Julia Jones, sailor, author, publisher and mother, lives in a bookish nook deep in rural Essex. She has five grown-up children, two of them with the journalist and broadcaster Francis Wheen.
The couple own one of Arthur Ransome’s yachts – Peter Duck, a 28 foot (6.5m) ketch designed by Jack Laurent Giles which was built for the children’s author in 1945. Ransome famously referred to PD as his ‘marine bath chair’ – he only sailed her on the East Coast for three years before moving back to the Lake District.
She was then bought by Julia’s parents, George and June Jones, when George – who ran the East Coast Yacht Agency,
