Yachtsman and children’s author Arthur Ransome was once branded a traitor by the British Foreign Office and at one time faced the gallows. Now a new BBC film is to reveal whether Ransome worked as a spy for the British secret service or whether he was a Bolshevik sympathiser during the Russian Revolution.

‘The Secret Life of Arthur Ransome’ will be broadcast on Saturday 17th September on BBC 2 at 9.10pm presented by Griff Rhys Jones who investigates. As a war correspondent Ransome witnessed the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was close friends with many of the leading Bolsheviks including Lenin, and had an affair with Trotsky’s secretary.

Rhys Jones visited the St Petersburg flat where Ransome lived, met the last remaining relatives of the Swallows & Amazons’ author’s mistress in a drab suburb of St Petersburg and also travelled to the Kremlin in Moscow where Ransome had many of his key meetings with Lenin. In Estonia the comedian discovered how Ransome hatched a scheme to bring peace between Estonia and the Bolsheviks during the height of the Russian Civil War.