Dutch 14-year-old Laura Dekker sets sail on Wednesday 4th August on the shakedown passage to Portugal for the start of her planned solo round-the-world voyage. A modern Nancy Blackett? Perhaps so – she certainly shows the same admirable spirit and determination, and the link with Ransome's characters has not been lost on Peter Hitchens, who […]
The most dramatic episode in Nancy Blackett’s Round the Island adventure actually occurred during the preceding night, when our mooring – on a buoy out in the Cowes Roads – started to drag. The wind had got up, it was raining hard (in contrast to the weather on both the day before and the day […]
The highlight of the Nancy Blackett Trust’s AGM last Saturday was the first amateur performance from the newly-published playscript of Arthur Ransome’s “We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea.” The play, by dramatist Nick Wood, was created for the Ipswich-based Eastern Angles company and toured locally to general acclaim a couple of years ago. The […]
Nancy Blackett is registered to enter the Round the Island Race next Saturday (19th June), and we’re planning to use our participation to seek sponsorship for the good causes closest to our heart – helping young people to discover and enjoy sailing. To make sponsorship as easy as possible for our supporters, the Nancy Blackett […]
Roger Wardale’s book on Arthur Ransome’s boats, originally published in 1991 as “Nancy Blackett – Under Sail with Arthur Ransome” and indirectly responsible for inspiring the Nancy Blackett Trust, has been out of print for over a decade, with used copies advertised on the internet for more than £70. Now it has been republished, under […]
Nancy Blackett is back in the water, beautifully repainted and varnished and ready for the new season. Her fitting-out was completed in record time on Saturday, despite one volunteer being stranded in Cairo and another in Turkey by the flights shutdown. Thanks to everyone who turned up, with special mentions for the brass-polishing crew, Debbie, […]
The campaign to buy the film Swallow at the Turks boat auction has succeeded. After a tense 40-minute online bid battle (the auction site runs an ‘overbidding’ time extension scheme) the group supported by the Nancy Blackett Trust saw the sale close on their final bid, made possible by the donations that had flooded in from all […]
The bid to buy Swallow, the dinghy used in the 1974 film of “Swallows and Amazons”, has gained the support of the Nancy Blackett Trust. The Trust is accepting donations to the bid, and because the aims of the bid group, set up by Magnus Smith and Rob Boden, are broadly consistent with the Trust’s […]
Swallow, the film boat, up for auction is in Turk’s Boatyard in Chatham. I visited it this week to view some of the boats in the forthcoming auction, and, of course, quickly located Swallow. What follows is not intended to be an expert survey and shouldn’t be relied upon as such; just on-the-day observations to […]
The sailing dinghy featured as Swallow in the 1974 film of “Swallows and Amazons” is currently attracting a lot of attention as one of the lots on offer in an online auction. A group of Arthur Ransome fans, including Arthur Ransome Society and Nancy Blackett Trust members is planning to bid for it and trying […]
We've just added a new portfolio of photos showing Nancy Blackett and taken by crewmember Magnus Smith. Taken last summer at Nancy's home in Woolverstone Marina they include close-ups showing Nancy in vivid detail. Please visit the album and slideshow.
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