Nancy Blackett, Arthur Ransome’s favourite yacht, is returning to Scarborough this week for the first time in over 25 years, and will be open to visitors during the town’s annual Seafest weekend
Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and Amazons, came to Scarborough in 1937 to be presented with the first Carnegie Medal for Children’s Literature. Nancy Blackett, the yacht that he owned in the 1930s and put into his book We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea as the Goblin, moved to Scarborough in 1965 (five owners later), and was tied up against the town’s East Pier.
She remained there for 23 years, the longest period she’d spent in any single location before the Nancy Blackett Trust bought her in 1997. For most of this period she was beautifully kept-up (and her hull colour became known locally as ‘Nancy Blackett green’), but then her condition began to deteriorate.
She was neglected, and during a storm a car blew off the harbour wall, smashing her cockpit. She sank in the harbour, holing her hull on a spike in its bed, and the sea water swilled in and out of her on every tide. She had become a sad sight, almost a wreck.
Her rescue came in 1988 when Mike Rines, who had grown up in Scarborough, decided she was too pretty to be allowed to die. Mike knew nothing of her association with Arthur Ransome, though oddly enough his home in Suffolk, where he brought her to be restored, was under a mile from the house where Ransome had lived when he owned Nancy Blackett, and where he wrote We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea.
Mike struck a bargain with the then owner, offering him £10,000 less the cost of restoration – he’d been quoted a modest sum by a local firm. In the end, despite Mike doing much of the work himself and getting support from local businesses –free tools, space in a marina to keep her during the work – the restoration cost him £40,000 and he had to sell Nancy Blackett to recoup the cost.
The next owner also had financial problems and within a few years, in 1996, Nancy Blackett was on the market again.
It was then that a group of Arthur Ransome fans decided that Nancy Blackett was too important to risk the vagaries of private ownership, and launched an appeal to raise funds to buy and preserve her. They succeeded, and this led to the formation of the Nancy Blackett Trust, now a registered charity, with the 400-or-so contributors its founder members.
That was over 25 years ago – since then Nancy Blackett has sailed the local Suffolk rivers, recreated the North Sea passage of We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, and inspired countless children (and adults) with a love of Arthur Ransome’s books.
This week Nancy Blackett is making her first return to Scarborough. She has already set sail from Pin Mill in Suffolk, where the opening of We Didn’t Mean to Sea is set, and is making her way up the East Coast via Lowestoft and Wells-Next-the-Sea over three or four days to Scarborough, and back to the East Pier in time for Scarborough Seafest from 19th-21st July.
There she will be open – when tide times permit – for visitors to step aboard and enjoy seeing inside Arthur Ransome’s favourite boat and the heroine of his most exciting book.
You can follow her progress sailing up to Scarborough and back on their Boat Tracker page.
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