Michael Shelden's Orwell 1

Yesterday February 26th was an important event day because in  the evening I saw Silver Linings Playbook, arguable the best of a number of  good films this Oscar and Bafta season and which I had planned to write about next after another new series of weekly catch up summary reports. However the event of the day was the arrival of the brilliant Michael Sheldon’s 1991 authorised biography where I have I managed to acquire an original first edition in hardback.

My hope in purchasing was that this book will answer some of the questions and issues which have been raised while listening to the BBC The Real George 0rwell series of programmes together with re reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Down and Out in Paris and London, and reading The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. There is Animal Farm and 1984 to reread. I had hoped to read some of his articles and essays which are available online but will not now do so unless the reading of two of  the biographies indicates that I should.

I have so far published my notes in 2419 to 2422 and 2424 and 2245 and after reading the Introduction and the first chapter on family  background and his childhood until going to preparatory school I need to continue  noting this important book chapter by chapter because of its significance to my life to date and my life that remains,  in addition to the original purpose of the completer finisher within me.

I was nearly tempted to omit the introductory chapter until after  reading the rest, but grateful that I did not as Shelden sets the scene for his book in the context of other works completed beforehand and which immediately answered some questions.

The first is why Eric Blair did not write his story and that there is no book devoted to Eileen O’Shaughnessy and only  in 2002 was a book written about his second wife and literary executor Sonia Brownell. The answer is not because Eric died comparatively young but according to Sheldon he understood that to be consistent with his ideals it would reveal what he wanted to keep private about his inner life, his inconsistencies and his relationships with others, which I suspect  was out of respect and protection of their right to privacy. I plead guilty from extrapolating from my recognition of important similarities between myself and Eric to making assumptions that I claim to know more or as much of him than those who have read and studied all his works and communicated with many people who had direct knowledge of him as Shelden mentions in his introductory chapter

I also ought to repeat my crackpot  warning that I continue to believe that despite the way human beings appear to differ in their physical make up and appearance and in their behaviour  we are all inherently the same and that we all inherit the accumulated memories of our biological ancestors which is another argument supporting my lifelong contention that everyone has the right to know the who their biological parents were, and in fact that this is one of few rights I would declare inalienable.

According to Shelden Eric argued that the work an artist produces should stand or fall on the judgement of others over time and that experience unrelated to the creation of any individual work should be discounted, a distinction Shelden himself rejects as I do. Having said this the question remains what would Orwell have written and done with the rest of his life had he not died when he did and would this have included and autobiography or two? Would he and Eileen have remained married if she  and he survived into their sixties and  in any event would she have remained silent when after his death he became the focus of so much research, and writing by others?
According to Shelden it was Sonia, in response to an unauthorised biography where she had refused to allow any direct quotations from his writings, to invite the academic Bernard Crick (1982 revised 1992) to write up his life which Shelden explains is full of facts without getting beneath the skin of the man, although it appears Sonia was displeased with his work which she attempted to stop the publication. Crick was an important writer on politics with a left of centre  slant and the reference has reminded  me to buy a second hand copy of his book on Protest and Discontent which he published in 1970 along with the only book about the life of Sonia, a fascinating woman in her own right

Shelden comments that Eric was a man of contradictions, Are we not all? We are all made up of conflicting forces, as I believe are societies  local, national and international. Unless there are counterbalancing forces a dominate force will gain such  an ascendancy that others will find it increasingly difficult to survive, for a time at least. If the dominant is benign then most people will argue  this is how it should be, but I believe any force even if for the good, constructive etc will become unstable  and turn in on itself unless it is able to achieve balance, stability, equilibrium and this is only attained from the tension between forces.

The other aspect I feel the need to feature in my introduction is the belief there is usually more than one valid answer to a mystery,  solution to a problem or response to a question. This aspect is covered by Shelden in the sense that he notes Eric liked to understand the position of those with whom he often had fundamental disagreement. This should not be misunderstood that understanding means one does not vigorously oppose or criticise.

Also important to me from Sheldon’s introduction is the information whatever his success, and Eric worked  to be successful and for his work to be appreciated, he always expected failure and recognised his shortcomings well as those of others. He also appears to have been a driven creative  individual.

Homage to Catalonia 3

After Georges Kopp had arranged for Eileen, Orwell’s wife to visit him at the front after which he had his first experience of close action, Spring brought warm days which turned to hot and with cherries forming in their clusters and bathing in the river no longer agony. He comments on the gnarled rustic looking men from Andalusia, the homeland of my maternal great grandmother and that two fellow Englishmen were laid low with sun stroke. The Andalusians were described as illiterate, simple but knew how to make cigarettes out of dried fibre.

The Republican government doubled the number of men outside of Huesca to thirty thousand, and used  lots of planes to bomb and shoot but the city refused to fall. This could be said was an important turning point in the defence of the democratic republic against the nationalist forces of Franco. Then the Republic commenced to implode.

After 115 days at the front Eric Blair the combatant was given leave to join his wife in Barcelona and found that the workers’ revolution was coming to its end. The bourgeoisie were back on the streets and the workers were back to their jobs or their homes. The civilian population had lost interest in the war with voluntary enlistment dwindled.  

Worse perhaps than this while the hotels and restuarnts in the city centre appeared to have no difficulty in feeding their guests able to pay, in the working class districts there were queues for bread, olive oil and other necessities one hundred yards long, and children barefooted waited all over the city clamouring for scraps of food,  People went about their own business and greeting of strangers as comrades disappeared.  He came across a shop full of bon bons and pastries at ridiculous prices not out of place in Bond Street or Paris and marvelled at the extremes of means now openly displayed. It was during the week that he waited for his new pair of boots that his original enthusiams came apart as the street fighting involving comrades commenced. 

The sense of trouble brewing was not just between the Stalinist Communists and POUM anarcho syndicalism but between all the factions and differences in views about the kind fo society that should deveop once Franco was defeated. The spark was the arrival of several lorry loads of armed civil guards  driven to the telephone exchange and taken control from the CNT workers there. Two barricades were then created by the people and the war between the government and the nationalist became an open conflict between Government supported by the Communists and Stalin and the anarchists, the Syndicalist, the Trotskyists, POUM and in particular the second city of Spain Barcelona

Civil guards occupied a cafe next to the POUM building as a prelude to attacking the headquarters. There is a disussion between a Civil guard and Georges Kopp over unexploded bombs lying in the street. Orwell fires his only shot of these “troubles” in a failed attempt to explode one of them. He worries about his wife back at the hotel. There is chat between Orwell’s comrades at the top of one building and Civil guards occupying another and who explained that they did not want to shoot at them because they were all workers.

Orwell, the writer describes the changed atmopshere in the city from May5th with very few pedestrians on the street. One of main papers  called for everyone to return to work. There was rumours of Government forces and POUM men coming to the city to fight it out.  After sixty hours without sleep he is in a “ghastly state of mind.”       

Back at the hotel spy mania gripped everyone. There was only one sardine each for one meal, also mentioned in the radio programme. He and his wife breakfasted  only on goats cheese three mornings in succession and the hotel had no bread for days and nothing to drink. There was                                                                                                                        a chorus of there is no more food, we much “go back to work.”

