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.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

In this next writing on the Real George Orwell I cover the period before he goes to Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War as part of the Independent Labour Party Unit, abandoning  his recently married wife until she is able to also journey to Spain, He begins to have his work published, lives with his parents  and in London works as a teacher and in a bookshop and pursues women. I try and  find out why he went to Spain, a country not previously visited and with whom he had no connections.

In 1931 Jonathan Cape and Faber and Faber rejected Blair’s Scullions Diary later to be known as Down and Out in Paris and London. It was a time when he also set out to experience what it was like to be in prison over Christmas got himself drunk and disorderly. The magistrates decided that a couple of days in police cells was sufficient. He does not appear to try again although he gives a fictional account of the experience in Keep the Aspidistra Flying which I purchased in 1963 when living and working in Oxford. My efforts to go to prison at the younger age of 20 were more successful

In 1960 I participated in a civil disobedience demonstration at a USA rocket base in Northamptonshire having posed with a grappling iron, I had no intention of using, at the suggestion of a freelance photographer employed by Peace News holding  the instrument he provided  and which I dropped before sitting down with over 70 others who were arrested outside the main gates.

About 70 refused bail including, the daughter of High Court Judge, and we were remanded from the Saturday afternoon until the Monday morning. The majority of the men were taken to Bedford Jail where everyone but me and another were accommodated in the Library and had a great time whereas I and the other young man, being under 21 were treated as young persons on remand and kept separately locked up for 24 hours apart for two periods of half an hour exercise.  I hated this experience, albeit brief because on the Monday a leading lawyers successfully argued our case before the magistrates and we were discharged and if there were conditions these appear not to have been recorded.

I was soon sitting down  again, this time at the suggestion of a Liberal  Parliamentary Candidate outside South Africa House in protest against the Sharpville Shootings, fined £2 which was paid; and then in a country road in Essex, miles from anywhere, with no one else present apart from some thirty demonstrators, fifty or more police and  a couple of dozen news people.

Technically the police blocked the roadway but the charge was obstruction  of a police officer. Our  objective had been to march to the gates of the  Foulness Weapons of Mass Destruction Research Centre. In the court which was ready for us at Southend we were asked to pay a small fine or seven days and the majority refused. However my experience lasted four days at Brixton, sharing a cell with five other unconnected with the demonstration, because someone somewhere worked out that any funds in our possession less travel money should be  deducted from the fine. Deciding that the authorities had not taken our protest seriously  and by 15 votes to 13 we repeated the demonstration a week later and of the 15 participating, I cast my vote with heavy heart because I hated the prison experience as I anticipated with the Treasury solicitor prosecuting  but of the 15, 13 accepted the one month for refusing to pay the £50 pound fine and six month concurrent as an alternative for  refusing to give our word not to continue such action for a period of two years. The six months were spent in Brixton, Eastchurch, Brixton, Drake Hall and Stafford. All 13 completed the six months and two, Lady Jane Buxton and Margaret Turner wrote a good book about their experience and then with Lord Stonham (the former MP Victor Collins) they formed a group which they asked me to chair, resurrecting The Prison Reform Council which published 100 suggestions for Prison reform under the Title Inside Story, many of which the Government agreed should be implemented after a meeting with Lord Jellico Minister of State at the Home Office, a post Lord Stonham was himself able to fill and, and who arranged a debate on the subject in the House of Lords which I attended and where I met a Bishop whose daughter I was to meet again at criminology seminars at Nuffield College, Oxford.

It was the Home Office which found a place for me at Birmingham University and provided financial support as well as course fees. It was a Regional Inspector of the Home office who took me out to lunch one day and advised on my future conduct if I was to be successful in my application to become one of the New Directors of Social Services in 1971 and it was Sir Keith Joseph who approved my appointment as he only local authority chief officer to have  gone to prison before their appointment. Two decades later I had a pass into the car park of the Home Office as a member of a national committee which they hosted

All very interesting this may be but what I hear someone ask has this to do with George Orwell and his autobiographical work about the Spanish Civil War Homage to Catalonia? George was an insider of high rank who longed to become a proletariat insider but who spent most of life as  an artistic outsider observing himself and others, then recording as fact or fiction and usually mixing up both and my impression is that only occasionally he felt part of and involved  feeling fully alive, I was an outsider of lowly rank who became an insider of middling to upper rank and who returned to being an outsider but content with what I am doing and although back to being alone, not lonely. Within this frame worth there are similarities and connections as well as coincidences.

The prison aspect I have explained because in Orwell’s case he was first motivated from a desire to experience directly as a participant, not as an observer reporting or as  material for some literary work, a force which explains a much many of his actions of his actions.

In my case it was not an experience I wanted but felt it was important as part of a cause having understood the nature of a Satyagraha, only recently discovering that correspondence of mine was used in a book about Gandhi influence on the rise of protest in the West(Gandhi in the West, The Mahatma and the Rise of Radical Protest  by Sean Scalmer, Cambridge University press) see1 *  and which I shall review in due course.

Like me Eric Blair was not a pacifist as we both accepted the use of force by governments in defence of their people. However as a young man he enjoyed shooting  birds and animals, beat native prisoners when in Burma, shot an elephant, witnessed an official hanging (to be covered in a broadcast next Monday(Feb 18th 2013) and wanted to kill Fascists choosing to find a  way to get to Spain do so. Ill health  prevented fighting in the Second World War and failed in a plan to become a spy in France. I was  medically unfit for national Service.

It is also evident from the writings read to date that he was against Imperialism as a result of his experience in Burma, and in Down and Out in Paris and London he liked he comradeship and sharing of  the dispossessed and lowly paid hard working although he was also objective and realistic about the stealing and the hierarchies and snobbishness within the proletariat something he was to refer to again when first going to Barcelona in the heady days of POUM control (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxisto) pro worker but anti Stalin, He also was against injustice and after Spain he was a fervent anti Stalinist/Communist, becoming the darling of the embryonic CIA and denouncing everyone he knew who support the Soviets especially those at the BBC but I am way ahead of myself and for the moment I will leave the thought that I am not sure what he was for, except justice as fairness. He was not a member of any political party until  coming back from Spain.

My belief is that politics was not his driving force but the need to experience things at first hand, to feel part of rather than the observer from the outside. While against conventional suburban life and conventional marriage and  his anti hero in Keep the Aspidistra Flying  says “But he had taken an oath against marriage long ago. Marriage was only a trap set for you by the money God. You grab the bait and snap goes the trap; and there you are, chained by the leg to some good job till they cart you to Kensal Green. And what a life “licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra?” There would be pram pushing and sneaky adulteries. But then he also realised that not being married had is  downside.

I also believe that until he went to Spain Blair was still searching for a unique voice as a writer, despite several publications, and he also wanted a core sense of his  identity. After Paris he returned to the bourgeois home of his parents writing and painting and going on expeditions into the world of poverty under the name Burton, a man who liked to possess and change his identities, Blair, Burton and Orwell? Suggesting someone not happy with what he was and had been! 

Orwell provides a rational explanation, Burton was used to differentiate from his normal life on his tramping expeditions and the need to get into being a different character. He chose George Orwell, he says, because it sounded a rounded English name and he did not want his tramping activities to embarrass his family. In this afternoon‘s dramatization of his life after in England after Spain he tells an attractive woman from an Oxford College who has come to interview him that his name was also chosen to escape the enemies who threatened him, but if this was said it is not true for the  literary name came with his first publication. One wonders what else he got up to during when under the name of Burton?  The decision top use Orwell meant it was not until just before his death he was contacted by his first love and childhood friend who did not appreciate that her former suitor was the famous author of Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell. She was in a long term relationship with a peer at this time and had a child in an earlier relationship. I suspect had she known and made contact with Blair at this time any relationship then established between them would not have lasted unless she was prepared to tolerate his dalliances.

