“One of the most God-forsaken places I have ever struck”: George Orwell in Hayes
Most Wednesday mornings, Hayes FM are kind enough to have me on to talk about local history. Today we discussed George Orwell’s time in Hayes from April 1932- July 1933. It got me suitably fired up to jump in the car and go for an explore, accompanied by Mark Machado from the radio station.
Being a schoolmaster doesn’t fire the imagination quite like service in the Imperial Indian police in Burma or getting shot in the throat during the Spanish Civil War, but several key events in the author’s career occurred while in Hayes. His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London was published by Victor Gollancz in January 1933. In order to save the blushes of his family about his career as a plongeur and a tramp, Eric Blair for the first time chose the pen-name George Orwell, having previously and occasionally written under the name P.S. Burton in magazine articles. He had to spend much of his spare time editing the manuscript for a nervous and demanding Gollancz, while simultaneously writing his next book, Burmese Days.
After resigning his police commission and returning from Burma in 1927, Orwell divided his time over the next five years between investigating the lifestyle of ‘gentlemen of the road’, living an impoverished bohemian lifestyle in Paris, and hanging out at his parents’ retirement house in Suffolk. Although he had some success getting articles accepted in the Adelphi magazine and the New Statesman, he was nonetheless skint. So he took a teacher’s job at a private prep school in Hayes: the Hawthorns High School. There were only 14-15 boy pupils and one other teacher, a Mr Shaw. This made Orwell – being the senior of the two – technically headmaster.
Orwell was known as being strict in the classroom (not a word of English was allowed in French lessons), yet kindly and enthusiastic at extra-curricular activities. He frequently took the lads on nature rambles, showing them how to capture marsh gas in jars, that sort of thing; he also wrote and directed the school play – Charles II – which was performed in St Mary’s Church nearby.
Orwell wrote about Hayes that it was “one of the most God-forsaken places I have ever struck”. Given what we know, he was hardly giving the area a fair crack of the whip. Much as he worked on being empathetic to the common man, Orwell was a bit of a snob, particularly when it came to the suburban middle-classes. His time in Hayes provided a rich vein which he mined profitably in both A Clergyman’s Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (and probably Coming Up for Air, which I don’t remember very well). So one would like to think that rather than having a deep-felt antipathy for poor Hayes, Orwell was simply impressing his literary friends .
Today, the building that was the Hawthorns High School is the Fountain House Hotel. It has a plaque to Orwell on the front of the building, sponsored by the Hayes Literary Society. Our thanks to Rose and Yusuf of that establishment for their warm welcome at our unannounced arrival and for letting us have a bit of a mooch around.
The most famous picture of Orwell (and possibly the best, the one of him smoking over the typewriter is a contender) is his mugshot for his NUJ card. Several days’ beard growth, frayed collar, lush barnet. It’s the one which more than any shows his essential kindness and decency and was taken in 1933 and is therefore exactly contemporary with his time in Hayes, aged about 30. Armed with this and today’s sojourn, I have a great mental picture of the writer during that time in west London suburbia, the period of his breakthrough, about to start delivering arguably the finest writing of the 20th Century.
Sources: Orwell: The Authorised Biography by Michael Shelden (1991); Wikipedia here; a nice local newspaper article from 2003, Orwell’s centenary, here.
A nice insight into Orwell in transiion, thanks.
Top work. And excellent ‘new’ pic.
Thanks to the ereader on my Android tablet and courtesy of the Gutenberg Project, I have recently read both Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. Both books contain a wealth of information on the life in the times in which they were written. I think they are valuable contributions to our knowledge of the lives of the “sub-historical” folk who nonetheless underpin the edifice of history.
Orwell certainly had strong views on a number of topics, some of which I agree with and others of which I repudiate. For example, I was particularly irritated by his dismissive take on vegetarians! (It’s OK, I have forgiven him!)
In all, he was a remarkable man who has left us a rich legacy in his writings, the non-fiction no less than the fiction.
Well, I forgave him from the start for myriad left wing views! Paradoxically, he is a hero of the Right as a result of his patriotism and anti-Stalinist writing. At least his opinionated snobbery is usually elegant, funny and delivered with panache. Remind me which essay/book he wrote about vegetarians, I do remember reading it.
Glad his stuff is on Gutenberg, but I feel his books should be owned. I have a copy by Penguin of complete novels (6), great value, not sure if it’s still in print.
BTW, was watching Pointless on telly yesterday evening (quiz programme, love it). There was an Orwell question to name one of his novels. One team offered Road to Wigan Pier, the other Homage to Catalonia, good answers but not novels. Yet they were accepted as correct. Very sloppy.
If memory serves, the diatribe against vegetarianism (which, I think, is directed against the sort of people who hypocritically espouse vegetarianism, rather than against the philosophy itself) occurs in The Road to Wigan Pier, nearer the end than the beginning, but my faulty memory does not allow me to be more precise.
As for his political angle, Orwell always holds up as the perfect solution to all our problems political, social and economic, what he calls “Socialism”, though without defining the concept further (at least not in the two works mentioned). I somehow don’t think Orwell would have felt at all comfortable in some of the regimes that have been set up in the name of “Socialism”. I think he is too much of an individualist to conform entirely to any party or “ism”. His interest in, and concern for, the economically disadvantaged strata of society seems genuine and touching.
Yes, I’m sure Orwell drew on Hayes for material for some of his novels, but I’m also pretty certain that you’re unaware of the existence of the working-class writer Lionel Britton, whose novel Hunger and Love (1931) Orwell reviewed, and which had a lasting effect on him:
http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/george-orwell-and-lionel-britton.html
This is the transcript of the 1940 Home Service interview mentioned in my link above:
http://georgeorwellnovels.com/broadcasts/the-proletarian-writer/
Interesting blog, by the way.
Thanks, Tony, enjoyed reading both of those. Aspidistra was the first Orwell I read as an adult, at the ripe old age of about 30. I then went on to read everything that was in print that I could afford, ie excluding The Complete Works in 20 vols, unfortunately.
I’ve heard the quote before, but never knew Orwell spent much time here. Also interesting to see that fountain house hotel was a school! It has always stood out.