A new art project is exploring how the characters in the English children’s classic were modelled on a family from Aleppo
Alison Flood
Sat 9 Mar 2019 06.00 GMT
Mavis, Taqui and Susie Altounyan, three of the five children who inspired Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, boating with a nanny in the early 1920s. Photograph: Guzelian
Arthur Ransome’s fictional Walker children – John, Susan, Titty and Roger – are quintessentially English, enjoying summers sailing in the Lake District with bread and marmalade for tea, and peppering their talk with regular “jolly good”s. But the Anglo-Armenian family who inspired the Walkers deserves to be more widely acknowledged, says artist Karen Babayan, who hopes to re-establish the connection through an Arts Council England-funded project spanning stories, dance, theatre and art.
The Altounyan children – Taqui, Susan, Mavis (known to her family as Titty), Roger and Brigit – lived in Aleppo, Syria. Their father, the half-Armenian, half-Irish Ernest Altounyan, had known Ransome since their school days at Rugby, and Ransome had unsuccessfully proposed to their mother, Dora Collingwood. Altounyan married Collingwood in 1915, and their friendship with Ransome was renewed when the Altounyan family took a summer trip to the Lake District in 1928. Ernest and Ransome bought two boats, named Swallow and Mavis, for the children and the group spent months sailing, fishing and walking together.
Ransome published Swallows and Amazons two years later, initially including a dedication in the novel, “To the six for whom it was written in exchange for a pair of slippers”, which referred to the Turkish slippers the Altounyans gave him when they left. Ernest wrote to him: “I especially marvel at your extraordinary accurate characterisation of the kids.”
But Ransome removed the dedication from later editions. The Independent’s obituary of the youngest Altounyan, Brigit, who was president of the Arthur Ransome Society for years and died at 73 in 1999, speculated that “as the Swallows and Amazons stories became increasingly famous, Ransome, incited perhaps by [his wife] Evgenia, became over-protective about the originality of his characters”.
Ransome’s autobiography described Ernest as merely “Robin Collingwood’s Rugby friend” whose “children had identified themselves (regardless of sex) with my characters”.
Ransome with four of the five Altounyan children and their mother, Dora. Photograph: Arthur Ransome Literary Estate
Now Babayan, an Anglo-Armenian author and artist based in Cumbria, said she wanted “the contribution of the Altounyan family to be more widely acknowledged and celebrated, bringing positive awareness of different cultures in the Lake District”.
“In knowing the identity and ethnicity of the children, I believe young British readers of all cultural backgrounds would feel more connected to and excited by the works of Arthur Ransome,” she said.
Babayan’s book of short stories, Swallows and Armenians, is published on Friday. It draws from correspondence and diaries held in Leeds University library’s special collections to explore the Altounyans’ lives in Coniston and Aleppo. “In a curious way I’m echoing what Arthur Ransome did, but hopefully with an understanding of how displacement and being of a mixed cultural background may affect one’s sense of self, experience and reality,” she writes in an introduction to the book, which is published by Wild Pansy Press. “Art should reflect the concerns of its day and one of the main concerns of our world is the migrant crisis: this is what I am addressing through the perspective of an extraordinary family of artists, writers, poets and doctors, revealing a new seam in the already rich cultural geology of the Lake District.”
Her project also includes an exhibition at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick until 10 April, an Armenian circle dance on the shores of Derwentwater in honour of Ernest, and a showing of family portraits by Dora Altounyan, including one of Titty as a child that Ransome owned for years.
It remains unclear why Ernest and Ransome’s relationship cooled. But digging through the archives at Leeds University library, Babayan came across a letter from Ernest to Ransome, sent after the Ransomes had returned to the UK after a three-month visit to the family in Aleppo in 1932. In his autobiography, Ransome attributes his family’s departure to health problems. But Ernest’s letter reads: “I would only ask you to believe that Dora and I are acting in agreement and that I am not managing her in the least. I notice you also consider that I have been inconsiderate enough to keep her out in the East too long! The truth is that it will take a good deal to persuade her that either we and our children are so out of it as to feel like savages when we land in England … I cannot help thinking … however that the way you refer to their upbringing is that they have been under my influence too long. Why after years of apparent friendship you should suddenly decide that I am such a pernicious and underhand person I can’t think.”
Babayan commented: “Whether it was this disagreement in Aleppo or Ransome’s irritation with Ernest – who enjoyed and boasted of their family’s link to the books – which prompted the author to deny the children’s role in the inspiration for Swallows and Amazons in his autobiography, we will never know.”
Geraint Lewis from the Arthur Ransome Trust said Swallows and Amazons was “surely born in Ransome’s own formative love for Coniston”, but “the Altounyan children played a vital role by being the right inspirational ‘trigger’, in the right place, at the right time”.
“He certainly acknowledged the Altounyans’ importance at the time,” said Lewis, speculating that deterioration between Ransome and Ernest could reflect an element of romantic regret on Ransome’s part about Ernest’s wife Dora.
“Perhaps it would only be natural to look at the children and wonder what might have happened, had she not turned him down?” said Lewis. “Ransome also seems to have become increasingly protective of his fictional characters over time. I suspect this is quite natural for any novelist. While the Altounyans clearly provided significant inspiration for his fictional Swallows, the latter were surely only ever the real children in the first moments of creation.”
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