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.