AIBU to let them camp on an island overnight?

[chomalungma]

(Inspired by another thread)

We are on holiday in the Lake District. Lovely cottage. DH is working away. DC's have seen a lovely island and want to go camping there for a few nights. Light a campfire, cook for themselves. They'll get there by sailing boat. Youngest is 6 and oldest is 14.

Would you let them go?

I think Canada Water may be in order, but I have no idea why.

It’s a no from me

Interestingly Swallows and Amazon’s was originally inspired by an Armenian family ( friends of the author) and not the quintessential posh English ones in the story.

...the quintessential posh English ones...

They weren't especially posh. We don't know what Bob Blackett did, but we have the Walkers' father who was a Naval officer, the Callums' was a university lecturer, Tom Dudgeon's father a doctor, Port and Starboard's father a solicitor, and the Death and Glories who were all the sons of boatbuilders.

Ransome knew the Altounyans through their maternal grandfather, who had been one of his Lake District friends since he was a boy.

Ealing (Norfolk) Broadway - under the Big Six variations.

@GreatAuntMaria

...the quintessential posh English ones...

They weren't especially posh. We don't know what Bob Blackett did, but we have the Walkers' father who was a Naval officer, the Callums' was a university lecturer, Tom Dudgeon's father a doctor, Port and Starboard's father a solicitor, and the Death and Glories who were all the sons of boatbuilders.

Ransome knew the Altounyans through their maternal grandfather, who had been one of his Lake District friends since he was a boy.

Solidly middle class then. Your namesake seemed fairly posh though.

As we're not silly Billies, how about Burnt Oak?

Your namesake seemed fairly posh though.

Genteel, I think, rather than posh. The fact she lived in Harrogate says it all, really.

I think the middle classes were more concerned with Keeping Up Appearances than the genuinely posh. You don't need to worry about What People Think if you've got a stonking great stately home and a family tree going back to the Middle Ages.

@PablosHoney

This will be the last time I say this, Not everyone reads every single post, not everyone has read Swallows and Amazons, jeez! If you read every post why haven’t you read my other responses so I don’t have to say it all again? If I wanted to start a thread about something specific I would title it accordingly so people didn’t waste their time responding to it only to be laughed at for not understanding but that’s just me.

What I think is funny about this is that despite claiming not to have read 4 posts down from the OP (although originally writing a jokey response herself) she now seems to have the time to read and respond to every comment laughing at those who only read the title and post.

Kelvinbridge (under the Barnett formulation).

@GreatAuntMaria fairly posh then. Just pointing out an interesting contrast. Then he denied ever dedicating the book to them and refuted all claims it was based on the Altounyan family at all.

Solidly middle class then.

Neither the Swallows or the Amazons seemed "posh" to me - just normal, and what I took for granted. But I think what was "solid middle class" in the 1920s would be considered "posh" nowadays . We're a downwardly mobile society in that respect.

That's why the otherwise entrancing recent stage adaptation of S&A got it really wrong, giving Nancy & Peggy (rather bad) Cumbrian accents. They would have spoken with accents as RP as the Walkers.

They [the Amazons] would have spoken with accents as RP as the Walkers.

They were possibly somewhat bilingual - speaking with more of a local accent when talking to the Billies or the Swainsons, say, but RP at school/with the Swallows/with the GA.

I think they were definitely upper middle class and would have had posh RP accents. They are obviously all boarders at public schools. The language is quite distinctive.

Whose island?

The 7th Duke of Buccleuch. He died in 1935, but I am sure he would have agreed to it at the time.

They are obviously all boarders at public schools.

Not all boarding schools are public schools. And for girls, there just wasn't any equivalent to Harrow, Eton, Winchester, Rugby etc.

Until after the Second World War, for middle class parents who wanted to educate their sons and daughters for university or careers, sometimes there was no other option than boarding school. The principle of free, state provided secondary education available to all wasn't established until the 1944 Education Act, and that only began to be implemented in the late 1940s.

