George Orwell: A Life in Letters

by Peter Davison

  ARM THE PEOPLE is in itself a vague phrase, and I do not, of course, know what weapons are available for immediate distribution. But there are at any rate several things that can and should be done now, i.e. within the next three days:

  1. Hand grenades. These are the only modern weapon of war that can be rapidly and easily manufactured, and they are one of the most useful. Hundreds of thousands of men in England are accustomed to using hand grenades and would be only too ready to instruct others. They are said to be useful against tanks and will be absolutely necessary if enemy parachutists with machine-guns manage to establish themselves in our big towns. I had a front-seat view of the street fighting in Barcelona in May, 1937, and it convinced me that a few hundred men with machine-guns can paralyse the life of a large city, because of the fact that a bullet will not penetrate an ordinary brick wall. They can be blasted out with artillery, but it is not always possible to bring a gun to bear. On the other hand, the early street fighting in Spain showed that armed men can be driven out of stone buildings with grenades or even sticks of dynamite if the right tactics are used.

  2. Shotguns. There is talk of arming some of the Local Defence Volunteer1 contingents with shotguns. This may be necessary if all the rifles and Bren guns are needed for the regular troops. But in that case the distribution should be made now and all weapons should be immediately requisitioned from the gunsmiths’ shops. There was talk of doing this weeks ago, but in fact many gunsmiths’ windows show rows of guns which are not only useless where they are, but actually a danger, as these shops could easily be raided. The powers and limitations of the shotgun (with buckshot, lethal up to about sixty yards) should be explained to the public over the radio.

  3. Blocking fields against aircraft landings. There has been much talk of this, but it has only been done sporadically. The reason is that it has been left to voluntary effort, i.e. to people who have insufficient time and no power of requisitioning materials. In a small thickly-populated country like England we could within a very [few] days make it impossible for an aeroplane to land anywhere except at an aerodrome. All that is needed is the labour. Local authorities should therefore have powers to conscript labour and requisition such materials as they require.

  4. Painting out place-names. This has been well done as regards sign-posts, but there are everywhere shopfronts, tradesmen’s vans, etc., bearing the name of their locality. Local authorities should have the power to enforce the painting-out of these immediately. This should include the brewers’ names on public houses. Most of these are confined to a fairly small area, and the Germans are probably methodical enough to know this.

  5. Radio sets. Every Local Defence Volunteer headquarters should be in possession of a radio receiving set, so that if necessary it can receive its orders over the air. It is fatal to rely on the telephone in a moment of emergency. As with weapons, the Government should not hesitate to requisition what it needs.

  All of these are things that could be done within the space of a very few days. Meanwhile, let us go on repeating arm the people, in the hope that more and more voices will take it up. For the first time in decades we have a Government with imagination, and there is at least a chance that they will listen.

  [XII, pp. 192–3; typewritten]

  1.Orwell attended a conference on the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers, which he joined, at Lord’s Cricket Ground on 12 June 1940. This was later re-named the Home Guard. Orwell was soon promoted Sergeant in C Company, 5th County of London Battalion and proved a keen and innovative member. His lecture notes survive and are included in the Complete Works.

  To Sacheverell Sitwell*

  6 July 1940

  18 Dorset Chambers

  Chagford Street

  Ivor Place NW 1

  Dear Mr. Sitwell,

  I had your book on poltergeists to review for Horizon and was very interested by it. I could only do a review of about 600 words and I don’t know whether they’ll print all of that, as they haven’t much space. When I read that very creepy incident you describe of the girl medium dressing dummies or arranging clothes about the room, it brought back to me a memory of 10 years ago which I thought you might like to hear, as I believe it has a remote bearing on your subject.

