“Swallow is coming up for auction,” my father said, sending me the details of a clinker-built sailing dinghy stored at Twickenham. It was the Spring of 2010. I rushed into our damp computer room, took one look at the online photographs and wept. The letters WK were carved into her transom.

There was the 12ft, all-purpose, run-around vessel built by William King of Burnham-on-Crouch that had been purchased in 1973 to feature as Swallow in the original feature film of Arthur Ransome’s classic novel Swallows and Amazons. She looked a bit dried out, but remained an icon of British cinema.

I knew the little ship intimately. All those years ago, I’d played the part of Able-seaman Titty, sailing across Coniston Water wearing nothing but a thin cotton dress and thick navy-blue elasticated gym knickers. I was the one who stitched Swallow’s flag. She became part of my life back then and I longed to see her once again.

I’d grown up reading the books and could identify with Titty’s dream of emulating Robinson Crusoe cast away on a desert island. She became the heroine of Ransome’s classic adventure story when she grabbed a chance to capture the Amazon.

This enabled the Swallows to win the war set to determine ‘who should be the flag-ship’. In mooring her prize overnight near Cormorant Island, Titty witnessed Captain Flint’s stolen treasure chest being buried, and was eventually able to rescue it. She was rewarded with the gift of a green parrot.

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“Did you know how to sail before playing Titty in Swallows and Amazons?” people often ask. The truth was that I had crewed for my father in a similar dinghy and felt confident in boats but lacked experience at the helm.

Luckily, I’d grown up living by a lake in the Cotswolds where we had a Thames skiff, which I could handle. This proved important as Titty does quite a bit of rowing in the film.

She and Roger become galley-slaves rowing back from the charcoal burners, they row out to Cormorant Island and she takes the Amazon out of Secret Harbour in rather a hurry.

This I did alone, in one take, later rowing some distance from Peel Island with the lighting cameraman and his 35mm Panavision camera on board. No one had thought about the implications of this when we first tried out the two boats on Windermere but, being aged 12, I was agile and just about coped.

Ransome’s Swallow

Arthur Ransome described Swallow as being 13ft-long with a keel, rather than a centreboard. In his illustrations she is painted white, a common way of protecting wood in the 1930s.

I’m pretty sure that Richard Pilbrow, the producer of the movie, bought the dinghy we used when we were in Burnham-on-Crouch to audition for the parts in March 1973. She was varnished but had, or was given, the red-brown balanced lug-sail as described in the books.

Simon West who, aged only 11, played Captain John, was a capable sailor with an understanding of the wind that enabled him to cope with gusty Lakeland conditions. Swallow had no buoyancy.

As the book was written in 1929, we did not wear lifejackets. In the scenes when we first sail to the island she was laden with camping gear, including heavy canvas tents, the lighthouse tree lantern and a shallow basket of kitchen utensils, which I shifted every time we went about.

My father was an experienced sailor, used to racing yachts, having frequently crossed the Solent in his own clinker-built dinghy as a boy. He was looking after us children when he agreed to appear in costume as a ‘native’ aboard the MV Tern on Windermere, which bears down on Swallow in the story.

Dad watched from the deck of the Tern, terrified, as we sailed towards her. The Victorian steamer only had a notch throttle and an inexperienced skipper. Dad realised that Claude Whatham, the film director, had not anticipated the fact that we would lose our wind in the lee of the passenger ferry.

We only just went about in time, being pushed away from the larger vessel by the bow wave. Watch the film and you can see how very close we got. I was about to reach out and feebly fend off. Our safety boat was some distance away and Windermere is a deep, deep lake.

Stern words

My father spoke sternly to the producer that afternoon, pointing out that we could have all gone down. Sten Grendon, who played the Boy Roger, was only eight and could hardly swim. I could have become entangled in the camping gear.

Dad tested the old BOAC life vests we wore to travel out to film locations. They failed to inflate. He nearly took me home. By the time Virginia McKenna arrived at Bank Ground Farm to film the scene when the Swallows first leave for their voyage to the island, a frogman was lurking in the water, just out of shot, to rescue anyone in peril.

Another tricky scene to film was when John, Susan and Roger set off from the Landing Place on Wild Cat Island leaving Titty to guard the camp and light lanterns while they hoped to capture the Amazon and sail home after dark.

I had to push them off, grabbing the telescope at the last minute. Since Swallow’s mast was liable to catch in tree branches, I needed to wade out and give her a hard, one-handed shove.

It was a windy day. I slipped on a rock and fell up to my waist in water. Knowing it would be difficult to set up the shot a second time, I struggled to my feet and waved them off, dripping wet.

By this time, John had the mainsheet out as far as the knot and stood to grab the boom to avoid a Chinese gybe as Swallow was hit by a fresh gust of wind as she cleared the headland at the northern end of the island and sped northwards toward Coniston Old Man.

When I helped Virginia McKenna, playing Man Friday, leave in her ‘native war canoe’, (rather a heavy Lakeland rowing boat), I had no idea that she had a real train to catch.

While I was attempting to sleep up a tree, ‘for fear of ravenous beasts,’ Virginia and her husband Bill Travers were being driven to Grange Station.

Our unit driver was a 19-year-old lad from Ambleside. Forty years later he wrote from the USA admitting that he was so intrigued by Bill and Virginia’s stories about filming Born Free with George Adamson and his lions, that he drove increasingly slowly. They ended up having to run down the platform to catch their train.

The saucepan

Making the movie on location in the Lake District was pretty challenging. The weather was so unpredictable. Swallow had to be moved to four different lakes and a lily pond.