The school leaving age was fourteen. Provision for post-fourteen, and especially post sixteen, education was piecemeal and patchy. Many places didn't have a grammar school or high school within reach.

So boarding school it had to be, for many children.

Not as many as for boys Great Aunt Maria, but Cheltenham, Roedean, The Abbey and quite a few more were established in the nineteenth century. . My mother was at one of the GPDST day schools (Croydon High) in the 1920s, the independent school I went to in the fifties and sixties was founded in the 1880s etc etc.

And for girls, there just wasn't any equivalent to Harrow, Eton, Winchester, Rugby etc

Not sure about that, GreatAuntMaria - both my grandmothers - somewhat older than Susan, Titty, Nancy & Peggy, went to girls' boarding schools through WWI. My surrogate grandmother, about 10 years younger than my grandmothers, attended a finishing school in Switzerland in the 1920s. It was just what one did ...

Bit later than S and A, but I started this thread today.
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/what_were_reading/3989346-Terms-and-Conditions-Life-in-Girls-Boarding-Schools-1939-1979
The history of the schools is mentioned and lots were founded in the nineteenth century.
I wonder if the Swallows might have been at schools which favoured the children of naval officers. Titty and Roger were presumably at boarding prep schools.

Until after the Second World War, for middle class parents who wanted to educate their sons and daughters for university or careers, sometimes there was no other option than boarding school. The principle of free, state provided secondary education available to all wasn't established until the 1944 Education Act, and that only began to be implemented in the late 1940s.

Despite knowing the theoretical history of this I had never made the connection to the prevalence of boarding schools in S&A, Narnia etc. There can't have been much choice in the Lakes for the Amazons. I am now curious as to the backstory of the Blackett's/Turner's. Given the cairn note in Swallowdale, they had presumably been in the Lakes when Mrs Blackett etc were children but they are not farmers, so who were their grandparents and what did they do?

For the Walkers, presumably boarding school offered stability given their father could be deployed for long periods and their mother sometimes travels to be with him (same for the Ds with archaeologist father going abroad with mother in tow).

But also, it was just what you did - send the children to prep school, and then public school. My father still has fond memories of his prep school, although used to tell funny stories about the awfulness of the food in his house in his public school, and my mother remembers her school was partly idyllic, partly awful (I think it was the swimming she didn't like).

That is, neither set of my grandparents (or indeed my great-grandparents) had professions which required much travel - indeed, their children being at school enabled them to travel a lot for pleasure - I don't think my father's parents spent a winter in the UK after WW2. So in the middle (or is it upper middle?) class, in my experience anyway, sending your children to school (boarding) was normal.

@CatandtheFiddle

Solidly middle class then.

Neither the Swallows or the Amazons seemed "posh" to me - just normal, and what I took for granted. But I think what was "solid middle class" in the 1920s would be considered "posh" nowadays . We're a downwardly mobile society in that respect.

That's why the otherwise entrancing recent stage adaptation of S&A got it really wrong, giving Nancy & Peggy (rather bad) Cumbrian accents. They would have spoken with accents as RP as the Walkers.

I think the Amazons would have had mild Cumbrian accents. I was from Lancashire, and didn't have a strong accent growing up (often referred to as posh-ie southern accent at school) but when I came south everyone said how northern I sounded. I think they'd have had a northern edge to their voices.

The did give the Amazons Cumbrian accents in the more recent film too. They got an awful lot of things wrong (like most of the plot, the characterisations of the Walkers, and a few other minor points like that...) but that was one that was right. I believe one of the girls was actually native to the Lakes so was her natural accent.

I doubt that they would have had local accents, but they would certainly have had elocution lessons to eliminate them. I can still remember the ones we learnt at my school and strangely my MiL was reciting them in her last hours.
There was, I think, a GPDST (Girls Public Day School Trust) school in Carlisle, but we know they are at boarding school because of quarantine / medical certificates.

I think they might have code-switched, but in the 1920s if you were middle class and at boarding school, you’d have spoken with an RP accent.