  About ten years ago I was out for a walk on Walberswick common, near Southwold, in Suffolk, with a backward boy I was tutor to at the time.1 Under a gorse bush the boy noticed a neatly tied-up parcel and drew my attention to it. It was a cardboard box about 10'' by 6'' by 3'' deep. Inside we found that it was lined with cloth and made up like a little room, with tiny furniture made of matchwood and scraps of cloth glued together. There were also (for the sake of complete accuracy I must say that I am not sure whether these were in the same box or another) some tiny female garments including underclothes. There was also a scrap of paper with ‘This is not bad is it?’ (or nearly those words) written on it in an evidently feminine hand. The neatness and flimsiness of the whole thing made me feel sure it had been made by a woman. What chiefly impressed me was that anyone should go to the trouble of making this thing, which would have meant some hours’ work, then carefully tie it up in a parcel and thrust it away under a bush, and in a rather remote spot at that. For what such ‘intuitive’ feelings are worth, I may say that I felt convinced (a) that it had been put there with the intention that someone should find it, and (b) that it had been made by someone suffering from some kind of sexual aberration. Walberswick has a very small population and one could probably have deduced who was responsible with a little trouble. I may add that the boy I was with could have had nothing to do with it. He was not only very backward but was a cripple and so clumsy with his hands as to have been quite incapable of anything of the kind. The strange thing is that I do not remember what finally happened to the box. To the best of my recollection we put it back under the bush and on coming back some days later found it was gone. At any rate I didn’t keep it, which would seem the natural thing to do. I have often puzzled over the incident since, and always with the feeling that there was something vaguely unwholesome in the appearance of the little room and the clothes. Then in your book you linked up the doll-dressing impulse in girls with definite mental aberration, and it struck me that this affair had a sort of bearing on the subject. The fact that I promptly remembered the incident when reading that passage in your book seems to establish a kind of connection.

  I have ventured to write to you though not knowing you. Possibly you have seen some of my books however. I believe your sister at any rate knows of me as we have a common friend in Geoffrey Gorer.* 2

  Yours sincerely

  George Orwell

  [XII, 653, pp. 208–9; typewritten]

  1.Bryan Morgan who had been crippled by polio. (See D.J. Taylor, p. 112.)

  2.Sitwell replied on 22 July, saying he would have written earlier but was trying to finish a book. Orwell’s story was, he said, ‘most interesting—and decidedly weird. I wish one knew the secret of it.’ He also wished they could meet sometime and said that his sister, Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), was staying with him and had asked him to say that she had ‘read with admiration nearly everything you have written’.

  To Leonard Moore*

  22 October 1940

  18 Dorset Chambers

  Chagford Street NW 1

  Dear Mr Moore,

  I have only just had your letter as I have been in the country for a week. I didn’t get a previous letter you refer to in it. That is what the posts are like.

  I have thought it over and I don’t think I can do that thing for Hutchinson’s. I am sorry you have been to some trouble about it. But I don’t really know anything about the subject and it would mean doing research which is very difficult at present, especially as I can’t leave London for any length of time. Please apologise to them for me, and accept my own apologies for yourself.1

  I have nearly finished the short book I am doing for Warburg and shall have it done in about 10 days° time. I would have fi
nished it earlier only I have been ill, which was why I went down to the country. The title is to be The Lion and the Unicorn.2

  Yours sincerely

  Eric Blair

  [XII, 699, p. 277; typewritten]

  1.It is not known what this proposal was.

  2.This was the first of the series of Searchlight Books. The series was planned by Fredric Warburg, Tosco Fyvel and Orwell. The full title is The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. It was published on 19 February 1941. The first run comprised 7,500 copies and was followed by a second impression of 5,000 copies. Unfortunately unsold stock and the type, with that for Homage to Catalonia, were destroyed when the Mayflower Press in Plymouth was bombed. (See also Eileen’s letter to Norah, 5.12.40.)

  Eileen* to Norah Myles*

  [c. 5 December 1940?]

  24 Croom’s Hill SE 10

  [no salutation]

