ‘Bulls and Kindred Phenomena’, on ‘Talking to the Fish’, on ‘Failing to Catch Tench’ and on scores of other subjects besides. He wrote about them all with knowledge and insight and warmth and wry humour. He crafted every piece in a style that engaged the non-angling reader as well as the smitten.
Fifty of the best pieces, plus a translation of angling passages from Sergei Aksakov, the great chronicler of Russian life, appeared in Rod and Line (1929) – a book which Sir Michael Hordern, another keen angler, brought memorably to life for television.
The opening sentence of the first piece in Rod and Line, is a corker: ‘The pleasures of fishing are chiefly to be found in rivers, lakes and tackle shops and, of the three, the last are least affected by the weather.’
Among several later penetrating essays is one on the theme that angling is ‘a frank resumption of Palaeolithic life without the spur of Palaeolithic hunger’. In that piece, as often elsewhere, Ransome goes to the heart of it: ‘Escaping to the Stone Age by the morning train from Manchester, the fisherman engages in an activity that allows him to shed the centuries as a dog shakes off water and to recapture not his own youth merely, but the youth of the world’.
Ransome’s second collection, which included the scripts of some of his radio broadcasts, was published as Mainly About Fishing (1959). A portrait of Ransome tying one of the flies shown on the cover of this book, his favourite Elver Fly, still hangs in his old club, the Garrick, in London.
Ransome finally gave up his angling column when he decided that the pressure of producing it weekly was beginning to take the edge off his own fishing. He gave his editor three months’ notice of his intention to quit in March, 1929. By May he was well into Swallows and Amazons.
Ransome fished – and on and off wrote about fishing – late into a life that was increasingly plagued by ill-health. He caught his last fish, a salmon, in 1960. By 1963 he was confined to a wheelchair. He died in 1967, aged 83. Among the papers he left were parts of a new novel. It had, like so much else in this public man’s private world, an underlying angling theme.
OOFFICIALLY it is the salmon and the sea trout that are the ‘migratory fish’ – the fish that begin their lives in rivers and that go to sea before coming back, in turn, to spawn. The rest – eels excepted – are the ‘non-migratory’ species: the stay-at-homes and the moochers-about; the sidlers from this side of the river to that; the fish that limit their forays to a trip to the shallows downstream from time to time, or just occasionally to the deeps around the bend.
That, anyway, is the official view and, as it happens, the view of many anglers. The reality, though, is more complex – and surprising.
BIOLOGISTS have known for years that coarse fish, for all their stick-around reputations, are given to travelling astonishing distances – often at astonishing speeds. It is just that somehow the results of their researches rarely reach the riverbank and even long-established facts will come as news to most on it.
Like, for example, the fact that barbel can range tens of kilometres upstream and downstream in a single season. Like, for example, the fact that bream can leave their daytime swim at dusk, roam several kilometres during the night – and be back where they started off by next morning, leaving the local anglers no wiser.
Research into behaviour like this is highlighted from time to time at fisheries management conferences and when biologists get together, but not on many other occasions. In fact, an Aquatic Animal Research Group at Durham University has been studying fish movements for years. Scientists there have tagged and tracked barbel, chub, dace, bream, roach and a range of other species on the Nidd, the Ouse and the Derwent in Yorkshire, and on other rivers and lakes further south.
Much of this work has been undertaken in an attempt to understand the effects on river life of man-made interventions – from the building of weirs and fish passes to flood prevention works and significant water abstraction. It is the insights into fish behaviour coming out of it all that will fascinate anglers most.
Barbel have been tagged and tracked five and even ten kilometres upstream and down again in a single season, with individual fish undertaking round-trips of 60 kilometres to find suitable spawning gravels. Chub heading upstream for places to spawn have been found to make repeated attempts to use fish passes built for sea trout and salmon – one memorable fish on the Derwent entering a pass seven times in seven nights before finally giving up.
A study of bream on the River Trent revealed that individual shoals covered beats of up to six kilometres long in the course of a season. Within a shoal, different fish would behave differently as dusk approached. Some would leave the ‘home’ reach occupied during the day and move several hundred metres upstream and down in the course of a night. Others would range three and even four kilometres afield and still be back before morning. The extent to which a given reach meets the needs of the fish in it is likely to dictate when, how far and how often fish will travel.
Studies have thrown up other fascinating insights – like the disadvantage of being released into the wild after being bred in captivity. Stocked coarse fish, it seems, can travel at the wrong times. Whereas native fish lie doggo while the sun is up and travel under the cover of darkness, farm-bred fish will shift location in broad daylight.
‘Presumably there is an advantage in native fish moving at night – they may be less susceptible then to predation by birds, pike and otters’, one of the study team has suggested. ‘The movements of