This is the response to the eighth (and final) question posed in an interview with Dundee University students of Psychology.
Question 8 - Despite the fact that being a spy is admittedly an unlikely career choice for most readers, what can we learn from Ransome’s life?
Perhaps not as unlikely as you might think. Let me end with a little more of the history of our department. In the distant past, before the creation of Dundee University, we were a college of the University of St Andrews. The Head of the tiny department of Psychology was a man called Oscar Oeser. By the time he came to St Andrews he had completed a PhD with Erich Jaensch (who went on to become Adolf Hitler’s favourite psychologist) and then completed another with Frederic Bartlett at Cambridge.
Oscar wasn’t popular, partly because he’d begun a research project to study unemployment in Dundee - a topic considered undignified by his colleagues in 1930s St Andrews. But it hardly mattered. As war approached, he left the University and began work at Bletchley Park, ending up in charge of the “hut” tasked with translating and interpreting decoded Luftwaffe communications. Oscar’s special field of interest was the German encoding machines, vastly more complex than enigma, nicknamed “fish” and as the war drew to a close a secret raiding party was set up to capture this equipment before it fell into Russian hands. Oscar led the most successful of these raids, arriving at Hitler’s Berghof headquarters in early May 1945, taking prisoners, and unearthing several tonnes of hidden equipment.
I knew Oscar Oeser very well (he was my boss in Melbourne, years ago). He kept his secret life secret. It was much the same with Arthur Ransome. In his later years you would find him playing billiards or propping up the bar at the Garrick Club. This bespectacled avuncular chap with the walrus moustache, someone every child considered a personal friend, had actually watched from his window in Glinka Street Petrograd as the nightmare of revolution unfolded.
[To learn more about Oscar Oeser read Oscar & Lucy.]