Change of Name for No Reason

I set this blog up sometime ago, and like many would be bloggers had good intentions of regularly posting various articles that I have written regarding the children’s books of Arthur Ransome.

So now it happens that the first topic I post regarding Ransome’s work has only arisen in the last day or so.

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When I first read Swallows and Amazons in the early nineteen-sixties the book had already been in print for thirty years, now over eighty years after publication I am still reading it and the eleven volumes that followed.

That original book, published in nineteen-thirty, to me as an adult reader, has always been a snapshot of the England of its day. Ransome writes of how people were at that time, weaving in incidents of his own childhood and early adulthood.

The book has achieved the status of classic volume of children’s literature, but it cannot be denied that as Ransome wrote of his time it contains uses of language etc that to some in the 21^st century jar or are even unacceptable. Sometimes the reactions of people to these quirks are disproportionate, they lose sight of the when the book was written and the society it reflects.

So it seems that latest victim of this inability to view the work as it was written is BBC Films, in their new film production of the book they have let it be known that one of the major characters is to be renamed. Why? Because the name might provoke ‘sniggers.’

Any readers of Ransome will know that I am referring to Titty Walker, who in the view of BBC Films now is to be called ‘Tatty’.

For those old enough to remember, the corporation made the same mistake in 1963 when a television adaptation was made. Titty Walker became Kitty (famously played by a young Susan George.) This in some ways could be forgiven, the permissive society as it was dubbed had yet to take hold, and the idea of a television programme for children containing a slang word for a part of the female anatomy would still have ‘shocked’ some people.

Fortunately, when Claude Whatham directed the 1974 EMI film version of the book he stuck with the original name. The child actor Sophie Neville, who played Titty, is still known to many as Titty and she is proud of her association with the character and her name.

Then in the nineteen-nineties, BBC Radio 4 produced a dramatised version of the book, and had no qualms in retaining the original name. It seems that in those enlightened times it was assumed the average radio listener would not be at all bothered by the word.

In the ensuing discussions on the Internet and non-BBC news outlets the point has been made that BBC Films seem to have missed something. In the same book there is a character called ‘Roger’, another called ‘John’ and yet another called ‘Nancy’. These three ‘snigger’ worthy words are to be retained in the script unaltered.

Of course, we must not leave out Susan Walker from this rewrite, the hardest working of the Walker and Blackett children would not want to be compared to a ‘lazy Susan’ I am sure!

BBC Films hopes that ‘Swallows and Amazons’ will be the beginning of a franchise in the same way as the Harry Potter novels, if that is so they are heading for trouble with the fourth book ‘Winter Holiday’ – there is character called ‘Dick’!

Language changes as we all know in both use and meaning, new words appear and are assimilated quite quickly. Titty has a long history, the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang notes a first usage in 1746, but it seems that BBC Films does not realise that over 250 odd years we have all got used to it!