  This is to accompany a Charming Gift but I don’t know what the gift is yet because it will be bought this afternoon. Or so I hope. I have been ILL. Ever so ill. Bedridden for 4 weeks & still weak. You know or Quartus does perhaps though it’s more than all my local doctors do. They diagnosed cystitis and then they diagnosed nephrolithiasis & then they diagnosed Malta fever1 with ovarian complications & then they went all hush-hush while they diagnosed a tuberculous infection so that I couldn’t possibly guess what they were testing for. They haven’t yet diagnosed cancer or G.P.I.2 but I expect they will shortly. They’re in a great worry because nothing can be found wrong with my heart as that was assumed to be giving out very soon. Meanwhile a perfectly sweet little pathologist like a wren did an ordinary blood count & found the haemoglobin down to 57%. This is much despised by the clin-icians but in fact they can find nothing else. So now I hear I’ll be cured when I weigh 9 stone. As my present weight is 7st 12. with my clothes on I think perhaps they’ll lose interest before the cure is complete. I went to Norfolk for a fortnight’s convalescence and wanted to start work on Monday as all this is just silly, but I can’t go back without a health certificate & the wretched man won’t sign one. However I am now allowed to go shopping on medical grounds though the financial ones aren’t so good.

  How is your paint? 3 I hope for a Word at Christmas. Marjorie (née Blair) says they’re quite O.K. but I don’t know where S. Michael’s Hill is 4 & have no inside information about the Bristol blitz. I may give up this job for a bit anyway & perhaps see for myself after all. I had arranged a long weekend (which I was going to spend with you) because the pain was worse but then it got a lot worse & the long weekend was merged in sick leave.

  George has written a little book, no 1 in the Searchlight Books (Secker & Warburg 2/-), out next month, which please note. Explaining how to be a Socialist though Tory. It was going to cost 1/-, which would have been better, but Warburg changed at the last minute & the book had to have another 10,000 words inserted to give value for twice the money. Some of the later ones look like being good.

  I hope you have a tolerable Christmas. We’re having the Dinner on Boxing Day, theoretically for lonely soldiers but they are so lonely that we don’t know them yet. Mother is still away of course. Now I shall go and shop. But can you send on an envelope to Mary, of whose address I have no idea[?] I also don’t know whether she got any further news about Teddy though he was posted Missing in the Times months after the Glorious went down.5 She was really magnificent about that. I have been assuming that it was hopeless but of course it’s possible that he was taken prisoner. George Kopp,* whom I had also assumed dead, was captured with two bullets in his chest & part of his left hand shot off. Later he escaped to unoccupied France & he’s now trying to get here6 but his letters take about two months to come so one can’t know much of what is happening.

  By the way, where is Norman?7 I hope not in Egypt.

  Now I must go shopping being as ever a Devoted Pig.

  Having walked twelve or fourteen miles to find mother soft slippers with heels, I had to buy everyone else hcfs8 in a horrible shop. Last year’s gift was identical I believe but you will have a nice stock of white hcfs for the cold days.

  [LO, pp. 79–81; XII, 714A, p. 294; handwritten]

  1.Nephrolithiasis: kidney stones; Malta Fever: undulant fever resulting in swelling of the joints and enlarged spleen. It was common in Malta, hence its name, and is an affliction especially suffered by goats.

  2.G.P.I: General Paralysis of the Insane. Ill though Eileen certainly is, she can still be comically ironic.

  3.Presumably Eileen (perhaps ironically) refers to superficial damage to the paintwork of the house arising from the air-raid.

  4.St. Michael’s Hill runs south-east to north-west, alongside the University of Bristol campus.

  5.See Bertha Mary Wardell, 16.2.37 n. 11.

  6.Kopp worked for much of the war in or near Marseilles as ‘a sort of engineer’ and eventually reached England. He helped Eileen make the journey north from King’s Cross to Stockton-on-Tees shortly before she died under an anaesthetic.

  7.Norman was the older brother of John Durant. (See headnote to 3.11.36, and 1.1.38, n. 8.)

  8.hcfs = handkerchiefs. The gift had to be white, easily bought even in wartime, suitable for men and women, and ordinary to the point of being unimaginative. Clothes were not rationed until 1 June 1941, when, of the 66 coupons allowed per year for an adult, one would have been required for each handkerchief.

  To Z. A. Bokhari*

  17 March 1941

  18 Dorset Chambers

  Chagford Street NW 1

  Dear Mr Bokhari,

  I am sending you a rough synopsis of four broadcasts on literary criticism,1 which I discussed with you a week or two back. I think they are full enough to give you an idea of whether they are the sort of thing you want, and, if they are, I can get on with the scripts. I really don’t know whether this is the sort of thing an Indian audience is interested in, but you told me to talk on the lines along which my own interest lies, and naturally I am glad of an opportunity to do that.