The rumour of government troops, Assault Guards, from Valencia proved accurate and suddenly they appeared  taking control of the streets, with the outbreak of street fighting giving the government the opportunity to assume fuller control of Catalonia. In the press POUM was declared a Fascist organisation in disguise.

After describing his personal experience Blair used the next chapter, the longest in the book, to try and explain what was happening in terms of the wider picture but makes the point that working out what happened accurately is impossible because there are no records, either not made, or destroyed. Frustration and disappointment on the part of the working class once it was appreciated that the former gulf between wealth and poverty was continuing coupled with the Government orders for personal weapons to be handed in and the growth of non political well armed government forces from which trade unionists were excluded were among the factors he lists.

He describes the tactics of the Communists but not those of the secret Nationalists who would have remained in the to spy. Until he comes to writing 1984 and the role of 0’Brien Orwell, from what I have read so far, does not appear to appreciate that all sides will have undercover people joining the organisations they are against, sometimes holding major roles in an organisation and undertaking illegal  action. It is rare of these individuals to become known or for the practices to be admitted while they are taking place. Both as a young man practicing non violent direct action, in later life as local authority chief officer and since in the age when what we do and say can be viewed and listened to, recorded and changed by anyone, anywhere with the technology, I quickly came to assume that this was so, acted in accordance to what I felt and believed, and regarded as fair and good, but I also sometimes laid trails so see who and how they were followed. Eric Blair to me always remained the idealist despite the realism that became his experience  and never appears to have got stuck in until he went to Spain followed by World War Ii when his ingrained patriotism resurfaced and his anti totalitarianism governed his remaining years.

Orwell reports that people started to leave barricades almost as soon as they had been created. POUM leaders appeared ambivalent and unsure in that while they encouraged followers to remain at the barricades they had argued against insurrection until the war against Franco was won. He noted that the Communist press, highlighting the Daily Worker in the UK, put the entire blame for the street fighting in Barcleona on POUM as a France’s Fifth Column and goes in to considerable detail examining various articles and statements.

He also comments on Trotskyist tactics of causing disorder and bloodhsed to undermine the position of anarchists and syndicalists in Barcelona. This reminds of my single experience when I got to hear the demagogue tirade of Socialist Labour League Leader Gerry Healey at the annual meeting of the organisation at the Friends Meeting House in London in 1961( I think I have the year right). I was invited by Harry Mister, the manager of the Peace News Bookshop to spend the day looking after a  Bookstall at their annual meeting as Pat Arrowsmith had been invited to talk about the role of the Direct Action Committee campaign against the possession and potential deployment of weapons of mass destruction. In order to listen to Pat I had to complete a delegate’s card and having done so and no one showing any interest in the  books, I stayed inside the hall to listen to an address by Healey that went on for the rest of the morning.

He first told the delegates that the movement should support the action to reduce the power of capitalist countries but it was essential that the soviets did not reduce their position. He denounced the volunteering to go to prison as unproductive and wasteful.

As Orwell explains in Chapter 11 the Trotskyists like the SLL were little different from the Stalinist in both supporting the dictatorship of the proletariart and that their ends justified any means. The essential difference  being that the SLL and similar groups believed that socialism was impossible unless it existed within every country an  approach in principle, no different from the Facists,  fundamenal Christians and Muslims. Without a world wide approach the capitalists would continue to do everything they could to undermine and destroy socialism.

A major part of the speech of  the SLL leader was to report on progress achieved during the year and the various struggles many of them small scale that had taken place and that in the coming year the priority was to enter the machine tool industry. It was evident from what was said that known members of the League were black listed by employer organisatuions and therefore the approach  was to quickly move into an area, cause as much mayhem as  possible in terms of getting the employers, the capitalists to show their true colours by turning on the worker and this would have the effect of educationg the workers in to the reality of capitalism and moving them into their camp. A short time afterwards an elderly man called to see me unexpectedly at the home of the aunties first confirming that that I had attended the annual meeting. I explained the circumstances and my response to what I had heard. We argued over many issues and as I had come to appreciate from previous situations I lacked the general education and communication skills to match his eloquence although I thought I managed to hold my own as by then I had read and reflected sufficiently to be clear what I was for and what I was against. I have always wondered if the man was from the SLL or MI5!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Orwell does  report that during the month of the uprising in Barcelona, the former Monarchist flag appeared on several balconies in Barcelona thus fuelling the allegations against POUM. Poum became an illegal organisation over  15th and  16th June and one of the first acts of the Negrin  led government that came into power in May. The Executive Committee  was imprisoned as was George Kopp.

Blair wrote his analysis  six months after returning to the UK and he reports that the leadership of POUM was still in jail although within the small Spanish Cabinet they had voted by five votes to two (both Communist Ministers) to release the prisoners. There had been a number of delegations from the UK and elsewhere visiting the Republican government including one by the Socialist Labour Member of Parliament, James Maxton. And also John McGovern when he visited was told that that because they had received aid from Russia “ we had to permit certain actions which we did not like,”  the words of the Spanish Minister of the Interior. McGovern had not be able to gain admission to the secret prisons held by the Communists in Barcelona despite having a signed order from the Minster of the Interior to do so,

Three days after the fighting in Barcleona ended Orwell and his comrades in Barcelona returned to the front. He found ity difficult for anyone returning to look at the war in the same way as before.  He was stationed  back outside of Huesca, a little to the right than previously and he had been promoted to acting second Lieutenant  i.e. had he been in the British Army, an officer, and in command of about thirty men. His friend Benjamin had been officially  promoted to Captain, the same rank as a cousin and Georges Kopp to Major, the same rank as one of my uncles.   

It was five oclock in the morning always a dangerous time because with the dawn at their backs if you put your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky, He felt, although hard to remember or describe how he felt at the moment that a bullet went into and through his throat.  What surprised him was not being in pain.

As a school boy  I had  entered  the school House boxing competition, never  having boxed or been in a fight of any kind before. I was hit and hit hard but the odd thing was  I did not feel pain and considered it an odd experience and keen to have joined the school boxing club which the head of house recommended. I was stopped by the aunties.

Less than a decade later I was picked up by police as I sat  at a pier across from a Polaris Submarine supply vessel and tossed in the air on top of other protestors and the action was repeated several times. I was calm  as I had been when another prisoner at Stafford had taken offence at my manner when working in the prisoner Library and placed a neck lock intended to cause me harm. In  these incidents there was neither fear or pain, surprise yes and in retrospect  being bemused by my reaction.

He is taken to hospital where he remembers a nurse trying to feed him a large meal and two of his troop expressing relief that he was alive but then taking away his  watch, revolver, knife and electric torch, all valuable at the front, knowing that even as a survivor his war was over.   After a few days he was able to get up and walk with his arm in a sling which had become paralysed.

