It is preposterous on the face of it to have suggested that an Eton scholar, by no means at the bottom of the class, could not, with some judicious cramming, have won an Oxbridge scholarship. Orwell was one of the cleverest boys in England. Why did Gow deliver this death sentence? Andrew Sydenham Farrar Gow (1886— 1978) was the son of a public-school headmaster. He got a double first at Trinity College, Cambridge, in Classics but, when Blair came his way, was having difficulty getting the fellowship back there, something that he wanted above all things in life. As his tightlipped entry in the ODNB records:
He applied four times for permanent posts in Cambridge, but was each time unsuccessful; it was feared that he would alarm and discourage his pupils, particularly the weaker sort. Indeed Gow’s appearance was formidable, an uncompromisingly Scottish kind of countenance being set off by bushy eyebrows and side-whiskers, and anything like conceit or pretentiousness on the part of a pupil might provoke a wounding sarcasm.
The rejection letters from Cambridge cannot have softened Gow’s schoolroom sarcasm. A ‘bachelor and a half’ (as Paul Johnson archly called him), Gow liked the friendly company of favourite pupils, out of school hours. Barely thirty, he was nicknamed ‘Granny Gow’ for his effeminacy and for his solicitude to those favourites.
Gow was Blair’s Classics tutor. They were necessarily close, but they didn’t like each other at all. ‘Granny Gow’ could not have been unaware of homophobic sneers against him by the ‘manlier’ boys. Orwell was not tolerant – at any period of his life – of ‘nancies’. What Freudians called reactive suppression has been suspected, and there is a fleeting reference to one crush at Eton. Blair wrote a scurrilously homophobic limerick that was printed in one of the school’s papers. It opens: ‘Then up waddled Wog [i.e. Gow backwards] and he squeaked in Greek / “I’ve grown another hair on my cheek.’” No need to ask which cheek is alluded to. Gow was a hairy man – down to the hirsute buttock, apparently. The lines are an allusion to the outrageously homosexual Cleisthenes tearing the hair out of his rump in Aristophanes’ The Frogs. The verse in the school magazine was anonymous, but Gow – who probably dreamed in Greek – would have had no difficulty in uncovering the rascal who wrote it and what it implied. But he could not rush off to the Provost, M. R. James, and demand condign retribution without the career-endangering query: ‘Do all the boys know, Andrew?’ James, it has been suspected, was himself discreetly homosexual. One can speculate that Gow used certain texts (such as The Frogs) in his small classics translation group to observe how receptive boys were to various Hellenic and Roman improprieties.
The early biographical birds, Stansky and Abrahams, interviewed Gow, and recorded him recalling a warm relationship with Blair, perceiving ‘under the shyness and surliness . . . an authentic intelligence’. As with other pupils, Gow said, they had private tutorials in Gow’s room, where groups of four or five boys would read aloud their personal writings. A fondness for Eric Blair is implied. Did Gow, in this relaxed atmosphere, venture some kind of pass? What he told Stansky and Abrahams makes all the odder the account of Richard visiting Eton, to be told by Gow to remove his son entirely from the British higher education system, lest he somehow disgrace Eton. Richard, a man used to obeying orders, got the message, and cut off any further family monetary sacrifice for Eric: no longer the hope of the Blairs.
From now on, Eric would have to pay his own way. And that meant the colonies. Richard would, of course, have relayed to his son Gow’s devastating report. It cannot have been a pleasant conversation. According to Jacintha Buddicom, Eric’s first sweetheart, her family put pressure on Richard to get Eric to university, whatever the cost. He wanted ‘so much’ to go, she recalled to Crick in 1972. ‘But Mr Blair was adamant.’ Gow had delivered a death sentence. It was revenge for the doggerel.
Orwell offers a scathing pen portrait of Gow as ‘Porteous’ in Coming Up for Air. The actual name is borrowed from the tutor who gets Kit into college in Sorrell and Son, a novel Orwell loathed for its grovelling worship of the English class system. In Orwell’s novel, Porteous is the public-school friend, and unofficial mentor, of the intelligent but unschooled hero. He is a kind of one-man prep school: a crammer, or freelance tutor. Bowling routinely turns to Porteous for worldly advice but, finally, he discards him:
I watched him leaning up against the bookshelf. Funny, these public-school chaps. Schoolboys all their days. Whole life revolving round the old school and their bits of Latin and Greek and poetry . . . And a curious thought struck me. HE’S DEAD. He’s a ghost. All people like that are dead.
