10 things you do not know about Eric Arthur Blair, 120 years ago today, 1903, 25th June, George Orwell is best known for the allegorical novella Animal Farm, and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier, documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia, an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War, are also widely acclaimed.
Below are some of the lesser known facts about the man behind "Big Brother", "Thought Police", and "Newspeak"
1. Prep school was an experience he hated, and inspired an essay that couldn't be published during his lifetime.
Eric Blair spent five years at the St. Cyprian School for boys in Eastbourne, England, which inspired his melodramatic essay Such, Such Were the Joys.
In the essay, he called the school’s proprietors “terrible, all-powerful monsters” and labelled the institution itself "an expensive and snobbish school which was in process of becoming more snobbish, and, I imagine, more expensive." Deemed too libellous to print at the time. It was finally published in 1968 after his death.
2. He moved from job to job, for rent, and research.
Orwell worked as a police officer for the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (present-day Myanmar), a high school teacher, a bookstore clerk, a propagandist for the BBC during World War II, a literary editor, and a war correspondent.
He also had stints as a dishwasher in Paris and as a hop-picker (for breweries) in Kent, England. Apart from paying the rent, these jobs were also for research purposes.
Orwell also spent some time “living as a tramp” and wrote his first book about these experiences, Down and Out in Paris and London.
3. Orwell deliberately got himself arrested to experience some time behind bars.
In 1931, while investigating poverty for his aforementioned memoir, Orwell intentionally got himself arrested for being “drunk and incapable.
This was done “in order to get a taste of prison and to bring himself closer to the tramps and small-time villains with whom he mingled,” biographer Gordon Bowker told The Guardian.
At the time, he had been using the pseudonym Edward Burton and posing as a poor fish porter.
After drinking several pints and almost a whole bottle of whisky, Orwell was arrested. He was released after spending 48 hours in custody.
4. His knuckles were tattooed.While working as a police officer in Burma, Orwell got his knuckles tattooed.
Adrian Fierz, who knew Orwell, told biographer Gordon Bowker that the tattoos were small blue spots, “the shape of small grapefruits,” and Orwell had one on each knuckle.
Orwell noted that some Burmese tribes believed tattoos would protect them from bullets.
He may have gotten inked for similarly superstitious reasons, Bowker suggested, but it's more likely that he wanted to set himself apart from the British establishment in Burma.
5. He volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
Like fellow writer Ernest Hemingway and others with leftist leanings, Orwell took part in the Spanish Civil War.
Orwell (then aged 33) arrived in Spain, shortly after fighting had broken out in 1936, hoping to write some newspaper articles.
Instead, he ended up joining the Republican militia to “fight fascism” because “it seemed the only conceivable thing to do.
” The following year, he was shot in the neck by a sniper, but survived. He wrote about his war experiences in the book Homage to Catalonia.
6. A Doodlebug nearly destroyed his early draught of "Animal Farm".
Near the end of WWII, Orwell’s home at 10 Mortimer Crescent in London was struck by a German V-1 flying bomb.
Orwell, his wife Eileen, and their son Richard Horatio were away at the time, but their home was demolished.
During his lunch break at the British newspaper Tribune, Orwell would return to the foundation where his home once stood and sift through the rubble in search of his books and papers, most importantly, the manuscript for Animal Farm.
Fortunately, he found it, Orwell then piled everything into a wheelbarrow and carted it back to his office.
7. He was the owner of a goat named Muriel. He and his wife Eileen tended to several farm animals at their home in Wallington, England, including Muriel the goat. A goat by the same name in Orwell’s book Animal Farm is described as being one of the few intelligent and morally sound animals on the farm, making her one of the more likable characters in this dark work of dystopian fiction.
8. The "Cold War." was first described by Orwell.
The first recorded usage of the phrase “cold war” in reference to relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union can be traced back to Orwell’s 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, which was written two months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the essay, he described “a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.
9. Charlie Chaplin, John Steinbeck, George Bernard Shaw were reported as Communist sympathisers by Orwell.
In 1949, Orwell compiled a list of artists he suspected of having communist leanings and passed it along to his friend, Celia Paget, who worked for the UK’s Information Research Department.
After the war ended, the branch was tasked with distributing anti-communist propaganda throughout Europe
Orwell's list included Charlie Chaplin and a few dozen other actors, writers, academics, and politicians.
Other notable names that were written down in his notebook but weren’t turned over to the IRD included Katharine Hepburn, John Steinbeck, George Bernard Shaw, Orson Welles, and Cecil Day-Lewis.
10. While writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell almost drowned.
One day in 1947 while taking a break from writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell took his son, niece, and nephew on a boating trip across the Gulf of Corryvreckan in western Scotland, which happens to be the site of the world's third-largest whirlpool.
Unsurprisingly, their dinghy capsized when it was sucked into the whirlpool, hurling them all overboard.
Fortunately, all four survived, and the book that later came to be called Nineteen Eighty-Four (originally named The Last Man in Europe) was finally published in 1949, just seven months before Orwell's death from tuberculosis.
This is my colourised version of a black, and white photograph taken in 1944.
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