Coot Club Coot Club Coot Club is the fifth book of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of children's books, published in 1934. The book sees Dick and Dorothea Callum visiting the Norfolk Broads during the Easter holidays, eager to learn to sail and thus impress the Swallows and Amazons when they return to the Lake District later that year. Along with a cast of new characters, Dick and Dorothea explore the North and South Broads and become 'able seamen'. The Callum children spend their Easter holidays on The Broads with a family friend, Mrs Barrable, who is staying on a small
Swallows and Amazons than go abroad as a foreign correspondent. He did continue to write part-time for the press, however. The book was inspired by a summer spent by Ransome teaching the children of his friends, the Altounyans, to sail. Three of the Altounyan children's names are adopted directly for the Walker family. Ransome and Ernest Altounyan bought two small dinghies called "Swallow" and "Mavis". Ransome kept "Swallow" until he sold it a number of years later, while "Mavis" remained in the Altounyan family and is now on permanent display in the Ruskin Museum. However, later in life Ransome tried to downplay the