How Much of Eton Did He Take With Him?
If St Cyp’s was a ‘prep school’ preparing ‘scholarship fodder’ for the (anything but) public school, what was Eton preparing its pupils for? Power, influence and ‘achievement’, as currently defined (at the moment this achievement includes prime ministership and screen stardom; floreat Etona). Connolly, on arrival at the school, realized that ‘This was the place for me’, and played the system with the expertise of a card sharp. He attached himself, courtier-like, to those schoolfellows whom he could amuse, and who could be useful to him in years to come.
Evidence is scant as to what Orwell’s game was. He certainly wasn’t a truckler. He and Connolly remained friends but ceased to be bosom friends, Connolly going so far as to say that he hardly ever saw Eric at Eton. Orwell evidently chose not to be easily seen. He adopted the pose of flâneur outside the Etonian whale, but close enough to know it better than did those who were swallowed up like so many Jonahs. ‘Aloof’ is Connolly’s description in Enemies of Promise. He himself had the aloofness of a social tapeworm. There seems to have been some slight friction over a joint crush on some pretty junior boy.24 Connolly slyly accused Blair of being the purer of the two of them. By which he meant timid.
After St Cyprian’s, Eton clearly suited both young men, in their different ways. Stansky and Abrahams shrewdly note that Orwell never dwells in his writing on periods of his life when he was happy(ish). This seems to have been one such. Like Connolly he was pleased to discover, he said later, that Eton ‘had a tolerant and civilized atmosphere’. Even for bolshy Eric Blair. Despite war there was a reasonable level of creature comfort, much less corporal punishment than at St Cyprian’s, and nearby rivers – flowing water, which Eric Blair always loved (hence ‘Orwell’) more than the tidal ocean, which he found ‘dull’. The streams and pools were teeming with fish, and many of the anglers were in uniform. Blair caught and cooked arm-long pike, the largest of them. Pike flesh is (to my palate) muddy: but it was more fun than rugby. He doubtless, as I did as a child, boiled the head to show off the terrifying teeth.
A transparently disapproving Crick (grammar school and LSE) describes the peculiar internal institutions of Eton: ‘elections’, ‘wallgames’, ‘Collegers vs Oppidans’, ‘dry bobs’, ‘wet bobs’, ‘Pop’, etc. Orwell, he implies, was in Eton, but not of it. Eric ‘led his section behind a distant haystack and in shirtsleeves read them Eric, or Little by Little, whose ethic he detested so cordially, [and] read it with mock seriousness for the whole of a long and undisturbed summer afternoon’. Author Dean Frederic Farrar’s ‘ethic’ was that of a public-school headmaster (which he was): children must obey their elders or go to perdition – down the little-by-little path to becoming ‘a bad lot’. Self-abuse was identified, discreetly, as a main cause of juvenile downfall. Victorians had a holy horror of masturbation – tolerated as the prophylactic practice of Onan is in Holy Writ. It’s sanctioned if nothing better is, so to speak, at hand. Orwell surely masturbated. Boys’ schools, then and now, floated on a sea of frustrated juvenile sperm.
Orwell, it is well recorded, had, like many boys, his porn stash – Donald McGill ‘dirty postcards’, in his case. They were aphrodisiac to middle-class lads, even until the 1950s. I remember one I found oddly arousing: burly gym instructor to busty lass – ‘You’ll take your physical jerks under me tonight.’ Eric Blair began collecting McGills at about the age of twelve
. They were available at newsagents in seaside Eastbourne (not Henley). Not all newsagents would let children buy them, but some would, particularly stands round the pier.25 The McGills incarnated Orwell’s ‘Sancho Panza’ view of life: fornicating, farting, feasting and generally having fun. Eric’s ‘calf love’, at this period, was Jacintha Buddicom, a family connection, in Henley. In a friendly, late-life and deliberately foggy memoir, Eric & Us (1974), Jacintha recalled him, in his very early teens, showing her a selection of his less naughty McGill items. The hot ones he kept in a manila envelope, for private use.