He was able to subsequently comment that hosptials near the front line were treated as cl;earing stations rather than as places of treatment which led to hundreds if not thousands of wounded dying prematurely or being disabled unnecessarily.  
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             Doctors were too busy to examine  wounds  commenting that will be looked when you get to Barcelona as they rushed by. There were no trained nurses in Spain as the work of caring was undertaken by nuns with the consequence that men too ill look after themselves  were shamefully neglected.

He was able to wire Eileen  before departing to Barcleona  via a bus to the station only to discover they were being taken to Tarragona instead presumably because that was where the train driver was prepared to go. The heat and lack of care meant that a number of the wounded died on the journey. It was ony eight or nine days after the shooting that his wound was properly looked at. The doctor told him he would never get his voice back. Although for two months he could not speak beyond a whisper, audible speech then returned. 

When he returned to Barcelona, there was a special evil in the air. Sinster rumours of all kinds rebounded. There was fear that  Franco force would attempt to invade Barcelona.  Bands of armed Assasult gurds raopmed everywhere while Civil Guards controlled buildings and strategic places with papers constantly being requested. Fortunately he had been warned  not to show his POUM doucmentation. There was a bad shortage of food. And there was no small change which meant those with large denomination currency might have wait for hours after queuing for hours to get the right change. He was taken to a sanitorium run by POUM where there were several other Englishmen.

His wife Eileen continued to stay at the Continental and he came into  the city centre by day attending the General Hospital for electric shock treatment on his arm where he could move his fingers and the treatment reduces the pain. The couple decided to return to England as soon as possible, because of his desire to get away from what was happening, the atmosphere of hatred and                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            suspicion. He had been certified by the doctors as medically unfit to continue fighting.  He had to get  the position confirmed by POUM at Seitamo. Georges Kopp was back from the front in a good mood believing that at last Huesca was to fall and he had received  an invitation from the Government to go to Valencia for a special assignment leaving on the same day as Eric Blair.

It was five days before he got back with his discharge but at the POUM HQ in Barcelona everyone was issued with riffles and cartridges because an attack on the city was feared. He had to go from hospital place to hospital place to sort out his discharge . When his papers was eventually stamped he descided to take a look at Spain for the first time and he appears to have made visits to Lerida and Barbastro during the day or over a day before returning very late  to Barcelona although it is confusing given what he said about Eileen‘s concern and the wish to return to England quickly and also because of what was happening in Barcelona.  Without taxis it was too late to go to the Sanitoirum so he made his way to where Eileen was staying, stopping for dinner beforehand.

When he got to hotel he found Eileen looking relaxed in the louneg rising to greet him without emotion she put her arm tound his neck and whispered Get Out.

Get out of here at once after he had  exclaimed what? Don’t stand there you must go outside quickly. She ws leading him out and going down the stairs where  he met a Frenchman he knew who confirmed what Eileen had been trying to say, You must not come in here Get out and hide yourself before they ring the police.  He then met a member of he hotel staff also a POUM supporter who explained that the Government had suppressed POUM, seizing the buildings and putting members in prison. “They say they are shooting people already,” he added.   He and Eileen found a quiet cafe and she explained what had happened while he was away.

On June 15th the police had arrested the head of POUM in Barcelona and arrested everyone at the Hotel Falcon mostly militia men on leave. The hotel was converted into a prison. Next day POUM was declared an illegal organisation and the offices, book stalls, sanatoria and Red Aid centres were seized. The police arresting all members and associates. Almost all forty members of the Executive committee were in prison within a couple of days. Eileen had heard that some 400 hundred had been arrested in Barcelona alone. They had dragged wounded men from the hospitals. There were rumnours  that some of those arrested had been shot.  The arrests continued for months after he had departed and ran into thousands. He mentions one couple both arrested where the husband immediate disappeared and his wife remained in jail for two months, without a trial. She started a hunger strike for news of her husband and was told he was dead.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        She was released and then rearrested.

Some of their English friends and other foreigners had got immediately across the border. Others the police had taken including Georges Kopp.  I will look at the role of  Kopp and what happened to him later although on the run Orwell and his wife got to see Kopp in prison before they departed. They established that Kopp had returned from Valencia after visiting  the Ministry of War with a letter to the commander of  the Engineering operations on the eastern front. It had not occurred to him he would be arrested  on his way to the front with papers  for a special mission and came back to the Hotel for his kit bag, missing Eileen who was out at the time and  the hotel staff had notified the police as requested.

Eileen remained at the hotel and was not arrested, the couple taking the view that she was  being watched as a means of capturing Blair.  Their room had been searhed by plain clothed policemen in the middle of the night. They had removed all papers except their passport and cheque book. These included his diaries, their books and press cuttings  and letters. He later learned that the police had raided the sanitorium removing his possessions. It was agreed it was safer for her to remain at the hotel after this but he needed somewhere to stay for a good night’s sleep.  He destroyed papers  connecting  him to POUM except his official discharge papers  so it could not be claimed he was a deserter. He had difficulty finding somewhere to sleep and learned what is was like to be on the run.  He spent time  at a public bath until learning that the police had raised one and arrested a number of alleged Trotsyists with  the same idea as Eric. It was a place to relax and keep warm.

The couple arranged a meeting at the British Embassy attended also by John McNair.. McNair  born on Tyneside had become organising secretary of the Independent Labour Party and its International representative. In this capacity he had gone to Spain with John McGovern to investigate the role of the Catholic Church in the Civil War and  stayed to run the ILP office in Barcelona, greeting Blair on his arrival and later giving a job to Eileen.  Also present at the meeting was Stafford Cottman another volunteer. They learned that Bob Smillie, gradson of Robert Smillie the Labour Member of Parliament, had been arrested. He died in prison immediately after the arrest and buried, it is presumed to cover up how he died. The young man had left Glasgow Universirty where he was a student to fight Fascism  His death angered Eric.  It was in the afternoon they were able to see Kopp in prison. He was  described as being in excellent despite assuming they were all going to be shot.  Kopp explained the important of fhe letter from the War Ministry that had been taken from him. Blair went to see the Commanding officer to explain the mistake of arresting Kopp on the special government mission in an effort to retrieve the letter. Despite his  limited Spanish mixed with French, the letter was duly forwarded  to the Commander of the Engineers but his superiors failed to get him released from prison, as Orwell was to later find out.   

That same evening Orwell, McNair and Cottman slept on the grass at the edge of a derellict building lot. He comments that the Gaudi Cathedral building was hideous and regretted that it had not been blown up by the anarchists. He and his two comrades were leading an insane existence, criminals by night and by day prosperous English visitors. A  bath, shave and a shoe shine does wonder for an appearance. If I appear at my door in old clothes unshaved without my hair sorted I gain a very different reaction when in a suit, collar and tie. There was a warrant  out for the arrest of Mcnair and it was presumed Blair and the others were also on a list. The British consul got their passports in order with a train arranged from Port Bou at seven thirty in the evening so  an eighty thiorty start was probably the earliest time of actual departure. It was proposed to collect Eileen and pay her bill at the last possible moment as it was likely the hotel was required to notify the police of her departure. The train  left at ten to seven! Fortunately they managed to warn his wife  in time The three men had  dinner at a small hotel near the station and find that  the owner was politically friendly thay were given a three bedded room without notifying the police.

