Thirty years ago this month – on Easter Saturday 1996 (April 5th that year, as it happens) a small item in Signals, the Arthur Ransome Society’s newsletter, caught the eye of one of its members. “Nancy Blackett is for sale, again” it read. There was a price mentioned, £30,000, and a telephone number. He picked up the phone…
And that was the beginning of the Nancy Blackett Trust. In just over a year, more than 300 society members had raised the asking price (reduced by the sympathetic owner to £25,000) a registered charity had been set up and Nancy Blackett was handed over to her new owners at the the first Sail Ipswich maritime festival.
Nancy Blackett herself is celebrating her 95th birthday – she was built in 1931 at Hillyards in Littlehampton, and first registered (as Spindrift) on 30th March 1931. Arthur Ransome bought her 90 years ago last October, changed her name (a second time, by then she was called Electron) to Nancy Blackett and began to think of building a book around her. By the following January the plot of that book was forming in his mind.
Ninety years ago this summer, on 1st June, to research the crossing for the book, he set out from Shotley with a single (and rather useless) crewman to sail Nancy Blackett to Holland, arriving in Vlissingen (then ‘Flushing’ to British sailors) soon after noon on 2nd June. A year later, We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea was published.
Header: Nancy Blackett on the River Orwell, from Country Life magazine, July 2017.
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