Arthur Ransome’s Suffolk
From Visit Suffolk
As VisitEngland celebrates its Year of Literary Heroes in 2017, the Shotley Peninsula in Suffolk will be hosting The Arthur Ransome East Coast Celebration, to commemorate the life of the English author and journalist who moved to the county in 1935.
It’s the 50th anniversary of Ransome’s death this year and coincidentally, is also 80 years since his book We Didn’t Mean to Go To Sea (1937) was published.
Arthur Ransome is best known for his Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books, and it was during the five years he lived in Suffolk that he wrote one of them: We Didn’t Mean to Go To Sea. It’s a story about the adventures of a group of children aboard a small boat called the Goblin, “a little white cutter with red sails” which is said to be inspired by his boat at the time, the Nancy Blackett…