It was Sunday and a much needed, formal day off for the crew of Swallows and Amazons. It was also a day of rest for the ‘Artistes’ as Claude Whatham, the Director called us. The crew called us ‘Saucepans’. Saucepan lids : kids. It is Cockney rhyming slang. There was a lot of that about in Ambleside that year.
My parents were still in bed, exhausted on that Sunday morning. To keep me busy, Mum had me writing letters to my Headmistress, Sister Ann-Julian and to my Housemistress, Sister Allyne. Amazingly I wrote them.
My father’s idea of a day out in Westmorland was to drive up the Hard Knott Pass taking car rugs, a picnic and his volcano. This is a brilliant item of equipment with which you can boil enough water to make a cup of tea using an old newspaper. I’ve read that Arthur Ransome had one… I think my mother just pulled on her Charlotte Mason College of Education sweatshirt and came too.
The highlight of the day was a trip on the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway, through the National Park to the coast and back. You can still do this today. The historic line was opened in 1875 to ferry iron ore from the mine near Boot to the coast at Ravensglass by steam locomotive. They say that nowadays:
“Four steam locomotives are currently in regular service, ranging from River Irt, the oldest working 15″ gauge locomotive in the world, to Northern Rock, one of the most powerful. The locomotives names, with one obvious exception, are those of the local rivers, the Esk, Mite and Irt, the last mentioned flowing from Wastwater just a few miles away from the railway.”
My father has always loved steam. He’s also rather enjoyed using the self-timer on his new camera.
We were standing on part of the Hard Knott Roman Fort near Boot with the fells behind. Built between AD120 and AD138 at the Eskdale end of the Hard Knott Pass it must have been one of the furthermost outposts of the Roman Empire. It had been studied and excavated by Arthur Ransome’s mentor WG Collingwood, whose novel Thorstein of the Mere is set on Peel Island where we had just spent the week. The fort was known to the Romans as Mediobogdum, which has to be one of the all-time great names. If only the film crew had known.
As children we had grown up watching Frankie Howerd on television when he was dressed in a Roman tunic, assuring us that ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum’. We didn’t know at the time, but the producer of ‘Swallows and Amazons’, Richard Pilbrow, had brought the theatre production from New York to the West End, where it ran for two years.
The hotel I mention was the Kirkstone Foot Hotel, at the top of Windermere, in Ambleside where Richard Pilbrow and the senior members of the film crew were staying. Mum must have left her camera there.
Pandora Doyle, whose father Brian Doyle was handling the publicity for Swallows and Amazons, kept a record of her half-term holiday, marking her room at the Kirkstone Foot (telephone: Ambleside 2232). She wrote about it quite beautifully:
I’m pretty sure the film company used the coach-house block for their production office. The green parrot was once released in the bathroom where it spent a day waiting to be used in a scene, presumably on the houseboat. Pandora pointed out the hole-protector she had added when filing her scrapbook. I’d totally forgotten about such things and yet I must have stuck on hundreds. ‘Ring-binders’ were the thing but I never had red ones.
We didn’t know it, but Arthur Ransome had died on this day, 3rd June in 1967, six years previously. I feel he would have enjoyed our day out.
You can read the full account of making the film here:
Sophie Neville 