A boat that was built for Swallows and Amazons author Arthur Ransome is being given new life in Suffolk, as Catherine Larner explains.

Climbing aboard the ‘Peter Duck’, Julia Jones can hardly contain her delight at seeing the extensive renovations underway on her much-loved family boat.
‘PD’, as Julia calls the 28ft wooden sailing ketch, is the source of many childhood memories as well as being a piece of literary history, and encompasses Julia’s dual passions in life – books and boats. By making the necessary repairs, she hopes to get ‘PD’ in shape for the next generation.
While there’s plenty of work to do to bring ‘Peter Duck’ back to her former glory, here on the deck, 12ft above the ground in a Woodbridge boatyard, Julia is eager to point out the features which she remembers so well from the many outings on the River Deben in Suffolk.
There’s a tiny stove in the cockpit on which to cook sausages and boil water for tea, a bookshelf which has a lockable lip to prevent books falling out in choppy water, and looking down to the left there is a quarter berth where the young Julia used to hide away if things on board got a bit fraught. In this child-sized cabin she would lose herself in numerous readings of ‘Swallows and Amazons’, and later learned that this was where Arthur Ransome kept his typewriter.

Great British Life: Peter Duck is named after one of the characters in the Swallows and Amazons series of books by the boat's original owner, Arthur Ransome.Peter Duck is named after one of the characters in the Swallows and Amazons series of books by the boat's original owner, Arthur Ransome. (Image: Archant)


Peter Duck was designed and built especially for the famous children’s writer in 1946, and was named after a character in the third book of his timeless, bestselling series of sailing adventures.
But the boat was bought by Julia’s parents in 1957, when she was not quite three, and remained a vital part of family life until her father’s sudden death in 1983.
“Mum tried to keep ‘PD’ on after Dad died,” says Julia, “but we were all at that unhelpful phase when we were doing our own thing with families and careers.
“There was one sad day when Mum had got ‘PD’ kitted out and took her down the river to the mooring at Waldringfield. And she went down below, but there was nobody there. She said she couldn’t bear it. Peter Duck was such a family possession, she thought when she picked up the mooring and went down to the cabin, we’d all be there, and we weren’t.”

WRITERS ON THE WATER
The boat was sold first to a Suffolk bookseller and then to Greg and Ann Palmer, both writers, who sailed around Britain, and took Peter Duck to Russia.
“Peter Duck is a very literary boat,” says Julia. “You can’t have Peter Duck if you’re not literary.”
Years later, a chance conversation led to Julia being able to buy the boat back using the money from a biography of Karl Marx written by her partner, Francis Wheen.
Julia was now a bookseller, a biographer of crime writer Margery Allingham, and had followed her father in writing regularly for a monthly yachting magazine. But getting ‘PD’ back gave her the confidence to write fiction, she says, and she published her own series of sailing adventures for children, called ‘Strong Winds’.

UNTOLD STORIES
It was when Julia was looking for the logbook for ‘PD’ a few years ago that she discovered another astonishing story. In an old suitcase full of papers and diaries that had been sitting in her attic, she found wartime papers and diaries revealing an untold period in her father’s life and a little known contribution made by yachtsmen who volunteered in the Second World War.
“Dad had started writing in 1939,” she says of her father, George Jones. “It was around his 21st birthday, and he could see the war coming. He wasn’t belligerent or full of confidence, but in a few months he had volunteered for the RNVSR.”
He became one of only around 2,000 amateur sailors who joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Supplementary Reserve. This was initially a list of ‘gentlemen who are interested in yachting or similar pursuits’, aged between 18 and 39 who would be prepared to serve as naval officers in case of ‘Emergency’.
“All that they went through,” says Julia. “They were so young. I remember that Dad had tried to show us his papers and we just weren’t interested. We were teenagers and we thought if you weren’t in the Dambusters or escaping from Stalag Luft III it didn’t count.”
Many men who joined the RNVSR did make a significant contribution, though, applying the skills and knowledge they had acquired from what had been until that point a hobby, a leisure pursuit.
“It was rather wonderful. Some were like my Dad and just a clerk from Birmingham, but others were lawyers, publishers, teachers, businessmen, and because they loved sailing at weekends, they took a deep breath and signed up for this,” she says.
Julia realised that she’d actually met a number of these men as they’d been friends of the family and it made reading of their experiences very real. There were others, too, who were familiar through their achievements after the war – the ornithologist Sir Peter Scott, novelists Nicholas Monsarrat and Nevil Shute, and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy were among those who volunteered. And James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming worked for the Naval Intelligence Department, recruiting several RNVSR members as ‘Intelligence Commandos’.
Many, though, were involved in minesweeping, a few took command of destroyers or submarines, others patrolled in fast gunboats, and some were involved in surveillance, intelligence and sabotage.
“Understanding navigation and boat handling might not be the same as a 100-foot minesweeper but they had basic skills,” says Julia.

Great British Life: Uncommon Courage, The Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II, by Julia Jones,Uncommon Courage, The Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II, by Julia Jones, (Image: Julia Jones)

A BOOK THAT HAD TO BE WRITTEN
Although she hasn’t been able to trace all their number, Julia has looked through naval records, visited cemeteries, and read novels, memoirs and diaries written at the time to put together a story of the war through the lives of key figures in this organisation. The resulting book, called ‘Uncommon Courage’ was very much her lockdown project, she says.
“I felt so emotional about it. I suddenly sat up in bed one morning and said ‘This is the book that I have to write’. I know about sailing and I remember some of the people who were in the RNVSR.
“I thought finding those papers was a gift.”
She has subsequently started to publish a series of reprints of memoirs of Yachtsmen Volunteers and hopes to encourage other sons and daughters of members of the RNVSR to share the stories of their parents.
“We feel that we’ve ignored it for too much of our lives. Now that we’re older in age ourselves, we look back, think about all they did and feel great pride.”

‘Uncommon Courage: the Yachtsmen Volunteers of World War II’ by Julia Jones is published by Adlard Coles, priced £20.