  Yours sincerely

  George Orwell

  [XII, 776, pp. 451–2; typewritten]

  1.These were broadcast on 30 April and 7, 14, and 21 May 1941; they were published in The Listener on 29 May, and 5, 12, and 19 June 1941 (see XII, 792, 797, 800, and 804).

  Orwell’s review of General Wavell’s biography of Field Marshal Allenby had been published in Horizon in December 1940 and Orwell commented in his War-time Diary, 2 January 1941 that his criticism appeared when Wavell was successful in North Africa. Janus, in ‘A Spectator’s Notebook’, 21 February, remarked it was ironical that the review appeared the day Sidi Barrani fell to the British, noting particularly Orwell’s comment that Allenby was ‘perhaps . . . the best of a bad lot . . . he remains totally uninteresting—a fact which also tells one a good deal about General Wavell.’ This was followed, in The Spectator of 7 March 1941, by a letter from A. C. Taylor, who had noted Janus’s remarks and drew attention to another interesting coincidence: the same issue of Horizon had contained Orwell’s ‘The Ruling Class’, in which Orwell dismissed the bayonet as useless except for opening tins, at a time when Italian troops ‘were surrendering in thousands the moment they saw this weapon in the hands of the charging enemy’.

  To The Spectator

  21 March 1941

  Sir,—The letter from Mr. A. C. Taylor raises the question of the value of bayonets, and also refers back to ‘A Spectator’s Notebook’ of the previous week. Perhaps I can answer both criticisms together. Of course I was wrong about General Wavell, and Heaven knows, I am glad to have been wrong. What I said in my review of his life of Allenby was that as General Wavell held one of the key commands in the present war, it was important for outsiders to try and gauge his intellect from the only evidence then available to them, i.e., the book itself. I submit that it was a dull book, about a man who may have been an able soldier but was a dull personality. Where I was wrong was in supposing that General Wavell’s literary shortcomings
reflected in any way on his skill as a commander. I apologise to him, in case this should ever meet his eyes, but I doubt whether he will have been very seriously affected by anything I have said about him.

  As to bayonets, Mr. Taylor states that Italian troops ‘both in Libya and Albania, were surrendering in their hundreds and thousands the moment they saw this weapon in the hands of the charging enemy.’ I suspect that the tanks, aeroplanes, &c, may also have had something to do with the Italian surrenders. One must use common sense. A weapon which will kill a man at hundreds of yards is superior to one which will only kill him at a distance of a few feet. Otherwise why have firearms at all? It is quite true that a bayonet is terrifying, but so is a tommy gun, with the added advantage that you can kill somebody with it. Certainly a soldier with a bayonet on the end of his rifle feels aggressive, but so he does with a haversack full of hand-grenades. In the last war exactly the same propaganda stories about the ‘power of the bayonet’ were current, in the German newspapers as much as in the British. There were tales of thousands of German prisoners who had received bayonet wounds, always in the hindquarters, and countless German cartoons showed British soldiers in flight with Germans prodding them, also in the hindquarters. The psycho-analysts can no doubt tell us why this fantasy of prodding your enemy in the backside appeals so deeply to sedentary civilians. But statistics published after the war was over showed that bayonet wounds accounted for about 1 per cent of total casualties. They will account for far less in this war, in which automatic weapons have grown more important.1

  But why, in the book Mr. Taylor refers to, did I complain about the continuation of bayonet training? Because it wastes time which ought to be spent in training for things the infantryman will actually have to do, and because a mystical belief in primitive weapons is very dangerous to a nation at war. The experience of the last hundred years shows that whereas military opinion in England often becomes realistic after a defeat, in interim periods the belief always gains ground that you can somehow disregard the power of breach-loading° weapons if your morale is good enough. The majority of British commanders before 1914 ‘did not believe in’ the machine-gun. The results can be studied in the enormous cemeteries of northern France. I am not saying that morale is not important. Of course it is. But for Heaven’s sake let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that we shall defeat the German mechanised divisions with rifles and bayonets. The campaign in Flanders ought to have shown whether that is possible.