In real life it was Arthur Ransome’s sister Joyce who had a green parrot. She sent him its feathers to make fishing flies and possibly to clean his pipe. Do all children dream of owning a parrot, or was it just me?
Do all children dream of living on a houseboat? Going out across Derwentwater for tea in Captain Flint’s cabin was fun. He had laid on such a lavish one. It was a pirate feast.
We hadn’t actually seen Captain Flint walk the plank at this point but, together as Swallows and Amazons, we could all imagine it.
Suzanna described the afternoon quite differently. Her focus was on the food.
The green parrot had very sharp claws. If my eye’s are watering in this scene it is because they were digging into my shoulder. A piece of foam rubber was slipped under my blouse but it didn’t do much good. He really wasn’t a very tame parrot and had to have a chain around one leg in case he took flight. I was really rather worried he would nip me but ploughed on with the dialogue. If this is convincing it was because I needed to get through my close-ups before I lost part of an ear.
Despite this concern, I did rather want a parrot of my own. A tame one. Not long after we finished filming, my parents came across a green parrot called Chico who was remarkably friendly, a sweet bird who soon came to live with us. He chatted away in Spanish and was good company. I went everywhere with him – even taking him out rowing on the lake.
I am often asked if Captain Flint’s parrot really did speak. He could certainly talk. I remember something along the lines of , ‘Who’s a pretty boy, then?’ delivered in a broad Lancashire accent.
‘Pieces of Eight’ was beyond his natural vocabulary and was dubbed on later along with music from the accordion. Ronald Fraser couldn’t really play this. Having said that, all music from instruments played on screen is added later so that the sound runs seamlessly no matter how the editor cuts the shots together. The accordion had been muted by Bobby Props. The shanty was appropriate: What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor.
Did the wishful lines given to Titty by the screen-writer David Wood cast light on my future? ‘I’d like to go to Africa and see forests full of parrots.’
Rather unusually for an English child of the 1970’s I had already been to Africa. My family grew coffee on a farm between Arusha and Moshi in Northern Tanzania where I had been the summer before we made Swallows and Amazons.
I did not see forests of green parrots there, although, much later in my life I often saw Meyer’s parrots in the palm trees above our camp in Botswana. They would clatter about looking for wild dates while I sat painting maps I had made, just as Titty would have done. You can read about my travels in ‘Ride the Wings of Morning’, available online as an ebook and rather a large paperback.
You can read more about our adventures filming on Derwentwater here:
Sophie Neville 
Thank you again. My wife has an Amazon parrot that is green. She saved for months to buy him from the pet shop & his tiny cage. He’s quite old now but the bond between them is lovely to watch.
I’ve written about our parrots on ~
http://funnily-enough.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/parrots-i-have-known.html
I don’t believe Arthur Ransome ever had a parrot. He was into rats and mice and in later life, cats. However his sister Joyce did have a parrot and she did send him feathers, not for pipe cleaners but for fishing flies, He was a gentle man and sent to say not to pull out the feathers but to wait for the moult.
Do you know the origin of Jibber? Did Roger Altounyan have a monkey?
How wonderful, to film with a parrot! What a great, if apparently temperamental, character!
It would never be risked today! Apart from anything else, I was allergic to feathers.
You did well not to have been sneezing all over the set, then!
Mum had me on hay fever tablets.
They say, don’t they, never work with children or animals? With you bunch and a parrot, my goodness what might have happened! The scene looks entirely natural though, and the magic of editing makes it truly come to life with the parrot speaking and you all looking and acting the part. Truly wonderful stuff from an earlier age of film making that as you say, wouldn’t even be contemplated today!
The phrase ‘never work with children or animals’ was apparently coined because they can be so charming that you’ll be upstaged. Obviously a lot can go wrong. The parrot was unpredictable and could have been vicious. It was tame, but a one-woman bird and I was not the one-woman. Its amazing that it didn’t fly off. do you think they’d put one on a child’s shoulder these days?