There we were, in the middle of the Walpole river in the far south west of WA, when suddenly the eco tour guide mentioned Tolstoy and the Brotherhood church.

Utterly surreal.

Over the last year or so I’ve been researching the Friends of Russian Freedom, a group of Bloomsbury intellectuals (mostly) who supported tsarist period Russian exiles in London and helped smuggle banned material back into Russia behind the Okhrana’s back.

There’s been some oddities along the way, such as the story of a pair of Tolstoyan anarchists riding from London to Yasnaya Polyana on their bicycles (didn’t happen), but this was possibly the oddest.

The Russian dissidents had to get their material printed and published somewhere (I remember when I was a young man and studying Russian, besides paperbacks by approved writers printed in Russia on hairy recycled paper, there were the books by dissident writers such as Solzhenitsyn, printed on better quality paper, and published by small publishing houses in Hamburg, Paris and Amsterdam.)

And so it was before the Revolution – while Tolstoy was respected, some of his writings idolizing peasant life were banned, as were other books arguing for peasant socialism.

And it was books such as these that were smuggled into Russia.

And they needed to be printed.

And one of the places they were printed was the Free Word Press in Hampshire, which was run by a Tolstoyan commune led by Vladimir Chertkov, a close associate of Tolstoy.

Chertkov needed a business manager to deal with the paper and ink suppliers, the orders, the bills and the rest of it.

And the man he chose was the English Tolstoyan Frank Skinner Thompson.

Even after many of the exiles returned to Russia during a brief thaw in 1908, Skinner Thompson remained at the Free Word Press as the business manager, but by 1910 he was becoming seriously worried that, as things became harsher again in Russia, the Okhrana might come calling, and decamped to Tinglewood house near Walpole in the far south west of Western Australia to become a farmer.

Walpole at the time was still very isolated – the railway from Albany only went as far as Denmark, and access to the area was by boat.

On one of his trips to Albany for supplies Skinner Thompson, and his sister Phyllis, picked up a survivor from the wreck of the Norwegian sailing barque Mandalay which had come to grief on the coast.

Skinner Thompson accompanied by his son and nephew rescued the other members of the crew the following day.

The Mandalay was actually owned by the King of Norway, and Skinner Thomson in time received a cheque and a gold watch from the Norwegian King for his efforts in recuing the crew.

After this, Skinner Thompson seems to have lived the quiet isolated life of a cattle farmer, eventually dying in 1949.