They left early the following morning meting up with his wife at the station. He wrote to the Ministry of War while they waited for the train to leave arguing that the arrest of Kopp was a mistake. In the radio play it was Eileen who pressed him about  trying to release Kopp.

They cross the frontier without incident. There were detectives on the train taking the names of foreigners but seeing the group in the dining car they were assumed respectable and not questioned. On his journey to Spain he had been warned  to take off his bourgeoise clothes for the anarchists would tear them off him, an exaggeration although at the broder the guards had turned back a smartly dressed couple. At the customs office they were checked on the list of the wanted but because of the general inefficiency thay  had not been included. The first newspaper they saw mentioned the warrant for the arrest of John McNair for espionage.

What is the first thing you do when setting foot outside  a war zone in which you have been involved? He rushed to robacco-kiosk (unaware of course that this act was far more dangerous than for much of the time he had spent in Spain. After this they had their first cup of tea with fresh milk for months. It was several days before he got used to the idea he could buy tobacco whenever and wherever he wanted. Their two companion went on to Paris which became the base of the ILP.

McNair was born in Boston Lincolnshire in 1887  and moved to here on Tyneside with his family at an early age. He left school at 13 years and became an errand boy. And my earliest memories after the war when I assisted my care mother as she struggled to work out  bills and change in a various shops along the main Wallington High Street was to see errand boys with their bicycles and  baskets delivering purchases all day and every day except Sundays and Wednesday afternoons.  

McNair became General Secrteary of the Independent Labout Party in 1939 and held the post until 1955, the year I left school, having moved their officers to Glasgow.  He then returned to Tyneside and complete a first degree at the University of Durham, studying French and English History, Greek and Roman Culture at the age of 72. He then obtained a master’s degree on the work of George Orwell    

And Eric Blair, Eileen and Georges Kopp, theirs is another story

Homage to Catalonia part 2

I decided to take a break from reading and writing about George Orwell’s participation in the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia. In the time between the first writing and this I reached he conclusion that because of his rush to get to the front he had no time to examine how the worker’s city of Barcelona functioned in practice and when he returned its functioning was already being dismantled. For those of us with a leaning towards non violent local based syndicalism it was the first and the last occasion that a major city on the western democracies had moved in such a direction. The only examples there has been in the UK is the way miners tended to run their communities, especially in Fife in Scotland, nut in  communities in South Wales, in Yorkshire and Durham in particular miners and their families became a tribe part from the rest much like prison officers and the military and their encampments. Go to the supermarket at the centre of Catterick Camp and experience at first hand what I mean. Those engaged in direct action in the UK against weapons of mass destruction or the civil rights movement in the USA also understand the sense of being part of something yet also separate.  In Spain, Eric Blair who had spent all his life feeling apart from the majority  experience being one of many, perhaps the majority.

I have only visited Barcelona on day visits, at night to see the fountains, a daytime visit to a bullfight where  I left at half time having seen enough to confirm my prejudices. I have  visited the Gaudi Cathedral, still in its making and the site of the Olympic Games, walked the Rambalas, and driven past the magnificent Football stadium. My impression is of a city of apartments although.  I saw little of the outskirts or the industrial plants to obtain any meaningful impression without having stayed in the city and walked more or engaged with its people. It is a very different place from the coastal resorts where I have stayed in the North or had one quick hot and tiring trip along the coast in the South on an escorted trip from Gibraltar.

Reflecting on what I had read and written so far my main reaction was at the Black and White which Orwell had approached the War and so far he did not appear to appreciate that this was country of man against country man, neighbour and work mate against neighbour and workmate, soldier and against soldier, catholic against catholic and division within extended families and indeed within some nuclear families. Is it surprising that the ordinary people were reluctant to try and kill each other, apart from the ideological fanatics, and personal power seekers? Is it surprising that they attempted to persuade each other to change sides rather than kill?

The fourth chapter ends with a Fascist aeroplane coming over their position and instead of dropping bombs, there was a leaflet which announced the fall of the city of Malaga. It is my understanding that the Republican forces and most of the population decided to withdraw, leaving the remaining population to the fate of the advancing Italian troops who without the same understanding that these were fellow countrymen, women and children, set about machine gunning down the civilian population  including those who had already fled the city.

In mid February Blair and the others made a fifty mile truck ride to join the forces attempting to take the town of Huesca. Having taken another town in the area the promise was made that tomorrow, we will have coffee in Huesca. There had been several bloody attacks but the city had not fallen and Orwell says that if he was to return to Spain he would make a point of visiting Huesca to enjoy coffee one morning. Clearly he did not do so at the time.

It is on reading the next chapter that I find Orwell recognised the shortcomings of his original reaction to the political situation in Barcelona and the rest of Spain. He had not been interested in the political and was unaware of it. He had no notion of what kind of war it was.

The reason I have become so interested in the life as much as the writings of Eric Blair is that the more I read the more I believe there is considerable similarity between  our personalities and the development of our political outlook. Like Blair I rushed into supporting the extreme end of those involved in the Gandhian Satyagraha rooted direct action protests against weapons of mass destruction and it was only after I had been to prison that I commenced to take a more in depth look at the interests involved and the motives of the individuals  involved. It is a good coincidence that for different reasons I checked my birth name on Google once more and discovered that a book was published in 2011 by Sean Scalmar looking at the rise of radical Protest in the UK and the USA based on Gandhian Satyagraha which makes reference in one of his copious footnotes to the letters written to the Direct Action Committee on behalf of Peter Brown (the author of Smallcreeps Day) and I proposing a Gandhian style march ending with a direct action protest at the USA nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch and our response to the protest after it had taken place. We had the same belief and commitment as those workers in Barcelona, despite having recently volunteered to spend six months in prison rather than giving an oral undertaking not to participate in protests for a period of two years. It was only then I began to fully understand the extent of the differences between the various factions making up the leadership of the anti nuclear movement. We were both to improve our understanding and adapt our position to changed circumstances

On returning from Spain, based on his diaries and memories, Blair wrote  that the revolutionary atmosphere of Barcelona “attracted me deeply but I had made no attempt to understand it,” and he was exasperated by the number of political parties and trade union with their different names which he considered tiresome. It only on arriving outside Huesca when someone said that the Socialists were  positioned on their left that he queried,” I thought we were socialists? “

Orwell uses this event to introduce his understanding of the Civil War and its origins, he confirms my understanding outlined in the first part that Franco did not come to power to introduce Fascism in Spain but with  help of the  church and the aristocracy to return Spain to is Feudalism before the first mild democratic government had taken office. The consequence of this is that Franco had against him not just the working class but also various sections of the liberal bourgeoisie and I suspect many who would not describe themselves as liberal. Orwell incorrectly assumed that it was only the bourgeoisie who supported Fascism thus not appreciating the traditionalism, the conservatism, patriotism, anti outsider and tribalism of the working class, particularly the politicised and trade union working class. I also had found this in prison and in my work with poor families with multiple problems when I worked for a Family Service Unit  in Salford throughout the summer of 1962.