In 1932 Blair obtained a teaching job at a private preparatory school with one full time master and only twenty boys in Hayes, Middlesex, Greater London, When he returned to Southwold, the parental home at the end of the summer term he is reported to have pursued one Eleanor Jacques and later learn that he was also in correspondence with another young woman although she was already attached. I reflected on what I knew  from what I had and have read about Blair in relation to his attitude towards women including his real relationships and discovered that Daphne Patai has published a full length analysis of some 335 pages on his masculine approach to life (The Orwell Mystique a study in the Male Ideology, (Massachusetts University Press at around £20) with first 120 pages available on line

In 1933 he moved to a school with 200 pupils and a  full complement of staff. It is interesting that he was able to get such post given he not received teacher training or attended university. He bought a motorcycle and follow an excursion contracted pneumonia from which he nearly died returning to his family home once more to convalesce. He had become a seasoned smoker.  With Eleanor Jacques married and out of the country it appears that he cast his mind to creating a Clergyman’s Daughter

He then moved  to a job in a bookshop in Hampstead, over some eighteen months writing in the mornings, working in the afternoons and socializing in the evenings. It was  a job arranged for him by his aunt with friends of hers and this period is said to be the basis for Keep The Aspidistra Flying which is a book I possess and quickly speed read yesterday with its opening chapter about  being bored and unimpressed by the books and the majority of customers. He also wrote an essay Bookshop memories published in 1936 However the book is primarily  about the male sex drive without commitment.

In the book prior to embarking on the life as a writer, book he had worked for an advertising firm as a copywriter  and there meets Rosemary with who in begins an association and who is portrayed as a normal intelligent young woman, a virgin, seeking marriage before sex, concerned about the possibility of pregnancy outside of marriage,   seeking a stable family life in suburbia, but also attracted to Blair. The  book is a critique of suburban life rather than of capitalism and also how  normal domesticity and being a wage slave can prevent artistic creativity.  He loathes his work at the advertising company and leaves to becomes a writer with working in the bookshop brings him in contact with a wealthy and generous man who understands and supports the anti hero’s writing imperative.

When he meets Rosemary again he immediately presses her to sleep with him but she says she would if they were married and marriage is something out of reach on their state of finances, especially his. She offers to buy them a meal  but makes an excuse because the male role is to pay and women do not, and when they go out for the day and to impress her he  takes her for a meal in a hotel, and this consumes most of what he has, he has to borrow from her from the bus fare home, and this stops him having intercourse which she then agrees having earlier backed out with the fear of what would happen if she became pregnant, something which today’s generation do not need to have, but then we did not know of HIV and AIDS.

As I read on I realise this book is an extension  of Down and Out in Paris and London, and what happens when the dispossessed come into money, they immediately spend it on food, drink, cigarettes and on a woman for sex. In this instance he takes Rosemary and the friend to the man’s favourite Italian restaurant which sounds possible Quo Vadis in Soho, a few doors away from the post war Sunset Strip and where he orders not one but two bottles of Asti Spumante rather than Champagne. I am with him on the  Asti vis a vis the champagne, although also used to drink champagne occasionally.

As he gets drunk he wants her and gets her to leave quickly and when he attempts to take her in some back alley she slaps his face and goes off alone. He rejoins the man and they go to a pub where he starts to drink quarts in German style pots and then picks up two tarts, but when he gets one into a hotel room he cannot perform. He ends up drunk in the street and in the hands of the police he hits the sergeant but waking up he remembers nothing of what happened. Fortunately he is likely to be given a choice at court between a fine and imprisonment, avoiding the teetotal magistrates who would have sent him straight to prison for a month.  

He loses his job when his court appearance is reported in the local paper and he dismays Rosemary by refusing to let her attempt to get his job back at the advertising firm. He moves to squalid bug fested rooms but where at least you can be yourself although he is horrified when the landlady produces a dying Aspidistra plant which he regards as the great symbol of suburban existence. He takes a job at another bookstore on reduces wages where he is put in charge of a new two penny dread full’s lending library where the books are mass produced at four a year per author designed to titillate the masses which television today fulfils and aspects of the internet. Rosemary and his friend attempt to persuade him against the move because they and he knows it will stifle his creative abilities and so it does. Eventually after her efforts have failed Rosemary more out of pity than desire offers herself to her and in a cold miserable room they have  loveless and passionless sex which satisfies neither and disappoints both.

Then inevitably, because without the inevitable there would be now story, no book Rosemary is pregnant and lets him know and keeps saying she is not putting  any pressures for him to decide what to do. The idea of an abortion horrifies him so  they get married, in a small sad civil wedding after which they return by taxi paid by the friend to their knew small suburban home and for the anti hero to take the job at the advertising company where he does well and contemplates bringing up  a child with wife staying home to look after on £4.10 a week compared to he £1.30 at the penny dreadfuls, He flushes away the manuscript of his unfinished monumental poetical work and stuns his wife by insisting they need an Aspidistra plant to show off to the neighbours at the front window. One of Gracie Fields popular songs was Biggest Aspidistra in the World.

There is a brief reference to socialism earlier in the book when a friend attempts to get him to read Marx but his central character is not really, but in his writing and in sex. I believe the book accurately depicts his mind set towards women and marriage at that time

Eric Blair had friends who were in the Independent Labour Party and they helped him to move accommodation to Parliament Hill. His landlady was studying for a master’s degree in psychology and held a party for  some of her fellow student  one of whom was Eileen O’Shaughnessy. There has been one film released in 1997 which I have not seen staring Helena Bonham Carter who does not immediately strike me as Rosemary and Richard E Grant, a possible anti hero.   

Eileen was born in South Shields    , attending the Sunderland Church High School  from where she gained  a place at St High’s Oxford University to read English and where one of her tutors was Tolkien, the author of the Hobbit and Lords of the Rings. She had a succession of diverse jobs at a girl Boarding School, as a reader for Dame Elizabeth Cadbury, as a secretary and also open and closed an office for secretarial and typing work in Victoria Street London. A road I know well from when I worked in the area for two years when I left school. She did some free lance journalism and help her  brother  proof reading his scientific papers and books.

Her father  according to Wikipedia was a thoracic surgeon who she described as a natural fascist, a term which some on the left tend to apply to anyone right of centre, and therefore treated as an observation on him with caution. However in an article written in Guardian in 2005, Blair’s biographer D J Taylor he says her father worked for Customs and Excise and after sending him an email to clarify I read further that it was her brother the Thoracic surgeon.

That she was 29 an unmarried when she met Blair is interesting and that he proposed three weeks within meeting and she accepted  on his second attempt and they were married at Wallington ( my Wallington), but another in Hertfordshire  the following Summer where they had a small cottage. In the BBC programme drama called Loving yesterday afternoon the impression given is that Orwell pursued Eileen much as the anti hero pursued Rosemary although in this instance she responded more positively and although the Rosemary was education Eileen had been to Oxford and appears to have been a good intellectual match for Blair who appeared to long to find someone who was bright, sexually desirable and willing. That he has found  a soul mate only adds to my query why did he go off to Spain.

After listening to the two hour long programmes on Orwell and the Civil War Homage to Catalonia I am still uncertain. However before then and before his marriage Victor Gollancz is reported to have suggested that Blair spend a short timer investigating social conditions in economically depressed England (Clancy Segal Weekend in Dinlock) some three decades later and no doubt someone else is doing the same now)

According to Wikipedia he stayed above a tripe shop in Wigan where in went into people homes, study health and social  records  at the library in February  and then went to Sheffield and Barnsley, the latter I know well from have had child responsibilities for a year in the later , went down the Grimthorpe Colliery, listened to a Moseley Speech and to  meetings of the Communist Party and also stayed with his sister in Headingley, which I know well from my visits to the cricket and from the year at Wakefield and Lofthouse down the road from Leeds and also visited the Bronte Parsonage at Haworth, something  have done over a decade ago. The book was not published  until the following year in 1937 but attracted the attention of Special branch who kept him under observation for 12 years until the publication of 1984. I must read the book and will therefore write separately postponing yet again the important experiences in Spain.

* 1. The non-violent protests of civil rights activists and anti-nuclear campaigners during the 1960s helped to redefine Western politics. But where did they come from? Sean Scalmer uncovers their history in an earlier generation's intense struggles to understand and emulate the activities of Mahatma Gandhi. He shows how Gandhi's non-violent protests were the subject of widespread discussion and debate in the USA and UK for several decades. Though at first misrepresented by Western newspapers, they were patiently described and clarified by a devoted group of cosmopolitan advocates. Small groups of Westerners experimented with Gandhi an techniques in virtual anonymity and then, on the cusp of the 1960s, brought these methods to a wider audience. The swelling protests of later years increasingly abandoned the spirit of non-violence, and the central significance of Gandhi and his supporters has therefore been forgotten. This book recovers this tradition, charts its transformation, and ponders its abiding significance.

