Arthur Ransome, 6 Ash Grove

He's certainly not under-appreciated, with extensive sites such as All Things Ransome and the Arthur Ransome Society.

There's a blue plaque on the house he was born in at 6 Ash Grove (Google map), but it is rubbish. 'Arthur Ransome author of Swallows and Amazons was born here'.



I mean, if someone's so obscure that you have to tell people why they're notable it's bad enough, but to tie it to a single deed means that they're probably not worth commemoration.

And with Ransome, while the book is the main thing he's known for, it was actually written in semi-retirement after a much more interesting early life around some of the world's major radical politics.

He was taught to ice skate when he was 12 on a frozen lake up at the Ford's house by none other than the great anarchist thinker Peter Kropotkin!

In his early 30s he went to Russia to write a travel book but ended up as a witness to the Revolution. He covered it for the British press, writing from a pro-revolutionary perspective.

When the October revolution came he approved of that too. Within a few months he'd interviewed all the senior figures, was living with Trotsky's deputy and was going out with the woman who would become his wife, Trotsky's private secretary Evgenia Shelepina.

In August 1918 he was recruited as an MI6 agent. Yet he still smuggled out a load of jewels to fund communist causes when he left Russia. Double agent? Or just a sort of sneaky journalist diplomat? Either way, it's a hell of a lot more exciting, intriguing and relevant than childrens books.

In the introduction to his book Russia in 1919 he asserted

I got, I think I may say, as near as any foreigner who was not a Communist could get to what was going on.

He was at Kropotkin's funeral in Moscow in 1920. He finally returned, with Evgenia, to England in 1924, and after settling in the Lake District he wrote the children's books that made his name.

In recent years, though, as official documents have been released or leaked, this earlier, wilder, more political aspect of him has come to the fore. It appears the main guy doing the work is Roland Chambers who wrote this article for the Guardian in 2005, and his proper book on all this stuff, The Last Englishman: The Double Life of Arthur Ransome, has just been published.

The Statues of Woodhouse Moor

Four statues stand on Woodhouse Moor, but none of them were originally placed there.

At the corner of Moorland Road and Clarendon Road stands the Duke of Wellington, always with his boots creatively repainted, and as I write he's currently sporting a Homer Simpson mask.



Homer with a poncey hat and that puffed up pomposity of 18th century aristocrats. Great.

At the opposite side of the park by Hyde Park Corner stands Robert Peel. He too has been reinterpreted. For the Euro 2004 football tournament he got England flag facepaint, and after the death of John Peel the inscription 'Peel 1852' was painted to say 'John Peel 1939-2004'.



The miserablist council scrubbed it off, but it returned. By my count, it's been redone eleven times. And if you stood there and asked the citizens of the creative haven of Leeds 6 who they'd prefer - the inventor of the Conservative party and the police, or the man who brought us Jimi Henrix and The Clash - I know what answer you'd get.

Disrespect of statues is nothing new, nor is it limited to Woodhouse Moor. There was a great hoo-hah about disrespect when a Mayday demo gave London's Churchill statue a grass mohican, but that was anomalous. It goes off all the time without comment. It's seems like more common to see Cardiff's statue of NHS godfather Aneurin Bevan with a traffic cone on his head than without.

And frankly, I suspect that we subconsciously know that the people we erect statues to - largely our overwealthy and brutal ancestors - need taking down a peg or two, so we have them publicly shat on in effigy by pigeons.

But anyway, collectively the four statues of Woodhouse Moor spell out another form of disrespect. Wellington, Victoria and Robert Peel originally stood in Victoria Square outside the town hall, but were moved in 1937 to make way for a car park.

The fourth is the only native of the city, the Victorian industrialist and mayor of Leeds Henry Marsden.



His statue gives the name to Monument Moor, the area of Woodhouse Moor on the other side of the A660 from Victoria.

It was called Swing Moor prior to Marsden's arrival in 1952, when he was moved there from the city centre road junction of Merrion Street and Albion Street as he was deemed to be a hindrance to the increasing amount of motor traffic.

So, we used to venerate these folks in the city centre, but we've sidelined them to a peripheral park in order to make way for increased traffic. Collectively, then, they stand as a monument to the motor car.

Their moving is not a sign that we've stopped venerating things, just a physical acknowledgement of the change in what we worship.

More Mary Gawthorpe pictures

When I said that the WSPU postcards showed the second picture I'd found of Mary, I was unwittingly wrong.

For years I've had a postcard on my wall of Christabel Pankhurst in Manchester, with posters advertising her meeting at the Free Trade Hall, the scene of the 1905 arrest that got her imprisoned and kicked the suffrage movement up a gear.

In January 1909 when this was taken, Mary Gawthorpe was well established as the WSPU's organiser, running their Manchester office.

That's Christabel apparently holding a box file on her head by means of bedclothes. Who's that stood to the left of her?



Let's have a closer look.



And here's another one I've found, clearly taken the same day.