What happened in Spain is that the working class opposition to the arrival of Franco was to move from accepting the democracy to engaging in revolution.  Land was sized,  factories seized, often by the trade unions, and churches wrecked with many priests killed. This led to the reaction by the Catholic church and their support for Franco. The opposition to Franco was not the elected government as such but the trade unions. Blair reports that in the street fighting 3000 people were killed in a single day. Once the blood letting starts it is difficult to stop. For purposes of propoganda to the outside world the civil war was represented as Christian patriots versus blood letting Bolsheviks, which in many respects it was, or at least became, and good republicans (Orwell says gentlemanly) quelling a military revolt against the democratic  government, which it also was. The reality was that not just the western capitalist countries but Stalinist Russia was opposed to the kind of workers revolutuion that had  taken place.  More recently we have seen how this kind of revolt in Egypt although brought down one regime has been quickly replaced by another with the help of a other countries whose systems and motives are often in conflict.  Importantly In Egypt the revolt was non violent and therefore the leaders who emerged remain whereas in Spain it was more easy to get rid of them because they has used force and committed atrocities.

Through the various phases of Government during the first  year of the Spanish civil war it had moved more and more to the right  ending with a right wing socialists Liberals and the Stalinist communists. POUM, the syndicalists and the anarchists  were moved out. This appears to be part of the deal with Russia as they commenced to supply weaponry to the official government for its defence.  The arms were made available through the Communist party and those allied to the Communist Party and the Communists openly said they were non revolutionary in their approach and thus gained support from many on the left who were also not revolutionaries. By the autumn of 1937 the Socialists organisations were claiming that they respected  private property, When the tide turned and even after Franco won, it was the Communists who led the hunt to track down and eliminate the revolutionaries. 

POUM which Orwell was part of its forces because of the ILP links was not just fully behind the revolution that had taken place in Barcelona, and  elsewhere, but rightly in my view believed that any comrpomise on what they had achieved would be their doom. They resisted the “bourgeoisifying” of the  workers   militia   and police force. If the workers did not control the armed forces the armed forces would control the workers. 

Orwell then explains the problem with people calling themselves anarchists and belonging to organisations and  groups which the pure anarchist will argue is contradiction.  Orwell explains that the two million strong grouping of the anarchist was  largely made up of former socialists against the centralised state, whether a capitalist or socialist state, and were more interested in workers controls than parliamentary government. Orwell argues that the anarchism of liberty and equality  was so deep rooted in Spain that it would outlive Communism. I wonder what in fact happened to this significant anarchist movement and what the position is now.

I have only read the Wikipedia article on  the subject and it is a good one making the point that the anarchism was not ideological but borne out of fhe rural economy in Spain with its Federal and individualistic history. The CNT party, now split into two groups is said to have some 50000 members.  a significant number  in terms of the generality of political involvement as Party members that exists today in most west European countries. This may be because of the extent to which the Communists and then Franco persecuted the anarahcists with hundreds of thousands executed or imprisoned. Apparently there were 30 attempts to kill Franco, none succeeding and violent resistence to his regime until the early 1960’s.

This was the context which Orwell says he became aware of the feuding that was going on between the different groups and interests which made up the Anti Franco coalition. Thus he came to appreciate that the Communists and those allied were saying with slogans, posters, radio propoganda  that he and his comrades were Trotskyists, Fascists, Traitors, Murderers, Spies                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   and more.  He ends the chapter reflecting that he had never joined POUM as a party and given subsequent events he wishes that he had. I like that about                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           the man.      

Blair returns to his war experience in Chapter six admitting that at the time he was still of a mind to join an International Brigade and place himself under effective  communist control because  of the military inactivity of his front the time. He describes becoming vermin infested and the shortages and that as the end of March came he had developed a poisoned hand that had to be lanced. I had such an experienced in childhood. His infection was more serious and he spent ten days away from the line at a clearing station hospital.

And then there were the rats. Some as big as cats. They were  big  that they did not run away unless you shot at them. In the radio drama he is criticised for wasting a  bullet attempting to shoot one. He may therefore write about rats again and this experience according to the Drama Jura about the writing of 1984 is what led to have used the rats in  the room 101 torture scene at the end of  the story, after his sister encountered rats on the island.

It has also remembered that the revolution that took place in Spain occurred in the countryside as much as the town and Orwell in describing the arrival of Spring noted that the “peasants” ( his word) were spring  ploughing fields where the land owners had gone and fields appeared to be divided up between the agricultural workers rather than collectivised as happened in Russia and then in China, taking several decades to understand that this was a recipe for disaster. Blair`` was struck by the friendliness of  agricultural workers.

So far I had also found little written about religion by Orwell but in chapter six he observes that there appeared to be little religious feeling in this part of Spain and he never saw anyone cross themselves during his whole time in Spain. He does anticipate the return of Catholicism and its Spanish Church despite its collapse and refers to the Church of England in an aside as moribund. He describes the Church of the Inquisition as having become a racket and replaced by anarchism.`

Hr describes that in May on the cold night he had experienced the line was moved, quietly to a  new trench close to the Fascist line. He also mentions that ambulances would not come to the front because it was understood by  both sides that they  were being used carry ammunition and therefore were regarded as fair targets. We are then back to the rats which were swarming in the trench and he noted with pride being able to punch one flying.

His hand having repaired in time for participating in a small group participating in an attack for which he prepared with a hunk of bread, three inches of red sausage and a cigar which his wife had sent from Barcelona via George Kopp who come to direct action, addressing him in Spanish and then in English. In order not to shoot each other they were to wear white armbands except it was discovered these had not yet arrived.

In the radio play there is reference to the arrival of Eileen in Barcelona to work at the ILP office, the meeting with George Kopp and that her his accepted his offer to go for a meal. There was to be talk  that the two had an affair, and Eric thought so accusing his wife. I speculate why Kopp chose Orwell and his group to undertake a dangerous mission to capture a Nationalist position partly up a hillside.

Meanwhile Orwell was getting his wish for action and found himself throwing not one but two grenade bombs as another landed close to him from the other side wounding those around him. He threw and then ducked quickly not looking to see where his throws had landed. The enemy was firing their riffles as were comrades behind, one going close to his position. After throwing his third grenade bomb which landed on the target the order was given to charge, although his description was that of a lumber. On arrival he found that everyone had departed with  the exception of one man he chased as he successfully escaped to a higher position  where his comrades provided safety.

Eric mentions using a small electric torch his wife had purchased for him in Barcelona. Although they found plenty of ammunition they wanted riffles to replace their own which jammed from the mud and general lack of good condition. More importantly they wanted the machine gun that fired at them but it had been removed leaving only the tripod. The enemy was counter attacking from above as were  comrades below on several places along the line and his small group was now in the middle with their only booty a powerful telescope. He throws a grenade  bomb at someone firing towards him and the cries indicated the man is wounded which causes him some regret. Then the order comes for them to go back to their line. He failed to understand why.