Down and Out in Paris and London 2

In my previous piece of writing on the Real George Orwell, Eric Blair, BBC 4 Radio production he had returned to England on official holiday leave from his position as a police officer for the Colonial Service in Burma and to recover from a bout of tropical fever at the home of his parents. During a holiday in Cornwall he came to the decision to resign without knowing what his  next income would be. He was 24 years of age. He wanted to  become a professional writer.

As I also wrote there are sufficient connections and coincident to confirm my contention of the repetitive and cyclical nature of experience between individuals and generations

At the age of 20 after fours years working in local government in central London and  Croydon I decided to test my increasing confidence and wish to better myself  and became a office equipment salesman for the Italian firm Olivetti attending a month‘s sales course  at their headquarters in Barclay Square and finishing top out of about 40 others, some of whom did not survive the weekly examination and appraisal. In the first month I achieved over 30 placements of the latest machine on a trial based and was unable to sell one because those using did not like the soft, spongy touch. The new design was a disaster and I quickly lost heart as door after door was shut in my face and only having a limited number of small offices to visit in a concentrated areas in the City of London around Bishopsgate, as the weather changed, I found myself spending more and more time travelling around the circle line of the underground sitting in park, pubs and coffee houses, a  journey which took around 53 to 55 minutes.

For the cost of three old pence ticket, the minimum fare you could spend all day travelling around and around if you wished and it was interesting to note other fellow travellers in the compartment of choice, mostly salesmen killing time or writing up their sales and notes, but also the elderly keeping warm and school children playing truant. There was the occasional tramp although I do not remember seeing many,

I resigned much to the horror of the management without having another job to do. I quickly became dependent on my family but after a couple of months I obtained a temporary job at Housemans Bookshop  close to Kings Cross Station and from the same building the Pacifist weekly Peace News was also published.

While Blair was helping to control the Empire at the same age I had become an activist for the Direct Action Committee against Nuclear War  helping to organise the Scottish end of the London to Holy Loch march and  demonstration against the location of the USA controlled Polaris Submarines at Holy Loch, and a short time member of the Committee 100 set up by Bertrand Russell, electing to serve six months in prison rather than give an undertaking to stop such activities. I resigned  from the committee after Russell rejected my warnings about the conduct of his assistant and which makes nonsense of subsequent 8 page “I was misled” tirade against the man published as an appendix in the official work on his life by Ronald W Clark.  I had  some limited experience of being on the road and once spent a night frozen in a bus shelter in a town in Derbyshire on my way to Liverpool to join a march between Liverpool and Hull. I will refer against to the experience of walking 12 to 20 a miles a day in all-weather, on little food, dependent on the hospitality of others and  usually sleeping on the floor of some  hall in a sleeping bag.

On his return Eric Blair consulted a Cambridge Don about becoming a writer, attended an Eton College reunion dinner and in the Autumn he moved to London acquiring a flat in the Portobello Road. During the five years he commenced to investigate the lives of the poor, in and out of work in London and Paris  publishing an essay The Spike, moving to Paris until 1928, and turning his experiences into an autobiographical novel Down and out in Paris and London some after. His first published work was completed. His mother’s sister lived in Paris and provide him with social and financial support to enable him to write the first version of Burmese Days although the  issue of what is what is was like to be poor without prospects obsessing him as a subject for writing.

Like myself although he was poor, without a job or a home of his own, he was not isolated without relatives and others who he could fall back on and lend support, including financial support and therefore unlike the majority of the rest who were poor without support unless provide by the state or charities, and more significantly without prospects. I will come back to this issue as does Blair several times in his work.

In 1929 Blair became ill and was admitted to a hospital leading to an essay How the poor die (1946). You want to write the experiences you have but you need time, perspective and a  measure of objectivity and then from a publishing viewpoint there is the problem about writing about contemporary others without their expressed permission or whose activity in question  has been made public by them or is already in the public domain, although even in this respect there are appropriate restrictions where it is wise to follow if one dos not wants to find oneself in the civil and sometimes criminal courts as an accused. Blair and his publishers appears to have adopted her device of converting experiences into fiction with Homage to Catalonia the exception.

In Paris when his money was stolen  from a lodging house where he was staying Blair took a job as a dish washer in in fashionable hotel. Later, as the end of the year approached he returned to the comfortable existence of life with his parents who  settled at Southwold and where he remained for the following five years 26 to 31.

After I commenced the life as direct actionist (Marx on Fuerbach’s 11th Theses point) I worked occasionally as a temp in a left wing coffee bar meeting place in Soho and where the manager offered a permanent  job  in part to dissuade me from the course I had set on to go to prison. I was also elected to the executive of my local Labour Party which then sponsored me to Ruskin College Oxford, where after studying a year for a Politics and Economics diploma I was able to switch to a post graduate University Diploma in Public and Social Administration where the other students were first and second class honours graduates in other subjects, my tutorial partner for Criminology had gained a First in Theology which set the gold standard for analytical reproduction of the academic work others in the form the essay. I had three articles published in the university weekly Isis, joined several Oxford Societies and was appointed to a Labour Club Committee to campaign fort eh labour party to keep the UK out of a non socialist European Economic Community. Then de Gaulle said Non. Thus via the back door I had two amazing years in he City the Oxford and its University life experience, return to live and work there for three after a year in Birmingham. Eat your heart out Eric.

I went to Birmingham University for the embryonic new Certificate of Qualification in Social Work, specialising in Child Care which was gained, together with a Home Office  Certificate of professional competence and then joined Oxfordshire  Council, as a child care officer arriving on the day when its head became leader of the Association of Children’s Officers. Because of her role I read and summarised Hanzard in relation to child and family social work which developed into a subscription magazine which I produced with around 35 issues a year for a three year period, publishing other articles in addition to becoming the Parliamentary officer and then Vice President of the professional Association followed by becoming the first chairman of one of the new sections of the British Association of Social Workers. I had developed a clear vision of what I wanted to do and be. And also I knew where I stood politically, a socialist, but passionate anti communist where the writing of Orwell (1984 and Animal Farm) and others helped to confirm from my limited contact with members of the party and the Trots, their actual approach to political issue in the UK and the realities of life in the Soviet dictatorships, as I once tried to explain to Sir Keith Joseph when an official dinner guest.  I had also written a play which although rejected by the English Stage company they asked to see my other work which at the time I had not created, and I was then set on a  different course.

The second week of the BBC Book at Bedtime in the Real George Orwell series commenced with his travelling to London which surprised me because I was under the impression the was at least one further episode on his experiences in Paris. Undertaking catch up reading after the Monday night episode February 3rd, 2012 I appreciated what had happened,

The decision had been taken to omit his experience of leaving the hotel and working in the restaurant with Boris run by another Russian. They had only taken the job at the hotel because the restaurant was not ready to employ them so when Boris gets the call that it is about to open, Blair feels obliged to hand in his notice although he had become settled in the employment. I say Blair although this work was published as a novel and it  is not surprising that his first attempts to publish were rejected. While he did work as a kitchen hand in a hotel I cannot confirm that he worked in the kitchen of any restaurant and therefore his description of the Russian owned one may have been based on hearsay.

In the story he explains how having given up the hotel job, Boris and the two waiters employed found that the premises were in the same condition as when they had  started at the hotel. The owner did not have the funds to hire labour to finish the job and therefore adopted the ruse of getting the waiters, dependent on any money as tips for getting the job done. Because he was the plongeur without tips he was paid a wage but the owner only gave him  part of what he was due and because, but  did give a glass of brandy when he left for home.  He describes that when the restaurant opened he worked 17 to 19  hours days sometimes sleeping on the trampled food on floors too tired to make his way to his lodgings. In the book he claims that he was so fed up with the life that he approached a contact in London for work and he returning to London on the promise of being a companion to a mentally disabled young man in a family, but who he finds had gone abroad for a month hence his need to find the cheapest of lodgings and then to become a tramp dependent on charities providing at and bread during the day and the workhouse  spikes  for bed and breakfast. As I have noted in fact his experiences were the other way round, investigating the life of the poor living in cheap lodging houses and then going on the Spike and then going to Paris and then going home to become a professional writer.

