Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950)
Our classy gent of the day for today is Mr. Eric Blair. Born in (British) India in 1903, he grew up in a world very different to our own today. As a boy, he was sent to Eton college on a scholarship. It was during these formative days in Windsor that he established himself as a challenger to authority (as a practical joker and by “making himself as big a nuisance of as he could”); as a free-thinking, investigative person (manufacturing explosives and shooting a jackdaw off the college roof so that he could dissect it); and as a writer (getting several poems published in local newspapers).
His first published articles as a professional writer, which would form the bulk of his career, focused on censorship and the conflicts of interests behind multiple newspapers being owned by the same proprietor.
In early adult life he worked briefly as an Indian Imperial Policeman in Burma, during which time he (claimed to have) witnessed a hanging, which he later described as an “unspeakable wrongness”. It was during his mid 20s, after a time recuperating from Dengue fever in England, that he decided to leave the police and become an investigative author.
His social conscience was piqued by the conditions that people living in poverty had to endure. He variously dressed as a tramp and slept in doss-houses and homeless shelters around London; worked as a plongeur (dish-washer) in the restaurants of Paris, and when ill, was treated in a Parisian charity hospital (a significant risk to his own life), so that he could discover “How the Poor Die”.
He wanted to discover what life and death was like for those less fortunate than he was, and despite his privileged upbringing, blended in well among the down-and-outs he met, under the alias of “P.S. Burton”.
When he published his writings on this period of his life, he was worried that his “lower-upper-middle-class” family might be socially embarrassed by the fact that he had lived as a tramp, and so to protect their feelings, published under another pseudonym, chosen because it was a “good, round English name”, which he would go on to use for all of his writings.
Throughout most of the 1920s and 30s, he supported himself and his literary career through work as a teacher or tutor, and through shifts worked at a friend’s bookshop.
It was just before Christmas 1936, that he left the comforts of life in England and travelled to Spain, declaring upon his arrival that he had “come to fight against Fascism”. The political situation in Spain at the time was extremely complicated, and could fill entire volumes, but Blair was fighting for what he believed to be right.
Despite the difficulties of living in a war zone, our classy gent insisted on doing things the classy way. As a British man in the mid 1930s, he was a great tea drinker, and had crates of Fortnum and Mason’s blend delivered to him in the front line.
At 6’2” (1.88m), Blair was considerably taller than his Spanish brothers-in-arms. This highlighted itself as a significant disadvantage in early 1937 when, whilst on duty in a trench, his head projected above the parapet and he was shot in the neck by a sniper, ending his service in Catalonia.
His life after military service was relatively sedate, due to his injury, and various recurring illnesses.
Blair was a heavy smoker of hand-rolled cigarettes, a drinker of strong tea (about which he wrote an essay, of a similar nature to some of our own on this site), and an appreciator of good English beer, taken moderately and regularly. Blair wrote an article describing his ideal pub, the Moon Under Water, which was the inspiration for the style of the J.D. Wetherspoon chain of pubs.
Despite being very particular about the way he took his liquid sustenance, Blair was famously unfussy about his food - during the war he enjoyed the rather euphemistic “Victory pie”, was possibly the only person ever to extol the virtues of BBC canteen food, and once ate his cat’s dinner instead of his own by mistake.
As many a classy gent is, Eric Blair was somewhat eccentric. He insisted on having the finest cloth used to make his clothes when he went to his tailor, but happily tramped about in rags as well. Whilst fighting Fascism, he was described by a comrade as looking “like a prep-school master” due to his dress, but when living in London was described in his Special Branch dossier as dressing like a Bohemian, which was noted as being a sure sign of being a Communist!
His attitude to social mores was equally confusing. He expected working-class guests to dress for dinner when dining with him, yet he would also slurp tea from a saucer (considered to be remarkably uncouth) whilst in the BBC canteen.
Whilst this article does not touch on his later works, which virtually every schoolchild will have read, Eric Blair was a prolific political writer, highlighting the dangers of not thinking for oneself, and of accepting totalitarian government.
In constructing his later novels Animal Farm and 1984, he created a new set of ideas and analogies. Not only did he enrich the canon of English literature and political thinking, but he invented an entire lexicon of neologisms (called Newspeak) for 1984, describing the concepts required of the population under his dystopian totalitarian government.
Eric Arthur Blair grew ill in late 1940s, struggling to write because of his illness. In late 1949, he became so ill that he was admitted to University College Hospital, in London (a far cry from l’Hôpital X, where he had previously stayed) and passed away on the 21st of January 1950.
His will stipulated that he wanted to be buried in the Anglican churchyard nearest to where he died. Due to the closure of all inner-city churchyards in London during the 19th century, Eric was buried in the Oxfordshire town of Sutton Courtenay, under a headstone which makes no mention of his much more famous pseudonym, George Orwell.
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