Etonian rebel with drooping fag and bathing togs, probably 1916.
Orwell had other unofficial passions. A lifelong sufferer from nightmares, he loved horror stories, particularly Poe. The Provost of Eton, when he was there, was M. R. James. James arrived at Eton, his first and last love, the year after Blair had, and superintended the school until 1936. In 1918 his Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904–12) were famous. Orwell, as D. J. Taylor says, ‘was addicted to M. R. James’. James’s horror stories may have inspired Orwell to go himself into dark, supernatural places. He and a schoolfriend, Steven Runciman, made a voodoo doll of a pupil (an elder brother of the novelist Henry Green) whom they particularly disliked. First the boy sustained an injury, then he died. Orwell was always a dangerous man to cross.
There is a surviving picture of Eric Blair at Eton that is revealing. Unusually for him, he has his guard down in front of the lens. He has a floppy sun hat, rolled-up swimming togs under his arm, and a fag drooping from his mouth (doubtless the ‘lucifers’ are in his bags). He had found his lifelong deodorant.
An Etonian, Whatever
I’m a public school man. That means everything.
‘CAPTAIN’ GRIMES in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall
Stephen Spender’s ‘Orwell was the least Etonian Etonian ever to come out of Eton’ is witty but, to borrow one of Orwell’s favourite terms, ‘bollox’.26 In his later career Orwell might as well have had the old school tie tattooed on his chest.
Orwell’s higher journalism is one of the glories of English literary culture. But it is illuminating to look behind the crystalline, classless prose to his patrons. The first such patron was Richard Rees, the ‘socialist baronet’ (and millionaire) who published Orwell’s finest early articles, such as ‘The Spike’, and the much-reprinted ‘A Hanging’, in The Adelphi. The last was the multimillionaire David Astor, who published a hundred of his finest later articles in The Observer. Rees and Astor had four things in common: they were hugely rich, they were top people and they were Etonians. And, fourthly, they were unfailingly helpful to Orwell. Horizon – the magazine that sold massively during the war, giving Orwell his largest readership for such articles as ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’ (1944, a paean to ‘old-school’ values) – was edited by Eric’s friend Cyril Connolly, an Etonian, and funded by the margarine millionaire Peter Watson. Watson? Another Etonian. Oh, and Raffles? Etonian, of course.
These editors did more than lick Orwell’s prose into shape and open doors for him. They were patrons, in an eighteenth-century sense of the word. It was the radical baronet, Rees, who made the introductions that brought Orwell (like Rees himself) into the Spanish Civil War: two Etonians fighting for republicanism (which, if victorious, would have eliminated the Spanish equivalent of their class like rabbits at harvest time). When Orwell went to Wigan in 1936, observing with a jaundiced eye the grubby fingerprint in the margarine and the overflowing chamber pot under the kitchen table, he had in his pocket letters of introduction from Rees. Mine owners did not allow emaciated London journalists of leftist views with bad coughs to go into their deepest tunnels as it took their fancy (to write not entirely friendly articles). Orwell was always good at using friends like Rees as invisible social lubricant. Rees’s services, as a source of support, are acknowledged – with, as has been said, a somewhat ungracious portrait – in the character of Ravelston in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.
One doesn’t know how much Orwell cost Astor (not that it would have made the slightest dent in his fortune), but it was a large sum. It was all done on a friend-in-need basis. An Etonian friend. The two men became hobnobbingly close when Astor got in touch, admiringly, after reading Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, with its gripping first line: ‘As I write this, highly civilized men are flying overhead trying to kill me.’ During the Second World War Astor served spectacularly well against the highly civilized enemy, as did Rees; Astor was in ‘intelligence’ during the war. There is speculation that he introduced Orwell into that murky world.27 Astor gave Orwell a free range to contribute ‘as he pleased’ when he (Astor) took over The Observer after the war, making it the most politically influential paper in the country. The relationship went well beyond an ever-open editorial door. When Orwell did a kind of Robinson Crusoe, in 1947, to live a crofter’s life in the Hebrides, it was on an island, and estate, that Astor owned. Astor was immensely and discreetly helpful during Orwell’s dying days – arranging the poignant marriage and country funeral. He was the widowed Sonia’s pillar of strength. He chose to lie with Orwell in All Saints’ graveyard, Sutton Courtenay. Etonians in life, Etonians for eternity.
