Now! Then! An infant Arthur Ransome celebrates Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee at Wold Newton

20 June 1887: An infant Arthur Ransome celebrates Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee at Wold Newton

Arthur Ransome. 1976. The Autobiography of Arthur Ransome. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Jonathan Cape. Get it:

Excerpt

I was then three-and-a-half and carried a blue mug with me on my way to the Jubilee tea in a big tithe-barn. I can still see the raised floor at one end of the barn where the old people who had shared in the Coronation festivities of fifty years before were sitting in their smock frocks, the women all wearing linen sunbonnets. There is some point in recording such memories if the recorders live to a great age, and I am glad that I was taken by my father to have my head patted by a grey old man, one of the Baineses, who had been born in 1798, the year of the Lyrical Ballads, could remember Trafalgar, had been a youth of seventeen at the time of the Battle of Waterloo and, like Sir Walter Scott, had spoken with persons who could remember the Highlanders coming into England in 1745. This may seem interesting to some young friend of mine who in the year 2024 may like to say that he once knew an old fogey who had as a child seen one who had been born in the year when Coleridge was finishing The Ancient Mariner. But the memories that seem important to the rememberer are not of these chance touchings of the skirts of history, but of quite simple things, drifting snowflakes seen through a melted peephole in a frosted nursery window, the sun like a red-hot penny in the smoky Leeds sky, and the dreadful screaming of a wounded hare. That last I can never forget.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Comment

The Jubilee seems to have been celebrated on 20 June (Monday) and 21 June, but I have no idea what happened in Wold Newton and have assigned 20 in hope.

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Original

My next early memory (if indeed autobiographies need such things) is of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. I was then three-and-a-half and carried a blue mug with me on my way to the Jubilee tea in a big tithe-barn at Wold Newton in Yorkshire. I can still see the raised floor at one end of the barn where the old people who had shared in the Coronation festivities of fifty years before were sitting in their smock frocks, the women all wearing linen sunbonnets. There is some point in recording such memories if the recorders live to a great age, and I am glad that I was taken by my father to have my head patted by a grey old man, one of the Baineses, who had been born in 1798, the year of the Lyrical Ballads, could remember Trafalgar, had been a youth of seventeen at the time of the Battle of Waterloo and, like Sir Walter Scott, had spoken with persons who could remember the Highlanders coming into England in 1745. This may seem interesting to some young friend of mine who in the year 2024 may like to say that he once knew an old fogey who had as a child seen one who had been born in the year when Coleridge was finishing The Ancient Mariner. But the memories that seem important to the rememberer are not of these chance touchings of the skirts of history, but of quite simple things, drifting snowflakes seen through a melted peephole in a frosted nursery window, the sun like a red-hot penny in the smoky Leeds sky, and the dreadful screaming of a wounded hare. That last I can never forget.

286 words.