George Orwell and Kilburn

George Orwell was born as Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in India, where his father worked in the Indian Civil Service. He took his pen name from the King of the time, George V and the River Orwell in East Anglia.   

Orwell died 70 years ago on this day, 21 January, in 1950.

 

George Orwell at the BBC

Orwell is best known for his books such as The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), Animal Farm (1945), and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

In 1942 he rented 10a Mortimer Crescent Kilburn which was the lower half of a large semi-detached house: the ground floor and basement. He moved here with his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy from Langford Court, a modern block of flats in nearby Abbey Road.

Mortimer Crescent was built in 1854 on the Greville estate and originally called Mortimer Road after Thomas Hill Mortimer. He was the solicitor for both Fulk Greville Howard and the later owner of the property, Colonel Arthur Upton. The houses were built for wealthy and professional people.

Pre-War houses, No.10 shown in Red, opposite North Hall

Orwell liked the ‘old fashioned charm’ of Mortimer Crescent which conjured up middle-class households and he told a friend: ‘they would probably have kept a Buttons here’, enchanted at the thought. (Buttons was a Victorian nickname for a young male servant). But other visitors thought the flat was a ‘dreary, icily cold basement’. This was partly because the boiler would go out unless someone got up in the night to stoke it. There was also a noisy anti-aircraft gun nearby that disturbed visitors. 

Orwell wanted to take up his hobby of carpentry and installed a workshop with a lathe in the basement. He kept a few chickens in the back garden and told friends it was a bad idea to give the chickens names, ‘because then you can’t eat them’.

At the time Orwell, who was unfit for active war service because of his poor lungs, was working for the foreign service of the BBC. He was also writing the novel Animal Farm and in November 1943 he became literary editor for Tribune which gave him more time for his novel. Orwell said that the allegorical Animal Farm was a fable based on the events leading up to the Russian Revolution in 1917 and then into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. By April 1944 the novel was ready, but several publishers refused it because they saw it as an attack on the Soviet regime who were wartime allies. It was finally published in August 1945.

At the end of June 1944, a German V1 ‘doodlebug’, one of 10 that hit Hampstead, exploded in the garden of North Hall, the large house opposite No.10, causing considerable damage to many of the surrounding properties including Orwell’s. The flying bomb came in from the East early in the morning and passed over Kilburn before making a left turn and completing a circle, to drop in the back of North Hall. Fourteen people were taken to hospital, and another 20 were slightly injured. At the time North Hall was being used by Hampstead Council to store furniture belonging to people whose houses had been destroyed.

Fortunately, the Orwells were out, but returned to find the ceilings of the flat had collapsed, and it was damaged beyond repair. He thought he had lost the only manuscript for Animal Farm, but after a search he discovered it in the rubble, ‘crumpled’ but still readable. 

The couple moved to Canonbury Square in Islington. At the end of the War, while Orwell was in Cologne working as a war correspondent for The Observer, Eileen who had gone into hospital in Newcastle, tragically died from the anaesthetic on 29 March 1945.

In 1946 Orwell moved to a farmhouse on the remote Scottish island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides, where he wrote the first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Already seriously ill with tuberculosis, his condition worsened. Back on the mainland, with the help of friends, he was treated with the new drug Streptomycin, which they obtained from America. But this was abandoned because the drug had painful side effects. Rested, he returned to Jura and sitting in bed he typed the second daft of the novel but collapsed again when he had finished it. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June 1949.

Orwell spent most of that year in a Gloucester sanatorium before transferring to University College Hospital in London. The doctors didn’t tell Orwell that he was dying, and he married Sonia Brownell in hospital in October 1949. It is thought that she was the model for Julia, the heroine of Nineteen Eighty-Four. His friend, the writer Anthony Powell, noted that despite the tragic circumstances of Orwell’s failing health, the short three-month marriage ‘immensely cheered him’. Orwell died in University College Hospital on 21 January 1950, aged 46.

The garden of North Hall is now the site of the flats of Broadoak House, built in the 1950s. Number 10 Mortimer Crescent and some of the other V1 damaged houses were replaced by Kington House in 1955.

In 2012, a green plaque was unveiled on Kington House to commemorate Orwell’s time in Kilburn. Erected by the Historic Kilburn Plaque Scheme, it was unveiled by Richard Blair, the couple’s adopted son, who had been adopted while the Orwell’s lived at Mortimer Crescent.

Orwell, with his adopted son Richard

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell created words and phrases that are used today, such as: Newspeak, Big Brother, the thought police, Room 101 and the Ministry of Truth. The book has been adapted for cinema, television, radio, theatre, opera and ballet, and it has influenced novels, films, and plays.

Orwell had several Hampstead connections. In 1934-1935, he lived in Warwick Mansions above the bookshop where he worked, at the corner of Pond Street, South End Green.  Orwell’s time at the shop is commemorated by a plaque and a bas relief of his face, the latter replaced after the original was stolen in 2010. 

There is also a Heath and Hampstead Society plaque to him at 77 Parliament Hill, where he moved and rented a flat for a few months.