On the journey to Tilbury he tried to persuade a Rumanian couple that England was a paradise of art, culture architectural good design compared to Paris. He then finds his would be employment was on hold for a month and only a few shillings  and six pence to survive so he determines to find the cheapest of lodging houses leaving the rest of his possession at a railway station.

He also attempted to pawn his clothing for inferior stuff  but this only yielded one shilling, mentioning four pawn shop experiences. He then sees a tramp coming towards him and realises it is his reflection in a  shop window. I have previously commented on the difference in how you are treated if you wear a suit collar and tie or casual clothes, especially once past the age of 65. Blair also comments on the disparity between accent and  clothes and  towards the end of the book comments how a tramp manager at a Spike treated him  favourably because  his accent revealed him to be a gentleman on hard times. I suppose I ought to explain, although out of sequence that the Spike is the food and board for the night available at  workhouse casual wards for those on the road who were not pauper inmates,

His first experience of a lodging house brought him the experience of a 15 feet square room with  eight beds and later at a spike there would be eighty. I have experience of sleeping in a room with a score of others (at an open prison camp, former RAF station and again at the Iona Community House in Sauchiehall Street although for the most  part all the other beds were vacant during this stay in Glasgow while helping to arrange the Polaris Protest at Holy Loch.  And then of course I did spend the first ten years of my life after babyhood sharing one double bed with three adult women two at one end and me and my care mother at the other.

Blair complains that the beds in lodging house were hard as board and the pillows blocks of wood, so you should try sleeping on floors in just a sleeping bag my spiritual friend? It is during this experience he begins the diet of bread with marge and large cups if tea. His money lasts for three days and four nights.

He begins to learn about the comradeship that develops between those in like circumstances spend whatever comes their way and share what they have although there is also a lot of stealing from those in similar circumstance who fail to share. He finds that many of the men are 10 shillings a week pensioners and their ongoing survival Blair found  inspiring. One of my aunts, abandoned by her bigamist husband eventually got a 5 shillings a week widow’s pension and relied exclusively on my birth mother’s earning as a teacher for her survival.

Blair was then driven to use the Spike and to his horror found that the rule was you could not stay for more than one night in 30 days in the same place, but you could stay at two different places in London. This meant the hundreds if not thousands of men on the road were constantly walking in all weathers a dozen or more miles a day which was wasted energy to no social purpose and caused harm to the men in question, given they walked on a starvation diet. I have participated in  two walkings of over 100 miles from Liverpool to Hull taking about ten days and a number of shorter walkings Aldermaston to London and London to Bedford over four to five days. In all these instances any baggage including sleeping bags was transported from morning sleep over on a floor, with only one instance a bed provide by a college lecturer at Hull. As with the tramps one therefore was able to walk freely but in Wintry  conditions with the two main walks immediate after Christmas through to the New Year. Blistering feet rather than the absence of food was the problem although unlike the tramps there was  more than bread and tea provided and the  fundamental difference being that we walked with a purpose.

While they would be seen by a doctor this was  to ensure they did have some potentially lethal contagion which could be passed onto the general community. You were not allowed in if you had 8 pence in possession and what you had you were required to hand in including any tobacco but this you smuggled in your socks as although you were searched they rarely got below the knee while others had made secret pockets in their coats,

The evening meal was a half pound  loaf of bread and a mug of cocoa. You left with a 6pence open voucher for some food and a hot drink and were told where they could be exchanged on the next journey selected.

He also learned of the existence of places, usually provided by religions groups which  offered tea and a  bun on the condition you accepted half an hour of prayers and contemplation. Many of those he encountered came from the north who had  lost jobs, a few were mentally challenged,

He makes one friend, from Ireland who lost his job and failed to get another. Learned from the art of turning cigarettes stubs into smokes with London of course the Big Smoke, but also the man‘s reluctance to steal milk   left on the front steps.

It was in episode eight that Blair refers to the hatred which has almost become universal that Englishmen and women, in the UK have for those who come and work from another country, the Scots, the Irish, The Jews, the Blacks, the Indians, the Muslims etc, in fact blame the bloody foreigner nor unemployment and lack of  housing. The odd man who works, the young man who is not at home or a student and everyone who sponges off the state, Sounds familiar?  While Blair dislikes this he dislikes  the Salvation Army of their military approach to the charity they provided.

They could get into the Sally Army hostel at six if they possessed the means to buy a cup of tea each otherwise they had to wait with the rest of the 200 until 8. You went to bed at 10 with two officers making sure there was no smoking and no noise with gambling forbidden during the time before bed and lights out.

Having enough of this experience he goes back to his contact for £1 and gets £2 which takes him and the Irishman into lodgings once more, He also learns about screevers or the pavement artist, now long gone and replaced by those who paint themselves into statues. He tells of one who had studied art in Paris and discovered that if his wife took in sewing they and his six children could survive on the £1 a week average net profit he earned from  drawing the likeness of Churchill and other known figures, although his Botticelli nude had caused reaction from one London church and the police. He explains the hierarchy of beggars and begging scams notably the street photographer

While there is reference to drink being the cause of getting some men onto the street, and tobacco their drug,  there is no mention of other drug substances, or to difficulties after prison, or served in the armed forces. He rarely came across a woman and one fellow traveller was interested in prostitutes as he regarded  all other women out of his league, but in fact the overwhelming number of men remained celibate because of their life style and the effect their appearance had on other women, unless they were religious do gooders.

He also learns something of the rhyming slang, some of which he said was out of fashion although was still being used during my childhood social circle in the 1940’s. He also discovers the use of f,,,k and f,,,king as a swear word although in my 1960’s edition  there are simply  ----. One of the great moments of my Scottish experience in 1961 was getting on a bus full of shift ending factory girls where the coarseness of their comments towards and about me as well as in genera took my breathe away.

Blair then argues that Tramps and fellow dossers are not a different race from the rest of humanity although they are treated as such, but are men who have fallen on hard times and find it difficult to impossible to break back out or in depending on ones perspective. He ends the book with, the device that he is able to survive the days left before his prospective employer arrives back from going abroad and a plea for a more rational approach to treating the poor. All this was before the creation of  the welfare  state and where now the present Coalition, in part from good intentions and commenced to unravel the principal of universality with underpinned the Beveridge Reforms and Welfare system. We are going back an era to soup kitchens and means testing, begging officialdom rather than on the street. As a say everything is cyclical and generational. We never learn.

Down and out in Paris and London part one

I was delighted to come across a BBC radio production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm last week and quickly discovered that the programme is part of a new series The Real Gorge Orwell. He was Eric Blair in fact and I will write more later about him, his wife who came from South Shields, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia, part one which is being repeated today with the second part on Sunday afternoon, a discussion of his short story Politics and Language and Burma, a biographical play. 1984 is to close the season plus other programmes and I have found a site where all his works are available to read.

It is fitting that the BBC has chosen Down and Out in Paris and London as  his work to abridge in ten episodes for the book at bedtime this week and next, given that more people have become down and out or become greater strugglers wage slaves in the UK during the past two years because of the policy of the coalition just as the situation in the UK and the USA in the 1920’s when on his return from a colonial policeman in Burma he decided to explore life on the streets and the poverty of being a wage slave to survive first in London and then in Paris while reporting as a journalist and wanting to become a professional writer.

In the Guardian on Thursday 24th January 2012, the new George Orwell day, Stewart Jeffries asks what would Orwell make of the state affairs in 2013? What  would he be writing about and on what would his reputation be founded? His article disappoints although I agree  with the conclusion that he would certainly have written a 1984 to which I would have added Animal Farm given his views the Russians and the Germans through Communism and  Fascism created totalitarian societies and how much greater knowledge of this reality of political speak he would have gained had he lived after 1950 when he died at the age of 46.

 Anthony Powell The right wing writer whose books I possess and admire ( and want to reread again) argued in his journals that he anticipated that Orwell as he aged would have become right wing, anti CND, in favour of the Falklands War, and against the miners strikes to which I must say perhaps in terms of the specifics,  because his  writings always suggested the individualist, the liberal democratic socialist at heart, and a man who liked  good order but hated injustice and waste. Whether he would have earned a living writing about food, another suggestion, is more  questionable although he would  have campaign about food waste and its misrepresentation  for commercial reasons. Would he approve of reality TV programmes? For this piece I will review the first week of  Being down ( but I suggest not out) in Paris, listening to the radio broadcasts while I reread my copy of the book purchased three shillings and sixpence in in 1964 while I was the University of Birmingham, Penguin books edition  reprinted in 1963.

