“A LAKELAND SAGA” by Jeremy Collingwood (50-55)
(Sigma Leisure, 2012; £9.99; ISBN 978-1-85058-905-1)
In retirement Jeremy Collingwood, an Anglican minister who formerly worked as a lawyer in Zambia and
London, has written an intriguing family history that links the varied lives of the English Collingwood and
Armenian Altounyan families over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
To enjoy this book, based on papers and original research deposited with Jeremy by a third cousin shortly
before she died, it is not necessary to know anything about either family. Clearly written, with a timeline,
references and an index, it fulfils the prime duty of all family history – to draw the reader into another,
unfamiliar world and to make him or her want to know more.
The Collingwoods have long been a family of painters and historians, philosophers and archaeologists. The
Altounyans displayed an enduring medical gene. Their histories intersected when Dora Collingwood
married Ernest Altounyan in 1915. Ernest had been educated in England and was a qualified doctor. He
was also the son of an itinerant Armenian surgeon who had settled in Aleppo in Syria, where he had set up
a hospital and married an Irish woman, thus avoiding the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915-16.
The Collingwoods can boast various notables in their blood line. One of them, William, was a 19th century
artist whose works may still be seen in the V&A Musuem in London. His son, Gershom, became the right
hand man and biographer of the well-known Victorian art critic John Ruskin and is defined in the book as
an “antiquarian…(with) a wide and extensive curiosity in the past.”
For Jeremy Collingwood, the family connection with Arthur Ransome, the journalist, MI6 agent in Russia
and author of the famous children’s book Swallows and Amazons, provides the essential element of intrigue
and surprise in this story. Ransome knew Gershom from a chance encounter in the Lake District in 1896.
In 1928, when their five children were aged eleven or younger, the Altounyan family holidayed near
Gershom at his home on Lake Coniston. Ransome got to know the children as they sailed on the lake and
formed the ideas for the book that was to make his name although later, rather churlishly, he disputed this
version of events.
Like all family histories, this one has its fair share of quarrels, setbacks, sadnesses and loose ends. To some
extent, it reads as a tale of gifted individuals and families overtaken by history. But it is interesting in itself
as a vivid portrait of intellectual middle-class British and Middle Eastern life in the period up to the 1960s.
Jeremy Collingwood has also written three other books in recent years, all of which are now in the College
Library. They are As a Witness to the Light; Mr Saffron Walden; Sir Thomas Smith.
Robin Knight (56-61)