We shot the fishing scenes on Elterwater and those featuring Captain Flint’s houseboat on Derwentwater, whilst Octopus Lagoon was filmed on private property near Skelwith Fold.

Very few women worked on film crews back in the 1970s. There was a hushed reverence when Virginia McKenna was on set but otherwise Cockney rhyming slang reverberated around Cumbria. Far from being treated as a film star I was known as a saucepan (Saucepan lid: kid).

I got my revenge when the camera crew piled into a support boat for a full day’s filming. I looked down from the jetty, asked whether they’d gone to the Portaloo, and watched as they all filed out again.

There were no loos at all on Peel Island. How they got electricity across the water to light the Robinson Crusoe scenes remains a mystery. Having spent nearly seven weeks in the Lake District, the film was post-synced at Elstree studios where David Niven was making a horror movie. We arrived to sing out our lines to find Swallow there.

She had been set in a tank so that the sounds of sailing could be captured. You tend to take good sound quality for granted as a viewer but it draws you into the experience.

I last saw Swallow looking dejected outside the studio and was worried about what had become of her. Although she was offered to someone who had advised on the film, she was kept safely at Turk’s prop hire company on the Thames at Twickenham. Richard Pilbrow was hoping to make another film in the series.

A new lease of life

When Mike Turk retired, many boats that had featured in movies came up for auction. I knew Swallow would be costly and in need of renovation. When fans of the film, who were also members of The Arthur Ransome Society, contacted me I knew that I needed to club together with them.

In the end, 83 of us hastily formed a group called SailRansome and bid for Swallow, spending approximately £5,700. With sponsorship from Universal Varnish, she was expertly restored by Patterson Boatworks of Windermere and displayed at the London Boat Show in January 2011.

I invited along Nick Barton of Harbour Pictures, the film producer well-known for making Kinky Boots and Calendar Girls for Disney.

He was gaining the rights to make a new movie in partnership with BBC Film. I was rather hoping we’d be able to re-coup some of our costs by renting Swallow back to him.

The 2016 film

Nick came up to Coniston Water to watch me re-launch Swallow in April 2011, sloshing brandy wine over the old lady’s bows in true Ransome style.

I helped him to raise finance for the new Swallows and Amazons film, which was made in the cold wet summer of 2015 and released in 2016, starring Kelly Macdonald as Mrs Walker, Rafe Spall as Captain Flint and Andrew Scott as a Russian spy.

Nick decided to use 14ft RNSA dinghies for Swallow and Amazons as they were safe and satisfied the film insurance company who demanded that two identical dinghies were used for Swallow.

This time, Virginia McKenna’s son, Dan Travers, was put in charge of marine safety and the actors were able to wear thin wetsuits under their clothing.

Joining SailRansome was pivotal for me. I liked the idea of corporate boat ownership as it is so practical. The yacht Nancy Blackett, portrayed as the Goblin in We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea, a 28ft Hillyard that Arthur Ransome bought with ‘Spanish gold’, as he called his royalties from Swallows and Amazons, is now owned by the 400 or so members of the Nancy Blackett Trust.

They asked me to give a couple of talks on how we made the old film, and the BBC serialisation of Coot Club and The Big Six, which I worked on behind the camera in 1983.

The Arthur Ransome Society persuaded me to give a series of talks and present their DVD Encountering the Ransomes. I ended up speaking at a number of yacht clubs, literary festivals, on BBC Radio and even ITV’s News at Ten, promoting the societies and urging people to help get young people out on the water.

I took Swallow out on Ullswater, the Orwell and River Alde, remembering how difficult she is to turn, but enjoying her speed.

She was featured on BBC Antiques Roadshow when I brought movie memorabilia up to Windermere Jetty museum for two episodes transmitted in 2021 and still available on BBC iPlayer.

The art dealer and transatlantic sailor, Rupert Maas, valued her at substantially more than her 2011 auction price. She has become a national treasure.

Our EMI/Theatre Projects film entitled Swallows & Amazons was first screened in cinemas on 4th April 1974, nearly 50 years ago, and yet it hasn’t dated. It was last broadcast on British television in June 2022 and is popular in numerous countries.

Many of the original film fans are now professional sailors who enjoy showing the DVD to their children while reliving their own youth.

Telling my story

Urged by many to recount my full story, I launched The Secrets of Filming Swallows & Amazons as an illustrated ebook with links to behind-the-scenes cine footage taken by my parents.

A little bit of film history, it sells on Kindle, Smashwords and Apple Books for about £2.99. Being partly about acting, it can be found under the category ‘Stage & Theatre’ in the Amazon charts, where it hit Number One.

You can read more about the adventures we had in The Making of Swallows and Amazons (1974) by Sophie Neville, published by the Lutterworth Press with colour plates. It’s available from libraries, online retailers and to order from all good bookshops. We’re bringing out an audio version soon.

Here is an edited review kindly left on my Amazon page: ‘I’ve just finished reading The Secrets of Filming Swallows & Amazons, and what an enjoyable experience it’s been!

‘Accounts of the trials and tribulations of the film crew remind us that putting even a few minutes on film involves intense effort from dozens of people we never see. Add to that her final section on “Where are they now?” and you have the complete picture of a remarkable summer and its legacy.

‘Other highlights are Sophie’s stories of the film’s adult stars, the calmly professional Virginia McKenna and the rather naughty Ronald Fraser, who by all accounts preferred the local hostelry to walking the plank into the icy depths of Derwentwater. But then, come to think of it, who wouldn’t?’

Why not grab a chance to sail Swallow yourself, in the company of an experienced skipper? sailransome.org is looking for volunteers to help care for her, and she’s in need of revarnishing!

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