With Kopp anxious about an officer, his friend, who had not returned, Eric and a couple of Spanish comrades volunteer to bring the wounded or dead man back. Finding themselves under attack they retreat with finding anyone. He estimated that the Fascists had thrown  a couple of hundred men into the counter attack although a deserter said the number had been six hundred. Eric Blair could now write as George Orwell he had fought in a war and survived.

George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia part 1

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

Why Eric Blair, recently married to a woman he found  an intellectual as well as sexual soul mate, should go to kill fascists in the Spanish Civil War, just when also his books are being published in quick succession remains a mystery to me to me, especially as he was not a member of any political party and while being in favour of justice as a sense of fairness, believed himself to be a socialist and against things like Imperialism and Fascism but no more than many educated thinking and caring men and women.

Did the turning point come when at the suggestion of Victor Gollancz he spent a couple of months in Wigan Sheffield and Barnsley and Leeds investigating  social conditions and the lives of the proletariat, going down a mine, listening to an Oswald Moseley speech and attending a meetings or meetings of a local Communist Party.? The outcome was his book the Road to Wigan Pier published in 1937 during his time in Spain. I first skipped through the book online on 12th February 2013, and then pausing to study several aspects and appreciated that while, the trip was recommended to him, Blair had defined himself as an intellectual socialist who needed to gain first hand knowledge and the perspective of those who made up the proletariat. His findings led to the question why are not the majority of people in UK socialists and demanding and taking action?

The book is in three parts. The first chapter is a kind of forward and an extension to Down Out in Paris and London in that he stays in a doss house in Wigan where in theory the wife runs the accommodation with the help and a daughter and daughter to be and the husband  runs a Tripe shop on the ground floor. We learn about the conditions of the accommodation and shop, the people who run it and the other residents. In reality as with Down and Out he or his editors juggled the truth for literary and commercial convenience for just as he went tramping before going to Paris, he went to Wigan before going down the pits and staying at the homes of miners and which I believe had the greatest of impact on his thinking as it has all those who have live and worked among those who once made up the mining community, separate hierarchy from the rest of proletariat, including those working in the shipyards and steel works often regarded as the industrial elite, in the same way that the scaffolders and structure makers of the building trades or the marines and other special forces are elites of the armed services.

The next two chapters covers his experience of going down a pit, making the point that to take in the life underground you need to visit several times and he communicates the challenge of using the cage to get to the mine floor, then the difficulties getting to the latest seam face and then the difficult business of trying to get clean  as well together with dangers of work, and the diseases of the eyes and chest in the days before nationalization and the dramatic reduction in deaths and accidents that then occurred..

He also spells out the actual earning against the misleading presentation of averages, the stoppages from  what is actually handed, deductions enforced and deductions voluntary. There are then chapters on the housing conditions and the cost living as well as the reality of the level of unemployment and the difference between the official figures and the numbers who would work but are unable to do so. One has to judge this book in terms of the situation and public awareness at the time and in the context of other books that attempted to describe the lives, the working conditions and the  income and expenditure of the poor.

When I studied economic and social history the benchmarks had been set by J L and Barbara Hammond in their books on the Village and Town Labourer 1760 to 1832. Then there was Henry Matthew on London’s Labour and London’s Poor on the 1840’s. G D H Cole  wrote his masterpiece history of the British Working Class Movements in 1925 and then in 1948 he published his update to 1947 and which is matched by his work with Raymond Postgate,  The  first part  of  the Road to Wigan Pier is more journalism than social study but he provides hard facts about what people earn and what they have to spend and something of conditions in which they live and he rightly gives prominence to the miners and their conditions and which was further brilliantly exposed in Clancy Sigal‘s book Weekend on Dinlock, published as a novel two decades later.

Blair goes down the coal mine and describes the conditions in which the men work in considerable detail communicating the hardship and the dangers together with the impact on their lives. “ Most of the things you imagine are there, the heat, the noise the darkness and the foul air.  The aspect that one tends to forget is that as one approaches the coal face it is impossible to walk upright and Blair at over six feet found this very difficult and a journey of one mile takes hour whereas the experienced miner whose limbs have adjusted to the conditions will take twenty minutes. Then getting out the coal with pick axe is a problem because unlike above ground you have to work at best on your knees and one reason why miners  take so long to clean themselves  is that dust gets everywhere and they wear just thin trunks and shin pads with clogs on their feet. It is not surprising that the bodies of the miners are covered with scars and that injuries are common. I have looked at the lists of the dead in the mines here in South Shields, in Jarrow, Hebburn, Bolden and Whitburn, and  then horrifying number of women, the high percentage of  young men and boys 14 to 20, of the totals alarming in themselves, that is before nationalization when safety became the priority it ought to have been and numbers plummeted  to almost zero such as in pits like Westoe colliery where men went files miles under the North Sea here in South Shields.

He also describes he use of the power drills and of explosives which if the charge is too powerful with bring down the roof as well as bring out the coal. And  he has to work  continuously and at pace to achieve the two tons an hour required and you try shifting two tons of earth an hour above ground! He makes the point that even where the mines have pithead baths these have come out of their  own welfare fund and that the numbers of baths available is inadequate. The consequence is that while moat miners are able to clean their face, getting the dust out of the eyes and nostrils and with the help of mothers and wives from their backs it is only at weekends that many are fully clean to the church or chapel or going to match on Saturdays and for a drink at the at the welfare club afterwards. Ten there are disability illnesses of the eye and the chest.

My bench mark novel for describing the nature of coal mining is not Richard Llewellyn How Green was my Valley, which I  also possesses  and which was made into an excellent film which is still occasionally shown on a  film channel, but the almost now unknown Weekend in Dinlock by the American Clancy Sigal which was published in 1960 and I have  the first  Penguin Books print 3/6 1962. At the time reference was made to following in the footsteps of Orwell because he locates  his mine in the Barnsley area now regarded as south Yorkshire although  when I was there a  few years later it was part of the West Riding County Council with its HQ in Wakefield for whom I worked. Sigal is now better known as a film script writer and with his best known contribution as a co writer of the important film of the life of Frida Kahlo, a film based on a biographical work by Hayden Herrea both of which I possess and value, and for his autobiographical novel Going Away which was published just after Weekend in Dinlock.

Clancy Sigal’s book builds up to his fictionalised visit down a mine and his description is no less vivid and although by then  the pitheads had baths and the main thoroughfares were well lit but with developing technology the depth of workings had become greater as had the distance required to travel to the pitface  and whereas in Orwell’s book, his guide adjust his pace to that of the visitor, Sigal finds it impossible to keep up and lags behind losing contact, such was his difficulty and because of heat and foul air constantly hitting his well covered head he become dizzy and he has to pinch himself from passing out

Both books, a quarter of a century apart go into some detail about wages with Orwell makes the point that only those at the coal face, rather like train drivers on the railways earn the best wages, but the work is paid according to tonnage with some of the best rates in Scotland and those in Durham at the lower end. In the days before social security miners in Yorkshire paid  1/3 for unemployment Infirmary 2p Hospital 1p Benevolent fund 6p and Union fees 6p and they were also required to pay for their individual lamps at 6p a week, for sharpening their tools 6p and the check weigh man 9p.The men also contributed a shilling a week towards the welfare of window and the children of  colleagues who had been killed.