I was disappointed with the first abridgement on Monday evening January 29th 2013, because of the omission of the whole of the second chapter. In 1927 Orwell undertook the experience of being a tramp on the streets of London and experience which other journalists and social commentators have undergone since and then he went to Paris in 1928 to  have the same experience again and the book begins with surviving on six francs a day in a bug ridden lodging house.  In fairness to the BBC the second chapter is not essential to make the point  of what it is like to survive just on bread while seeing  the piles of food in shops, the food left on plates in  restaurants or dumped in trash cans.  However part of the purpose of his writing is not just to describe his experience but report on the condition and behaviour of others and in this respect the tale of Charlie is relevant and could have been summarised in a few words saying Charlie boasted of how he stole 1000 francs from his brother and the blew the lot on raping a girl kept as a slave by an old hag in a cellar.

The episode highlights one aspect of being poor without expectation of a permanent change in circumstances, the tendency to blow what ever comes ones way without regard to  tomorrow, in this instance 1000 francs on a brief sexual encounter and while Orwell is surviving on six. It is the poor who tend to gamble and smoke more on a regular basis often at the expense of food, shelter and new clothes; and thirdly that sexual slavery is nothing new. The omission smacks of censorship although it may be typical of the Book at Bedtime abridgements although I also mention in the context that the original Animal Farm film now available as a U certificate was graded X for over 18 year olds only when first released to theatres.

It is an abridgement series but in this instance missing out on some fo the characters not only reduces the colour of the piece but also reveals that it is no accident why many of  the characters are poor,  the inadequate, or immoral beings, prone to prone to petty criminality and in some instance violence and therefore should be no surprise that they are where they are. What percentage  continues to be a matter for debate, a significant minority from my experience but something which does not affect any analysis and sense of injustice at the extremes between the poor and the wealthy.

The edited radio programme does communicate the reality of being down and out with the author ending the third chapter explaining the consolation in poverty, that is the feeling of relief, almost of pleasure that at last you have reached the lowest you can get of being genuinely down and out.” You have talked  so often of going to the dogs- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.”

The second radio abbreviation covered the next four chapters to almost the end of seven(page 39) and  concerned his relationship with a Russian waiter called Boris who worked at a hotel and boasted of earning  100 francs a day in tips and hoped to save up for his own restaurant, something which all waiters dreamed of doing. Boris said he could get Blair, for Eric Blair is the actual birth name of the writer, a job if he wanted one. Then as the teaching English job ended and he was down to his last francs he went in search of the Russian, Boris, only to find that the man was in a worse position than himself living in a flea and bug invested slum, the room of someone who owed him  money, and where he had been sleeping rough under bridges have lost his job after an accident and breaking his back and still recovering he  was described as lame. He had hopes however about a Russian Restaurant that is opening  the following week but when they visit it is still being  created.

We learn a lot about Boris during  the  four chapters, of a wealthy family shot in the revolution and himself a Riffleman, a  Captain, his father had been a Colonel.  He had been with many women, to whom he writes to appeal for funds none of whom reply except who owed him  money but the letter was an excuse for giving nothing to him. He also had a love of chess as many Russians do,  and he was prejudiced against Jews, something which the BBC abridged out and which in fairness many Russians had at the time and still do.

We  also learn about  the pawn broking system in which you take in goods and receive a number and when the clerk has assessed he will call your number and make you an offer so that all  waiting will hear how  little or  how you   will get, and indeed if you are not offered anything. If you contest the offer, it may be withdrawn or you are offered less but if you go after lunch when the clerks have  eaten you are likely to get a better offer than in the morning when they have not.
It is also evident that if you want a job as a waiter you have to know the right person to bribe and Orwell describes how they bought a drink at the right place and waited for the permitted two hours without being introduced to someone calling for an employee because they had not realised  it was necessary to give the barman 20 francs. Their problem was that the Russian now with a limp was almost unemployable and of course Orwell had no experience and would  only get a job washing up in a kitchen for example on the say so of the Russian who had the experience. He manages to survive for one month when he receives 200 francs for some published work and then expecting only 5 or 10 francs for their winter coast they are given seventy from the pawn broker, probably a mistake, but they then  buy lots of food and drink, forge themselves and get drunk which seems to me the standards for those in this predicament.

The next part of the book better covered in the third abridgement describes what it is like working in a  hotel kitchen as a general dogsbody a plongeur. Boris gets a job as a waiter and smuggles out food over the first three days fo his employment until he gets Orwell the job. Before then in  the book there is the story of the Russian Duke who eat at the hotels and restaurants where he knew Russian officers were working as waiters and then borrowed 300 francs to pay for the food and  to survive which he never paid back or was expected as he was a Duke.

They then fall to a confidence trickster who pretends to run  a communist underground group above a laundry and demands 20 francs from the two as a sign of good faith promising Orwell 150 for articles about British politics and the life under the capitalist system. He promises to send a formal request within a couple fo day after they pay five francs of their remaining money and after a week when they go back there is no trace of the man who disappeared owing rent. However this is nothing like the new Tory led coalition approval for TV advising for loans to the poor at interest rates of over  1000% a year. The bastards including one firm  part of sponsoring Newcastle United.

Orwell is taken on because he speaks English and can help staff as most of the guests are Americans,  with his job to keep clean and ready the private restaurant for senior staff. He is offered a months work, the usual practice but at first says no because of the commitment to work in the new restaurant of the Russian which is due to open in two weeks and where they have both been offered better paid jobs. However when he tells Boris what he has done he is sent immediately back to accept the offer. If the new job comes and is better paid they can leave as there will be no shortage of others waiting to take their places. The way is to ask to be paid on a daily basis although one has to keep money on your person as anything left in outer clothing is stolen and everyone is on the fiddle regarding the food and the drink

He works at one of the top hotels in Paris and his description of how the hotel is run provides an important insight into what was the situation and may well continue to be in  most parts of the world  including some  of the greatest cities where tourist flock and where Orwell questions the value to humanity of their existence. The guests paid extraordinary prices then as now but then were cheated at every opportunity bringing to mind the Innkeeper in Les Misérables but then of course they usually have the funds to so indulge as was brought out  in the BBC TV series on one famous London Hotel series.

There is also a class as well as wages system among the 100 odd employees hired to serve the 200 odd customers. The top hotel employees have their own dining room the Maitre d’ Hotel has his own table with silver service and staff attending. The cooks have moustaches  to show their superiority over the waiters who earn more through tips than those on fixed wages, while the waiters insist on junior staff also being clean shaven as a show of their power. He paints in some colour observing that the older char women with still painted faces are usually former prostitutes. Everyone steals food and from each other with the cellar man selling the rest of the measures  set aside for a few sous if he trusts you.

However he has little sympathy for the guests who eat food with ingredients used in such a way to bring profit, drinks of short measure,  bed linen not properly laundered because of the turn arounds. The emphasis is on the appearance and the presentation, the smiles of service without sincerity or care.

Understandably  Orwell concentrates on the role and life of plongeur or dish washer. They work in filthy condition with no regard for cleanliness as waiters clean the sweat from their faces using the disgusting washing up water from the soiled utensils. The description reminds of the Arnold Wesker literal kitchen sink drama The Kitchen which I saw in theatre, listened to the radio play and have the text part of trio of his works.

He describes the going to work and the coming home at night among the other works, the fights and the swearing, except on Saturday night when they congregate as a small  bistro near the hotel  when the work is done around 11 pm and get drunk returning to their beds between one and two and to sleep through before the cycle begins again. Every Saturday a communist believer by day gets drunk and rises to make a speech, word for word the same, too drunk to notes that he is regarded as a comic turn along with those who dance or sing. He also praises the importance of sleep, describing awakened by a murder  by three men seen running off by hitting a man dead with a lead pipe that after the street checked that the man was dead and nothing could be done for him, they left him there and  immediately back to bed and too sleep,

Whereas the waiters and other senior staff could with some optimism plan to better themselves and to marry, the plongeur had no prospects given the hours of working sixty to one hundred every week there was no time to study to importance job prospects and there was only  sufficient money to get drunk once a week. But you had three meals a day, the rent was paid and here was pride in doing the job although he questions the necessity for the role and why it was done rather than people revolt and demand a better life. He argues that the rich even if they care do not involved themselves with the lives of the poor,  Cameron is presently accused of not having visited one of the soup kitchens that have arisen because of the ongoing levels of unemployment and lowering of wages and benefits in real terms.

