The 30-room Langdale Chase Hotel, which sits beside Lake Windermere in England’s famed Lake District, has unveiled a new toy for guests: a restored, 1920’s motor yacht named Albatros.
The hotel will schedule sailings for guests three times a day, and in warmer, sunnier months it will have evenings of champagne and canapes.
There also will be “Swallows and Amazons,” inspired afternoon teas, which is what caught my attention.
Yachts are all the rage right now with hotel firms — Ritz-Carlton, Accor and Four Seasons all have donned sailing caps and started to learn the words to sea shanties.
The Langdale Chase yacht, Albatros, was built in Berlin in 1928 for pleasure trips on Germany’s Elbe River. During World War II, the Germans converted it into a cargo vessel. After the war, she became a ferry on the Bodensee, the large lake that joins Austria, Germany and Switzerland.
In 1983, Albatros went to The Netherlands, where she piled the waters around the Friesland Islands. She was renovated in the 1980s, but a second overhaul in 2009 and 2010 saw her once again donning the style and grace of her earliest years, including teak decks and trim.
Now she is in the Lake District, looking as fresh as the hotel, which reopened its doors in November 2023 after a 12-month restoration to show off interiors that also hark back to the 1920s and 1930s.
The boat will ply the same waters as the characters in the “Swallows and Amazons” novels of Arthur Ransome.
I grew up with the “Swallows and Amazons,” and Ransome’s novels set in Norfolk with “The Coot Club.” It was my generation’s Harry Potter, I suppose.
Some accuse the writer of adopting colonial mindsets and more than a few stereotypes in his work, which I devoured as a child.
His real life was oftentimes controversial, even mysterious. His biography of Oscar Wilde ended in a lawsuit brought by Lord Alfred Douglas, the partner of Wilde, which Ransome won.
Ransome also was accused of being a spy with pro-Russian leanings, or perhaps worse, an apologist for Bolshevik policies and actions. He was present in Russia during the 1917 revolution writing for The Daily News and then the Manchester Guardian. Some wondered how he managed to get access to all the players in early 20th century Russia, including Vladimir Lenin — apparently, they played chess together — and Leon Trotsky.
Ransome shared a home with the Bolshevik public-relations — it was called propaganda in those days — chief Karl Radek, who allegedly was murdered by Joseph Stalin. There were numerous anecdotes spun around his relationship and marriage to Trotsky’s secretary Evgenia Shelepina, including one of a priceless horde of diamonds being smuggled by the two of them to allegedly fund Communist activities outside of Russia.
It is well-documented that the British Secret Service employed Ransome's services and gave him the codename S.76.
In the late 1920s, Ransome and Shelepina settled in the Lake District. Beatrix Potter would have been living on the same side of Lake Windermere at the same time. In 1929, Ransome published “Swallows and Amazons,” which made him famous, instead of infamous, his writing appealing to all ages, especially the young and teenagers.
The Langdale Chase Hotel is to the north of Lake Windermere, England’s largest natural lake, but conceivably its new boat could dock at the Far Sawrey pier for trips to Beatrix Potter’s home and to the Swan Hotel at the lake’s southern tip for travel to Ransome’s.
It would be wonderful if the Albatros has a role to help publicize and improve the health of Lake Windermere. If so, its new life would be like the sloop Clearwater and the Hudson River in New York. The Hudson was heavily polluted before the U.S. singer Pete Seeger, his wife Toshi Seeger and friends built the sloop, started sailing up and down the river in the 1970s and getting groundswell support to ban harmful industrial practices.
I met Pete Seeger once when he played a concert to 200 people at the International House on Riverside Dr. in Manhattan. He signed a book for me and drew a picture of a banjo on the title page. I still have it.
I have also swum in the Hudson off the town of Cold Spring, so I assume the water there is relatively clean.
Today, we are more attuned to pollution, or as a society we do not tolerate such levels of environmental abuse, but there remain concerns about Lake Windermere. Recently, the lake's levels of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, surpassed maximum levels mandated for swimming by the World Health Organization.
There can be several reasons why cyanobacteria could increase, none of them good, and it results in oxygen starvation for waters, as well as adverse reactions to humans.
A beautiful yacht skimming its waters can easily be a catalyst for action, support and environmental health.
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