The multi-million pound plans to create a new visitor centre and display areas for the museum’s rare and historic vessels are to be scaled back because of the recession.

The organisation behind the venture, The Lakeland Arts Trust, confirmed it would not be seeking Heritage Lottery Funding (HLF) for the project this autumn.It has ended the formal search for a European architect to design the new museum and would instead consider inviting designs for a smaller scale option. Plans to expand the museum were first announced early in 2008 by trust director Edward King. At the time he described the project as ‘a big hill to climb’.

This week, trust spokeswoman Jeanette Edgar said: “HLF grants require matching funding from private and other organisations but the current economic climate has made it difficult to secure this so we have decided not to apply this time.” She declined to reveal how much lottery funding was needed to go ahead with the full-scale project, but admitted it was a ‘significant amount’, running into several millions. “Everything is currently under review,” said Ms Edgar. “It may be that we will not proceed with such a large project at this stage but do something on a smaller footprint that could be extended later.” She said restoration work on the museum’s collection would not be affected by the funding crisis and the trust would push ahead with recruiting an ‘experienced boatbuilder’ to fill the three-year post of conservation workshop manager at the museum.

Boat historians consider the museum to have one of the world’s most important collections of vessels generic to one location. Featured in the collection is the world’s oldest mechanically-powered boat, the first twin screw steam yacht in the UK, the oldest boat on the Lloyds register and one of the world’s first motorboats. Other notable exhibits include the Esperance (1869), said to be the inspiration for Captain Flint’s houseboat in Arthur Ransome’s children’s novel Swallows and Amazons, and a flat-bottomed boat once owned by Beatrix Potter.

The museum was founded in the 1970s by the Lake District builder George Pattinson.

Arthur Ransome

AN INTENSE debate has been provoked by a new book which claims Arthur Ransome, the author of a much-loved series of children’s adventure stories set in the Lake District, was a ‘double agent’ – spying for both Britain and Russia.

Ransome, whose best-selling Swallows and Amazons books made him the J K Rowling of his day, was a foreign correspondent based in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. He became a friend of Lenin and was one of the first British journalists to interview Trotsky, falling in love with the revolutionary leader’s private secretary, Evgenia Shelepina. They later married and moved to the southern Lake District in 1924 where Ransome began his phenomenal writing success.

Over the ensuing four decades until his death, Ransome said little about his time in Russia but now author Roland Chambers casts doubt on the writer’s allegiance to his homeland in his new biography The Last Englishman: the Double Life of Arthur Ransome.

Chambers claims Ransome was ‘completely in the hands of the Bolsheviks’ and that he informed on a British agent to the Cheka, the Bolshevik secret police. But Ransome’s family have rallied to refute the claim. Hugh Lupton, the author’s great nephew, said the ‘double agent’ description did not correspond with his memory of the old man he used to visit in the Lake District as a child. “He was quite a straightforward man and I just can’t imagine him having this secret double life. I remember him as a rather benign figure with a big white moustache in a deck chair in the garden. He was profoundly English and quite an establishment figure, so that kind of disloyalty of spying for both sides doesn’t quite ring true.”

Ransome’s grandson John Ransome Lewis, said there were ‘no family secrets about him being a double agent’. “Certainly, within the family, there was never any mention of it.”

However, the biography’s author has stuck by his claim that Ransome, who died in 1967, was an informant for both sides. Chambers spent two winters in Moscow and St Petersburg researching The Last Englishman, gaining access to files held in Russia’s state archives. “Yes, he was a double agent,” he said. “He was paid by the Brits, supplied reports to them, and he advised the Cheka on British foreign policy. That said, though, this wasn’t the Cold War. There’s no evidence he ever passed sensitive information to the Bolsheviks, or even that he had access to it.”