For often around £2 a week  £100 -130 as year at best the coal face man is producing a vast tonnage which worked out at 280m tons a year per mineworker, that is those working above and below ground, the maintenance men, those move the coal face from the face to the surface, weighing and grading in addition to the coal face men and with production having risen 10% over the previous two decades.

Sigal also looks at wages where by 1960 the conditions at the pit head as well as coal face had improved but the wages has become close to the top end of the manual worker, as they should and he devotes the greater part of the novel to describing the way of life, the nature of the mining community and this reveals the extent to which the miner  and those who worked in the shipyards when they existed and steel works had the cash in hand to drink regularly at the club especially at weekends when they went with their wives or girlfriend and this included shorts where they  got drunk, many fighting drunk.

I had one Sunday lunch experience of a miners club  which was well packed out on two floors by several hundred men slowly supping pints and reading in comparative silence behind the popular Sunday  papers.    This was after the Sunday night knees up with their wives and entertainment. I met the committee in their room and then joined everyone for drinks and the Bingo. In the days when Orwell investigated women were only allowed into  the clubs on the Saturday evening, but by the mid 1970’s there were  sessions of Bingo for the ladies each week. Sunday lunch time was the men’s Bingo with cuts of meat  for some of the prizes but the main prize was a month’s wages after which the men went home to their families and Sunday lunch between 2 and 3 depending on which part for the estate they lived or indeed if they came from further affield.

Clancy  married one the sixties British feminists so he paid particular attention in the novel to the traditional industrial culture of the menfolk who could live with their wives being found in another‘s bed more than cope with being found washing up the dishes. This was not as chauvinistic as it sounds because after your shift upon shift underground you did not have much energy for anything else, as Clancy records the moan of the wives, uttered behind the backs of the men  was about the lack of personal attention, and their at times hatred for the life they found themselves although in front of their man they would keep silent,  until the drink  took its toll on the Saturday and returned to comfort of their homes, albeit sometimes with a best mate or two and their women. Relationships were often direct and raw and the rough stuff was not restricted to union and political matters with the children awoken treated roughly mostly playfully but as indeed as I was to find out worse, much worse.

Clancy describes attending union meetings, club committees and conversations with some of bigwigs in this hierarchy of proletariat hierarchies and what he said shows an appreciation  of the realities.  t Eric Blair also attended political meetings, including those of the Communist Party and an Oswald Moseley gathering but rather than detailing these, the second part of his book is a general statement of his views on the true nature of poverty in the UK,  on class and a accurate but depressing conclusion that fundamental change would not take place from the main political parties and that was needed was new approach. The Second World War with all his horrors, the genocide and the destruction together with the deprivations suffered by the majority of the people and which I experienced throughout my childhood, nevertheless did produce significance changes with the creation of the National Health Service of which I experienced, the Social Security  based Welfare State , the development of public sector Welfare Service, the raising of the school leaving age, an expansion in the provision of public housing, important improvements in health  and safety at work and some progress in the emancipation of women.

Before coming to his political conclusions Blair covers the reality of housing conditions and the true levels of unemployment and of poverty and what interests me especially are the parallels between then and now where because of the mobility between countries and the increased level of home ownership, individual living longer and on their own the need for low cost social housing to rent and own has become even greater although the level of accommodation generally available bears no comparison. I was based in in a portable metal bath during my early years with adults with a  miscellany of aunts and first cousins milling around which I hated, and my mother in law only had an internal bathroom and  toilet added to her council estate house in the late 1960’s we were so overcrowded that I slept at one end of a double bed with my care mother and my birth mother and another sister at the other until after my eleventh year, in fact I had moved from independent primary to secondary level education schools before a two bedroom requisitioned property was allocated.

He also explodes the myth about the numbers registered for employment i.e. the unemployed put two million, reflected  the numbers  actually out of work because in most households females of working age and sons of working age would not be registered as only one person per household was eligible for full benefit during the period when his unemployed insurance was valid. He was given   17/- a week as the head and 9/-  if married for his wife plus 3/- for each child under 14r that is 32/ for a family with two children unless there were older children earning when the income was allowed. There was then a transitional period of payment of 26 weeks before you were required to seek help from the Public Assistance Committee and whose records of Committee in South Shields I studied, inherited in my office in 1974 and where for example a woman if she had a second illegitimate child was not given relief but committed to a lunatic asylum, as  hospital mental health facilities were then described.

So the average family, whether short term or long term unemployed with two to three children averaged 30/- a week of which it was assumed a quarter would go on rent and by any standards then they were poor, with those who were single, including the elderly worse hit plus all those whose income from work, often part time work such as Dockers and those in the building trades amounted to the same or less, and he concluded, with a figure challenged at the time of one third or more of the population was living in physical poverty and without proper educational  opportunity  and good health care. Given that a substantial number of other people were concerned about this situation he posed the question why are more people not Socialists willing to take political, industrial and other action? And the main reason he gives is class in the UK, class that can be defined and class that is felt. This he discusses at length in Chapter 8 which he begins by admitting that the road  from Mandalay ( where he trained as  a policeman ) and Wigan had been along one ( lasting over ten years) and the reasons for taking onto this road  were not immediately clear, to which I add and to kill and be killed in civil war between people with whom you have had no previous involvement,  is not clear to me, except that I assume  that he stopped at Gibraltar on his way out and back from  Burma.

He explains that he felt he needed to see at first hand what mass unemployment was like at its worst at close quarters because he accepted  that views and position of the intellectual socialist was very different from the working man. Even as late as 1975 I came across the view that if a married man applied for the same job as a woman, he would get preference irrespective of whether the female was better qualified and experienced, and some older men continue to hold this view. This is first written declaration that I have seen that Eric Blair saw himself as an intellectual socialist and separated from the proletariat by his background and class from which eh struggles to free himself, claiming greater success than most of the intellectual socialists of his day

Blair says he was born into the upper middle class an assessment with which I also concur although the position was reinforced by his public school education and going to Eton in particular, which remains an important cross over point with the upper class. However he then defines his social status in money terms for between £2000 and £3000 a year with father at the lower end, but admits the English class is not defined by money as the middle class can include  those with incomes are as low as £300 a year. A naval officer and a grocer may earn the same  amount a year and on issues such a war or a general  strike they might be on the same side but in other respects they would live in different worlds. He suggests that until the first World War the primary consideration was whether you were a gentleman or not and the positions open to the gentleman with no land or inherited wealth included the Army, the Navy, the Church, Law and to less extent medicine. Such an individual knew about servants and how to  tip although at most you would have was two in your residence and you might know how to shoot and to ride and how to order a suit and which restaurants to go to but in practice you could not afford a tailor or the best of restaurants. He argued that these were not the real bourgeoisie who were in the £2000 a year position and with they financial padding between themselves and those the plunder. Because of this analysis he therefore included in the poor not just  those who produced  by their manual labour or who would work in such occupations if they could but also a vast swathe of people who would consider themselves middle class through their gentility.  There is much with this analysis  that I agree not just in the 1930s but which is carried through to the sixties and where there are vestiges to this day, The concept of gentility has almost disappeared. Those who wear suit are regarded differently from the majority who do not and those who were tailored suit are still considered superior. The acquisition of wealth alone is not long considered to be the virtue it was from the maritime adventurer and industrial entrepreneur. Public school and  a region less accent are still considered superior and people covered the order of the British Empire, the bestowing a knighthood and the status of the aristocracy especially in the Counties.