Wealthy as he was, Astor was enriched by Orwell in ways that mattered more than money. (He had a charmingly vague notion of real life sometimes. Famously, when he was editor of The Observer a colleague had to explain to him what a mortgage was.) I met Astor once only, at an Orwell Trust committee meeting. Someone observed that the archive was on a sound footing, for a year or two at least. ‘Orwell said [that] the most immoral thing a man can say’, Astor mused, half to himself, ‘is “it will see out my time”.’ Then the committee, bracing itself morally, Orwell’s posthumous instruction ringing in their ears, proceeded to the next item on the agenda.
One other small episode illustrates the Masonic Etonian network that invisibly supported George Orwell. In 1938, he wanted to write what would be the most ambitious novel he had hitherto attempted. Coming Up for Air, it would be called. Unfortunately, he was having difficulty with air himself: his lungs were in collapse. Doctors recommended clean, warm, dry foreign air. He was acutely hard up at the time. It was out of the question. An Etonian Orwell barely knew, L. H. Myers, heard about his plight. He advanced, anonymously, £300 (around £10,000 in modern currency) for Orwell to go away and write. He and his wife went to Morocco, the air did him no end of good, and the novel, his best, was written. It was years before Orwell knew who his benefactor was. By then Myers had committed suicide and repayment was impossible.
Would Etonians like Rees, Astor, Connolly, Watson and Myers have been, en masse, as consistently and constructively generous to a chronically down-and-out Harrovian, or, God help us, a grammar school boy? Orwell may have hated it – Gordon Comstock, his alter ego hero, sternly refuses handouts from Ravelston/Rees – but he took the help gladly, lastly a cool £1,000 to set up his ‘independent’ farm on Jura. Without his Etonian comrades, pulling all together, posterity would not have George Orwell or care about someone called Eric Blair.
The book-publishing world (‘trade’, as Jane Austen would have called it) was something different. Eton did not flourish in the British book trade. Orwell’s books were, every one of them, put out by brilliant mercantile Jews: Victor Gollancz, Fred Warburg and Tosco Fyvel. The one Anglo-Saxon publisher he repeatedly tried, T. S. Eliot, turned down his first book (Down and Out in Paris and London) and Animal Farm. There was something about Orwell Eliot didn’t like.
It’s not worth wasting words on the tediously repeated, and wrong-headed, charge that Orwell did not like Jews. Orwell was not, at his most Orwellian, anti-Semitic.28
The King’s Policeman
In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it.
The Road to Wigan Pier
I loved Burma and the Burman and have no regrets that I spent the best years of my life in the Burma police.
ORWELL in a late letter, quoted in Stansky and Abraha
ms
Burma ruined my health.
‘Autobiographical Note’ (1942)
Orwell left Eton without completing his last term. Cyril Connolly, always the shrewder of the two, had bagged a plum scholarship at Balliol. He was currently on a grand tour of the Continent – broadening his mind, as the phrase was. And his posterior (never svelte). Would the cadaverous Orwell recognize the fat-cigar-smoking frog he was, when, years later, they met, Connolly wondered? The next station in his life after Eton and Oxford would be Brideshead.
Orwell’s other close Eton companion, Harold Acton, was also Oxford-bound. He would have three years to ‘become’ himself – as a precociously published poet, aesthete and half the original of Anthony Blanche. He distinguished himself with a night-time reading, through a megaphone, of Eliot’s recently published The Waste Land. The performance is immortalized in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The other half of Blanche, Brian Howard, another Etonian contemporary of Blair’s, was also at Oxford. ‘Bright Young Things’, they were called. The world was their oyster.29
There were no oysters for Eric Blair. He had hit life’s buffers very early, it seemed. The colonies were traditionally where middle-class children who had no better choice were deposited. A ‘finishing school’, it was jested, for those who were finished before they had even got started. The word ‘exile’ hovers over biographical accounts of Orwell’s next five years, 1922–7. The word has an element of truth. The choice of what to do next was not entirely his. Three years short of the age of majority, without private means, he was still – if not for much longer – subject to his father’s authority. ‘India’ was decreed.
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