Orwell argues that if you put the poor in good clothes under a good roof and they are no different from the rich and vice versa. This is only a partial  truth as it is important to separate those who have become addicted to a substance or have emotional  or psychological problems, or become recidivists from those unable because of disability or lack of jobs or because of the nature of work and its pay.

Thus Orwell has described his experience having nothing and  then as a wage slave. However his experience in Paris continues when influenced by Boris they make the mistake of leaving the hotel when called by the Russian restaurant owner that he is ready to open, but this is for next week.

American Guerrilla in the Philippines the Story of Rich Ricardson and Curly

I recently wrote of the 1950’s film American Guerrilla in the Philippines that it was based on the Second World War experience of Lliff David Richardson  born in 1918 and who died in 2002  aged 82. I was sufficiently interested in the story that I investigated further and found that the book of the same name by Ira Wolfert  was available and acquired a copy of the original 1946 Victor Gollancz London edition from Kennys Books/ Able Book Sale for £7.35 including postage and  where the recent  US price was $38. My interest as usual was on the extent  to which the film was a fair cover of the true story of the book, given that the film had a fictitious character in the lead and because I was disappointed with aspects of the information about Richardson  found on line.

I received the book quicker than anticipated and once I read the opening pages I could not put it down staying up until 2am on Sunday morning January 20th 2013. I regard this slim in the sense of thickness 184 page book one of the more important accounts of what it was like to work and fight in the  Philippines during the second world war which also applies to the guerrilla activities in Borneo and other Pacific countries and island in which the battle was taken to the Japanese. This is because of the surprising amount of detail provided on how Richardson, and the men associated with him and the supporting population of the Philippines created an effective resistance movement able to provide a civilian government so quickly after the country was freed from the Japanese,  The important point to make and to be taken into account throughout the reading and understanding of his story is that he enlisted as a Navy man and therefore had no military training or experience before thrust into the role pf guerrilla organiser and fighter.

My admiration for Richardson increased with one notable exception where mystery still remains over the woman with whom he had an important relationship as stated  by him but who he appears to have abandoned  immediately on returning to the USA as the War in the Pacific was drawing to its end..

It is important to emphasise that the book only covers Richardson’s experience in the Philippines and was created from the oral accounts given to the is author Ira Wolfert whose life and writing also merits recording. Ira was born in 1908 ten years before the subject of book, growing up in New York and became Journalism Graduate of Columbia University. Working for the North American Newspaper Alliance in the 1930’s and throughout the Second World War. His reporting on the Battle for Guadalcanal won him a Pulitzer  prize in 1942 and in 1943 he published  the Battle for the Solomon Islands.

in 1944 he co wrote with Captain Don Gentle One Man Air force, about the exploits of the fighter ace and with “Rich” as he was known, Richardson,  American Guerrilla. 

He had publish a novel in 1943 about a  New York based Gangsters Tucker’s People. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1948 released film Force of Evil which is based on his novel and which is regarded as a film meriting inclusion in the Library of Congress because of its merits. His novel Act of Love was also highly regarded, and is available second hand for £121!

Ira was subsequently branded a Communist (by Association) by the infamous Un-American Activities Committee and this may account for my having no information that he published other fictions or non fiction writings subsequently. He went on to live until the age 89  in 1997 and was married to the same person, a poet  Helen, for 57 years until the death of his wife in in 1985. They had a son and a daughter and four grand children.  Now back to the book and the film.

I understand that Rich was  the son of a Methodist Minister who died when he was 3  and according to the Forward to the book, his mother moved around a great deal gaining work as a teacher of Latin English, History and Music wherever she could, this resulted in Rich learning to live alone without being lonely and to create his own environment. This is an important point to appreciate what subsequently happened and is also something that I am able to identify with from my childhood and subsequent experience.

 It was only when he was about fourteen that his mother was able to move and settle in Los Angeles as following  the death of her cattle ranch owning father (near Springview Nebraska) there was sufficient  funds to enable her to give up going to where the next job was offered.  According to an interview given after the War to Chuck Hlava of the Houston Texas Community Newspaper,  he left Compton Junior College using the money allocated for his last two years to go to Europe, the Middle and near East before returning just before the fall of France in World War I.  Why he dropped out of college and left the USA is not known and it is of interest that he never wrote an autobiography as such or authorised a biography, given, the book about his exploits, the film and that when General MacArthur made a  visit to Houston where Rich was living with his wife, he rode McArthur’s car and sat with him at the official dinner. It is unusual that there are several  blanks about a life that appears adventurous and creative until his return to the USA and marriage.

The explanation may be his wife Coma (Noel) who according to Houston Paper interview they while students at the University of Chicago in 1940 and that on their first date they went to see a performance of AIDA although I am puzzled by this report as I will explain in a moment. After his enlistment the two kept in contact by letter until he “ disappeared into the jungle”. They were married on his return and they remained together until his death in 2001.

Coma came from Virginia, born June 1922 and graduated from the University of Houston where the  couple settled  upon their marriage. so I how both came to be at or in Chicago is a mystery.  Coma is reported as a strong practicing Presbyterian and my understanding is that she “stayed home” to raise their four children until they  grew up when her interest in Art led to joining the Southwest Art Magazine and to organise the Southwest Art Foundation and the Museum of Art of the American West. She survived Rich for another ten years dying in December 2011 knowing the pleasures of grand children and one great grand child.

The TV Director Darryl F Zanuck who planned to make the film of the book soon after it was published is reported as saying it was the most honest war memoir of the period he had read, due to the combined approach of Ira Wolfert and the openness of Rich which included his having a passionate affair with a Spanish refugee from Civil war in that the husband of her aunt, a colonel in the Spanish Army had been killed fighting against Franco and the Fascists.  There is also mention of  a married cousin but otherwise no information on how or why they made the Philippines their home and why given the frequent references to the young woman in the book and the importance given to her by Wolfert he did not return or made arrangements for her to join him in the USA,

In the film the affair does not begin until the  American wife of a Filipino businessman and guerrilla organiser is brutally murdered by the Japanese. In describing the character of Richardson Ira mentions “Then there is a considerable affair of love involved. Richardson became attached to a very splendid girl and as opportunity after opportunity arose for him to escape from his dangerous guerrilla work, her thought up reason after reason for remaining with it and near her.”  Yet as he  memoir ends  the actual final words.  “ I did not even get to see Curly again. I had to leave in a rush to catch my ship and I sent her a message by Joe Rifareal. The message consisted.... Well it said mostly the word Darling). So what happened  to Curly? Why did  he not go back for her? T is one of the thousands of question  during my life I have asked and continue to ask, that I will never know the answers. I have assumed that Curly is his nickname for her. It is extraordinary that she did not become the subject of media interest  when  the book was published and then following the film!

When Rich enlisted in the Navy  he asked for a posting in the Asiatic squadron, because of his experience of the area and which would have been regarded as an asset by the Navy. He went to the Philippines aboard a minesweeper and was involved in actions around Bataan Coriggedor. Cebu and Mindanao. According to the interview with the Houston paper it was after the attack on Pearl Harbour that in 1941 he was given the opportunity to transfer to the PT boats when one of the boats came alongside the Minesweeper, asked if he was onboard and said there was a position for him as the Executive Officer. He is reported as not hesitating to accept the offer.

He joined the third squadron of PT’s and was directly involved in the evacuation of “I shall return General MacArthur and his staff. He saw MacArthur on the deck of PT 41, acting as  the lead boat on the journey to Mindanao some 500  miles away. Another PT boat mistook the 41 for an enemy vessel, got rid of fuel in order to attack, fortunately what could proved a disastrous error was realised but by then the fuel was lost and the craft had to be abandoned with the consequence that its crew and evacuated staff were reallocated among the three  remaining PT’s making life on board difficult on the rest.

