We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea

ARTHUR RANSOME was born in Leeds in 1884. He had an adventurous life -- as a baby he was carried by his father to the top of the Old Man of Coniston, a peak that is 2,276 ft high! He went to Russia in 1913 to study folklore and in 1914, at the start of World War I he became a foreign correspondent for the Daily News. In 1917 when the Russian Revolution began he became a journalist and was a special correspondent of the Guardian. He played chess with Lenin and married Trotsky's personal secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. On his return to England, he bought a cottage near Windermere in the Lake District and began writing children's stories. He published the first of his children's classics, the twelve Swallows and Amazons books, in 1930. In 1936 he won the first ever Carnegie Medal for his book, Pigeon Post. He died in 1967.