While I believe that class continues to have a negative influence on the politics but the way society works in the UK ones birth, education, accent and financial state is not necessarily an inhibitor to making advancement although there has been less social mobility over the past two decades than over the past 50’s to 70’s according to views, During an online review I came across an article on the politics of George Orwell on the site of Socialist of Great Britain which then pursued the crude Marxist premise that there can be only two classes the capital class who do not produce and the proletariat who do. This is of course nonsense especially with the attached moral implication that to be a capitalist is morally wrong and that to be a member of the proletariat is always good. I mention this because despite the article’s strictures Orwell in chapter 8 shows the same tendency of his class to see manual work as good rather than necessary and that because a  man does a difficult and dangerous job it is OK that he swears, is violent, lacks manners, talks irrationally, is racially prejudice, religiously intolerant and so on. There is also the false assumption that worker a manager. a private an officer without appropriate training he will do as good or a better job than someone who becomes an officer via a middle or upper class background and education. Neither  will do an effective job unless they are properly trained for the task there required and have the  strength of character and the personality to become a confident leader of others.

It is in Chapter nine that I came across more contradictions and much explanation of why Orwell at 33 was on the verge of going to Spain to fight. He admits that at 14 and  15 at Eton he was a snob but no more than the others of his class and generation but this also coincided with the First World War ending and the Russian Revolution and claims it was a queer time to be at school as throughout the nations there was running a revolution feeling. How he knew this at that time is a great puzzle even if it was true which it was not,  no more than what happened after World War II when the mood was for change and given the failure of governments in the 1920 it is to the credit Atlee that he despite the economic constraints and the huge war debt he had he majority to achieve major reforms through the democratic process,  he also claims that people were far more radical in the 1920s than in the later thirties were again is nonsense. The working class has always been reactionary and  small c conservative and remains so There has always been the black economy the selling of knocks off and the get away with it in terms of avoiding effort at work, more so when sanctioned by a union umbrella and exploiting the benefits system. I also found that despite the arrogance, class hatreds and racism which runs through the middle and upper class there is just as great a strand of empathy, tolerance and commitment to ameliorate unjustified  inequalities and  injustice. Blair argues that from an early age he raged against the capitalism system. I do not  believe him.  He joined one of the four strong arms of the imperialist capitalism, the police. He then argues that his approach to the native population was different from all his colleagues yet he remained for five years a feat which I suspect was nigh on impossible in that you either accepted the culture even if you did not wholeheartedly agree with every aspect. He watched the hangings, shot the elephant, beat he prisoners like everyone else, had a man servant dress him and it is difficult to believe that given his life long approach to sex did not avail himself of indigenous women for his bed. I am also  inclined to challenge his assertion that he came to hate imperialism before his return to England. He returned to England on holiday recuperation from fever and only then decided to resign and become a writer. In other words I am suggesting that even when he came to write the second part of the Road to Wigan Pier hew as still working through his prejudices and trying bridge the gulf he felt between his views and feelings and those all around him. It was only by going to Spain, and seeing what happened when the when the Stalin directed communists turned on POUM and the anarchists and  was shot in the throat that he began to grasp the reality of the words he had been writing and the experience destroyed the myopic vision he had until then.

As I write this I appreciate that I am doing a great disservice and misrepresentation of this normal man, just as complex as most but prepared to cross the line, step off the edge to find out not just what doing so was like but how doing so reinforced or modified his views at that time. I suspect that he grasped that it is possible to hold contradictory views at the same time and to know that something is right or wrong without necessarily being able to articulate or explain.  My conclusion is that he was stronger about recording his own processes than he was about those of other people  something which he admitted in relation to proletariat but found more difficult to accept in relation to the bourgeoisie.

Blair admits in Chapter 10 that making friends with Tramps, beggars and other social outcasts does not  solve the problems of poverty and social inequality and that they are no more typical of the working class than the literary intelligentsia are typical of the bourgeoisie.. What he says is that he was able to get on with and close to those members of the underclass he encountered than the working class with which he mingled in the lodging houses or when staying with miners in their homes.. He then makes several revealing admissions first saying that it is no good clapping a working man or the back as saying he is as good a man himself. Don’t be ridiculous Eric whose says you are a good man and who says the particular working man is a good man?. Your talking simplistic literary hogwash!  He then attacks the ILP members he encountered for not being proletarians  yet believing that they knew what was right or better for the working class than themselves, Again this is a simplistic divide. The individual ILP member may or may  not have known what was right just as the individual member of the proletariat may get it horribly wrong. You miss the whole point of equality under the  law... The working man or woman an the  occupationally unemployed  man or woman has just the same right as Orwell to stand for election to a political office, right to a job etc conditional only on being approved by a political party or gaining sufficient nominations to stand as an independent, or to  be considered for a job with appropriate qualifications, training and experience. They should then be judged by their performance, not what they said before or after or matters unrelated to the political position or  occupational post. Collectively a group of educated land owning and or wealthy business may make a better or worse job of running a county council as a group of trade unionist and manual worker housewives than running a London Borough and vie versa irrespective of political party labels and policies, just as no reorganisation works as  designed or hoped for unless you recruit people who have helped devise the reorganisation and or understand and believe in it.

In Chapter 11 he poses the question What about Socialism? I was struck by his 1930 comment that even the middle class for the first time in their history are feeling the pinch. What would you make of now Eric or of the 13 years of Labour Government? He then makes the statement that socialism if applied world wide would give everyone enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything else! Blair expresses amazement that socialism was not  progressing, going backwards with the Fascists going forward. He then goes on to criticise those who argue that socialism is no more or else than economic justice and defines his utopian society as somewhere with at its cornerstone family life, the pub, football and local politics and he was not joking.

Where I do agree is that many of those who push ideologies do not communicate that there is a love of anybody, just as I inappropriate told a couple of pontificating pacifists that in reality they were violent men searching for peace for themselves. In this and the next chapter he makes some attempt to understand the good and the bad aspects of Fascism well as Communism as a means of understanding why an increasing number of people appeared to support Fascism and were turning away from socialism. So far he had not defined what socialism is to him in any meaningful way and he concludes the chapter by stating that it is primarily justice and freedom. In his  final chapter he asserts that anyone who has a  genuine hatred of tyranny and war must be on the socialist side and goes on to say that the role of thinking man is not to reject socialism but to humanize it. A real socialist will want to overthrow tyranny. The issue of class as distinct from mere economic status has got to be faced more than it had been. He goes on to argue that there no chance of righting the conditions which he has described or preventing Fascism from taking over in England without bringing an effective socialist party into existence. On returning from Spain he was to join the Independent Labour Party.