It is of interest that the Character Rusty Ryan played by John Wayne in the film They were Expendable which features the role of the PT’s in the Philippines is said  to be partly based on Rich Richardson who it is presumed was an adviser for the film.

The book provides a vivid account of the destruction of his PT boat,  where he was the Executive officer, by Japanese planes when in harbour at a time and when he was ashore and could only watch from the Quayside in horror. He was put in charge of the funerals of those shipmates killed in the attack.

After his boat  was sunk he assisted the army in setting off demolition charges in Cebu City where he meets and is immediately attracted to “Curly,” the Spanish niece of the refugee widowed Spanish army officer. It is not accurate to say that in every instance Rich chose the girl over  leaving his involvement in the guerrilla campaign because once the order to surrender the forces came, he was set on  getting to Australia and get another naval posting. He recounts that the girl was strongly opposed to the trip because of the danger and the odds against reaching Australia. Nevertheless he was set on the escape.

The problem he faced in addition to working out what was needed for the voyage in a comparatively small 12 handed  boat, was his lack of experience is operating a sailing craft. They nearly did not make it out of the harbour and then disaster struck in the form of bad weather when the had progressed only some two hundred miles and the boat was turned upside down. He estimated that they were some 8 miles from the coast of Mindanao and the decision was taken to attempt to swim ashore rather than stay with sail boat and risk being picked up by the Japanese.

The  film and book recount the swim he had to make with lasting some 24 hours. One of the others who had stripped down reached the island in eight hours but suffered greatly from sunburn but managed to explain about his companions in the water  and the coastal villagers had set out in two craft with one finding them stranded, their bodies seizing up and unable to move despite being able to stand up in the water. The book provides a good  account of just how lucky they were and the long and painful process of recovery when they were forced to swallow a little soup at regular intervals because without doing do they would have been no recovery.  In fact all the men were recovered from the sea although one died and was  buried, faithfully recorded in he film as was the bravery of the villagers who knew the penalty for harbouring American soldiers was death.

It is after they had recovered that the film and book are different. In the film Rich and the others remained determined to try and get to Australia rather than surrender  and after an unstated long period of hide and seek in the jungle they make their way to a city where they discover that groups of Americans are raising money  and goods from local communities on the pretext of providing guerrilla bands but are in effect  tricking people into  giving of the little they possessed enabling them to  live well in their hideouts. In he film he meets a genuine patriot and guerrilla organiser whose American wife he has previously encountered and been attracted to believing her to be a single woman. This man persuades the film character to undertake a long sea and jungle trek to reach an American officer known to be wanting to organise the locals  into an underground in preparation for the return of MacArthur. The carrot is that on reaching the American, he would be in a position to arrange  a boat for an attempt to get to Australia. In the book while Rich continues to want to return to the Navy via Australia, the others  do not and rather than surrender as ordered they determine to  survive on their own.

They remained on the loose for six months through the summer helped by  families with whom they stayed, fishing and swimming. Rich commenced to write down his experiences in the PT boats. He notes that the schools were closed by the government who did not want their children to be indoctrinated by the Japanese although this cause  the teachers to starve.

It is at this point important to emphasise the nature of the Philippines because while there is a large Island Luzon to the North  with the capital Manila, and Mindanao to the South there in fact over 7000 islands of which  some 2000 are inhabited. This would have made control by any invading force difficult. Rich spent his time in the central group the Visayes and Cebu (155 by 45 miles) present population  under 4 millions  and Leyte Island  group with 300 square miles and a present population of around 2 million. The present day democratic and unitary  nation has over 50% greater population than the UK with over 100 million citizens with a population jump over the past twenty years by almost a third increase and with around 10% living outside the islands which cover 186000 square miles, twice the area of the UK.

In the film after surviving on the island for an unspecified time he  remeets the  American wife of a local business man and patriot who he helped previously under the impression she was single, The husband suggests that he should make his way by sea to where an American is known to be organising resistance in preparation for the return of General MacArthur. The carrot is the suggestion that the American Colonel will  provide the means for him to get to Australia. After a perilous journey he finds the Colonel who persuades him that his best role is to stay and organise the radio services. After the husband of the woman is killed by the Japanese for his work for the resistance, the woman also takes to the jungle and on a Christmas Day they become lovers.

In the book Rich explains that because of the behaviour of the American led soldier guerrilla groups he kept separate He reports on the experiences of others while he admits he  stayed in what he describes as his Lotus world. He explains that the Filipinos like to party, more than  most populations but relations with the Filipino young women was different to that of young Americans back home. The boys and girls sit separately with  the girls guarded by their chaperones. When the music stopped the girls went back to their area so there was no opportunity to engage in chat. The way to establish direct contact was to find as a friend of the father of the girl and use him as  in between man.  In effect the in between man is used to bribe the father to allow an association  between an American and his daughter as this works as long as she does not object. Although there is a strong catholic predominance in the county then as now there was also an open minded  attitude towards sex and to children born out of wedlock including those of mixed races. Whereas in the USA and Western Europe the tendency has been to regarded anyone with non white blood and non white the reverse was true for the Philippines in that anyone with a drop of white blood was regarded as white

This was he context when Rich decided to and try and find Curly  who was part of the family which occupied the Casa a thirty room property party of what is described as a  beautiful estate with commanding view of the local Bay. A property of this nature is used in  the film as the home of  the Filipino and his American wife. However Rich found that the girl and her family was on another island which had a Japanese garrison of 5000. Rich writes to her in attempt to persuade her to visit her cousins at the Casa but she replied that her father did not want her to travel to Leyte  at that time. The letter said she would come with her father on his next visit and he had sent some cigarettes and a bottle of whisky. This overture coincided with Rich become involved  in the real guerrilla movement for the first time ( page 81 of the book) Colonel Kangleon  was a Filipino army man with 27 years experience and as he first Filipino made a divisional commander by MacArthur. He had surrendered as required but escaped to form the guerrilla movement, he impressed Rich because to fund enterprises and support his wife and five children he had built a crude soap factory  rather than  levy the local population. My impression that the Colonel represents the husband of the American wife in the film for
he asks Rich to try and find a known American colonel guerrilla organiser. With the Japanese having left the southern part of Leyte Kangleon  said it was  good time to organise resistance  but  the problem was that without the presence of the Japanese there could not raid for weapons and other military supplies thus they needed help from the Americans to become effective. Kangleon said  Rich would then work for him which suited him because it meant he would be able to see Curly rather than  remain on Mindanao.

As in the film finding the Colonel (Fertig) proved a challenge but the effort proved worthwhile because first he was put in contact with a Colonel McLish who had with him two Majors and other officers and were professionally organised. He took Rich  using a captured Japanese launch to see Fertig at what was termed the General Headquarters. The man and his HQ  was then hidden in holes in the ground. They had made radio contact with San Francisco and kept abreast with news about he war development as well as having contact with General McArthur. Rich met with a representative of McArthur on the island who persuaded him to work for the Navy setting up a radio station to report monitored movements of the Japanese Navy observed `from Leyte and other nearby islands.

With Colonel McLish and ten soldiers they had to walk 500 miles, averaging 25 a day before it was considered safe to cross back to Leyte he lost over two stone on the journey, he was in such a deteriorated condition that Colonel Kangleon  did not immediately recognise him especially as he was reported to have died. He was pleased because it meant that contact had been made with Fertig.

He reporting to as meeting with twenty five officers on the island that they under the unified command of Fertig they were no longer regarded as deserters and would be paid  IOU against their military pay books. The decision had also been taken to print money and thirdly they were to form a civil government. Colonel Kangleon was delighted with the news because it meant  he had  his army back. A deal had been struck with McLish who provided 3000 empty cartridge cases which Rich undertook to fill, returning a  third to McLish as payment or the remainder. He put sixty soldiers to work on the ordinance plants mainly using powder from Japanese sea mines. It is at this point in the book we begin to learn something of the extent of Rich’s creative energy, leadership and organising abilities.  The new government levied a tax to pay for the as yet undeclared war on the Japanese in the bid to free the islands.

Rich was responsible for the first government proclamation which created a rift between him and  Kangleon as similar to what I know happened in the UK it became essential for the military effort to get hold of various supplies, paper and ink for example to print money, and everything from  the obvious of guns and ammunitions to chemicals, radios batteries, vehicle engines, thread and buttons to make uniforms from sacks. It has to be remembered that Rich had been recruited as Executive officer to the PE. In order to counter what Kangleon regarded as confiscation Rich arranged for USA army receipts.

Having been appointed Chief of Staff Rich’s next task was to appointed the staff including medical, transportation, signals and paymaster as well as legal (Judge Advocate for Court Marshals) and  the primary function Warfare. He took a special interest in signals and describes how they set up a communications system around the island. The structure led to the creation of a proper army with exercises, night manoeuvres, forced marches and target practice( without using the bullets)!. Companies were organised on a regular army basis with barracks, guardhouse, mess etc,

He was also seeing Curly who had returned to live at the Casa although he became concerned when it was suggested that the assumption was being made he wanted to marry the young woman having mentioned  the thought of settling in the Philippines after the war. Rich pretended to himself that she was visiting to see his cousins  until it was made clear she was visiting to see him in the expectation of marriage. He records that he came to love the woman.

They received a summons to get to Colonel Fertig before November 1st when a submarine was due which he presumed meant that he was being recalled to Australia to rejoin the naval service. He took a launch from the Japanese to  reach Fertig where he was told off for not undertaking the task  that had been set for him in terms of the Naval intelligence about the Japanese navy. The arrival of the submarine  provided the opportunity to make contact with other naval officers, to  be provided with  American food, especially ice cream and books.  Fertig came on board with the guerrilla leaders including Kangleon  who pressed for supplies on the next trip, They were promised regular submarine calls from then on  but for Rich he was  leaned on the undertake the naval intelligence operation that had been promised to MacArthur.

When he returned he found that Curley had moved because the Japanese were returning  would take the Casa after the 18000 pounds of fibre used to make rope. Knowing this the fibre had been set on fire taking two days to burn. When the Japanese arrived back in  the south of the island  they found the guerrillas had moved north. It was not time to engage the enemy.

He records that the Japanese question the owner of the Casa Don Lorenzo, one of sixteen children all fop whom had children and one of his  sisters, Curley’s mother also had sixteen children. This large   family was closely knit and involved in various commercial a background of Castilian Judaism. The Japanese wanted detailed information about the commercial interests. It is said that he defended accusations supplying and supporting the guerrillas, but prisoners were taken and tortured. On learning their identity they commenced to kill. Rich learned that Curly was safe with relatives and concentrated one establishing a radio system on the island

In the book he travelled to see Curly in time for Christmas whereas in the film it is the now widowed wife of the owner of the Casa who arrives where Rich is located to celebrate Christmas with him signalling that they become lovers. Once the New Year was celebrated, the decision was taken by Kangleon for the guerrillas to go on the offensive. In the town of Anhawan the Mayor invited the 12 man Japanese garrison to a  breakfast with him on February 1st It was a trap

The Japanese retaliated with planes and then with heavy weapon patrols but this only enable the guerrillas into greater action when their casualties commenced to  run in the hundreds compared to limited loses by the guerrillas. The Japanese were driven from the countryside to the coastal towns leaving the guerrillas controlling the hinterland.

Although the Japanese used the Casa as its headquarters for South Leyte members of the family commenced to attack from the outskirts. The Japanese retaliated, and found a woman prepared to identify those in the community who were members or supporters of the guerrillas. They rounded up the whole family making prisoners of those identified who then disappeared presumed killed. When one member escaped to join the guerrillas the Japanese rounded up the whole family again and threaten to  kill all its male members. Because of all this activity Curly came to Rich for protection.  There is a similar situation involving the American widow in the film who joins Rich in guerrilla activities. They would be  together sitting out in the jungle every evening after she had  helped with preparing food, They would talk a lot before he walked her back to where she was staying, about their respective past and their previous experiences together,

He set up a radio station  in the North on the  coast going through Japanese occupied territory fulfilling his commitment to Fertig. He records that they were the only Island to be in contact with the headquarters of Macarthur on a  daily basis. Then another submarine came in loaded with supplies. He expresses mixed feelings about the development assuming that with his job done, so to speak, he would be asked to leave. He said goodbye to Curly. It si not clear if this was the order  but he elected to stay.

He rounded up sixty people to take the four tons of supplies back  HQ and then to see Curly. However he was then asked to set up another radio station in the south and plot a minefield which meant that General MacArthur was returning as promised. Cigarettes, chocolate and other goods now all had I shall return  MacArthur on their wrappers. He waited to he last minute  to leave Curly before setting off knowing the danger of the mission.

The opportunity is taken  to mention the treatment of a fifth columnist mentioned in the film in a different context. The man was given and made  to eat a whole roasted chicken on the principal that the condemned man is given a hearty meal. Despite his protestations he is executed. He also explains relationship with the civilian police including what happens in relation to the police chief when MacArthur planes began their bombardment. The pleas  of  loyalty fell on deaf ears given the knowledge of the extent of collusion with the Japanese. There is also recording of an incident  also in the film where a guerrilla  ( in the film a close associate of the main character) gets back with half his guts hanging out from a  bayonet. Rich agrees to trying and put the intestines back and sew him up, the young man  having  given consent, but the man dies. In the film  the Rich character wants to give up but the widow presses him on.

The film concentrates on communicating the movement of Japanese naval moments and that they had to quickly move to avoid  the fire from one of the vessels, also recorded in the book

In the film the Rich character, plus the widow and other guerrillas are surrounded by passing Japanese troops hiding in a church and here is a battle which they appear destined to lose because of the superior numbers. However the Japanese pull out with the arrival of the planes. The couple are seen joining other crowds MacArthur comes by in convoy.  This is fiction.

Rich begins the penultimate last short chapter of the book with his waking dream of the arrival of General MacArthur.. He receives his first mail from home, finding later that the FBI had delivered the mail he had sent with the warning that she had not to reveal to anyone she was having the contact, He then gets an official message to stay where he was while MacArthur was landing forty miles away.

He then resorts to the age old way around orders in that as the commanding officer with a situation where everything is organised and in good order, he gave himself a few days for rest and relaxation having felt under the weather. He celebrates with the locals and insists they fly their own flag along with that of the Americans and he presented with two warm bottles of Coca Cola saved for him for this occasion. This is also included in the film. The is a meal of monkey and rice and he mentions that monkey is an acquired taste.

He then sets off to greet the General without an American flag to wave on the craft Understandably he has great difficult convincing the guard  on the ship that he is who he claims he is, especially when they think his instructions to the outriggers in the local dialect are in Japanese.  On establishing his identity he is taken to the Wardroom and given food which he finds  difficult to eat given the local diet but a large bowl of ice cream provide  a different challenged so he is given another. He and those accompanying him were kitted out in uniforms and he was taken to the cruiser Nashville when he was taken to see MacArthur for a ten minute chat.

Until recalled home he worked with the army air corps. There was a guerrilla reunion after which he acted as  a liaison officer between the army and the guerrillas and hen  as mentioned earlier he doe snot get to say goodbye to Curly and as I say the evidence is there was no further communication between them.

Given that he had spent over a decade adventuring away from home it is difficult to believe he was ever able to settle down, and certainly I am not surprised that he found life as an insurance executive dissatisfying or that he set up a company manufacturing inexpensive  guns based on his Philippine experiences or that it failed.  It was no surprise that on return states sides he found himself court marshalled for drawing pay from both the Navy and the Army until  what he had. done was communicated to  the authorities and all charges dropped and the money paid in full.

When I  left school at the age of sixteen in 1955 I went to work for the Middlesex County Council Local taxation Department ( Motor Vehicle Licences) and was attached to the New registration section of five and hen six men who had served in  the  first or second world war, Including  the head of section a Naval officer, someone who had lost part of his leg in he first, a airman and a man who and fought in North Africa. Now in a job with no transferable skills they struggled to adapt  knowing there was  little prospect of bettering their lot. It was he combination  of hearing about their experience and having read the official reports of the War Crime Trials on  the concentration camps while still at school that affected how  I looked on war since, especially the use of weapons of mass destructions. I suspect that Rich despite having a  loving and loyal wife, the mother of children, and grandchildren never really settled, especially given his adventuring prior to the war.  And then of  course there was Curly.