Orwell's list

Orwell's list, prepared in 1949 by the English author George Orwell, shortly before he died, comprises names of notable writers and other individuals he considered to be unsuitable as possible writers for the Information Research Department's anti-communist propaganda activities.^[1]

Background

The Information Research Department was a propaganda unit set up by the Labour government in 1948 based at the United Kingdom's Foreign Office, after the start of the Cold War.

Celia Kirwan, who had just started working as Robert Conquest's assistant at the IRD,^[2] visited Orwell at a sanatorium where he was receiving treatment for tuberculosis in March 1949. Orwell wrote down the names of individuals he considered sympathetic to communism and therefore unsuitable as writers for the Department, and enclosed it in a letter to Kirwan.^[1] The list became public in 2003.^[3]

Having previously worked for Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine,^[2] and briefly as an editorial assistant for Humphrey Slater's Polemic,^[4] Kirwan was Arthur Koestler's sister-in-law and one of the four women to whom Orwell proposed after the death of his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy in 1945. Although Koestler had supported such a match, Kirwan turned him down.^[5]

Notebook

Orwell based his list on a strictly private notebook he had maintained since the mid-1940s of possible "cryptos", "F.T." (his abbreviation for fellow travellers), outright members of the CP, agents and sentimental sympathizers. The notebook, now at the Orwell Archive at University College London, contains 135 names in all, including US writers and politicians.^[6] Ten names had been crossed out, either because the individual had died or because Orwell had decided that they were neither crypto-communists nor fellow-travellers.^[1] The people named were a mélange: "some famous, some obscure, some he knew personally and others he did not."^[7] Orwell commented in New Leader in 1947:

The important thing to do with these people - and it is extremely difficult, since one has only inferential evidence - is to sort them out and determine which of them is honest and which is not. There is, for instance, a whole group of M. P.s in the British Parliament (Pritt, Zilliacus, etc.) who are commonly nicknamed 'the cryptos'. They have undoubtedly done a great deal of mischief, especially in confusing public opinion about the nature of the puppet regimes in Eastern Europe; but one ought not hurriedly to assume that they all hold the same opinions. Probably some of them are actuated by nothing worse than stupidity.^[8]

The notebook contained columns with names, comments and various markings. Typical comments were Stephen Spender “Sentimental sympathiser... Tendency towards homosexuality”, Richard Crossman “Too dishonest to be outright F. T.” and Kingsley Martin "Decayed liberal. Very dishonest".^[9] Journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft considered Orwell’s remarks "perceptive and sometimes even generous", going on to say that "DN Pritt is described as an 'almost certainly underground' Communist but also a "Good MP (i.e. locally). Very able and courageous'".^[10] Among the names, Orwell selected 38 which he forwarded to Kirwan.^[1]

Richard Rees discussed the names with Orwell, later commenting that it was "a sort of game we played - discussing who was a paid agent of what and estimating to what lengths of treachery our favourite bêtes noires would be prepared to go."^[11] Orwell asked Rees to fetch the notebook from Jura in early 1949, thanking him in a letter of April 17.^[1]

One of Orwell's biographers, Bernard Crick, thought there were 86 names in the list and that some of the names were written in the hand of Koestler, who also co-operated with the IRD in producing anti-Communist propaganda.^[12]

Orwell was an ex-colonial policeman in Burma and according to Garton Ash, he liked making lists: 'In a "London Letter" to Partisan Review in 1942 he wrote, "I think I could make out at least a preliminary list of the people who would go over" to the Nazi side if the Germans occupied England."'^[1]

Reactions to the IRD List

The British press had known about the list for some years before it was officially made public in 2003, and reactions included the following headline in the Daily Telegraph when "breaking" the story in 1998:

"Socialist Icon Who Became an Informer"^[13]

People like Michael Foot, the former leader of the Labour Party and a friend of Orwell's in the 1930s and 1940s, were "amazed" by the revelation. Richard Gott, who in 1994 had resigned as literary editor of The Guardian after admitting that he had accepted travel expenses from the KGB, in an unrelated case, referred to Orwell's list as only a "small surprise".^[12]

Norman Mackenzie noted "Tubercular people often could get very strange towards the end. I'm an Orwell man, I agreed with him on the Soviet Union, but he went partly ga-ga I think. He let his dislike of the New Statesman crowd, of what he saw as leftish, dilettante, sentimental socialists who covered up for the Popular Front in Spain [after it became communist-controlled] get the better of him."^[14]

Bernard Crick justified Orwell wanting to help the post-war Labour Government. "He did it because he thought the Communist Party was a totalitarian menace," he said. "He wasn't denouncing these people as subversives. He was denouncing them as unsuitable for a counter-intelligence operation."^[12]

Professor Peter Davison, editor of Orwell's Complete Works, said the really disappointed people will be those who claimed to have been on the list but were not.^[14]

John Newsinger considered it "a terrible mistake on his part, deriving in equal measure from his hostility to Stalinism and his illusions in the Labour government. What it certainly does not amount to, however, is an abandonment of the socialist cause or transformation into a footsoldier in the Cold War. Indeed, Orwell made clear on a number of occasions his opposition to any British McCarthyism, to any bans and proscriptions on Communist Party members (they certainly did not reciprocate this) and any notion of a preventive war. If he had lived long enough to realise what the IRD was actually about there can be no doubt that he would have broken with it".^[15]

Celia Kirwan insisted:

I think George was quite right to do it. ... And, of course, everybody thinks that these people were going to be shot at dawn. The only thing that was going to happen to them was that they wouldn't be asked to write for the Information Research Department.^[1]

The List

Sources vary as to the actual number of names on the list (figures go from 35^[13] to 38^[3]). Names on the list include the following:^[1]

Writers and journalists

• J. B. Priestley,^[1] novelist and playwright
• Kingsley Martin,^[1] editor of the New Statesman
• Alaric Jacob^[1] Moscow Correspondent for the Daily Express during the Second World War^[16]
• Iris Morley^[1] Moscow Correspondent for The Observer during the Second World War^[16]
• E. H. Carr,^[17] historian
• Isaac Deutscher,^[1] former Trotskyist writer, correspondent for The Economist and The Observer (1942 - 1947)
• Walter Duranty,^[1] New York Times Moscow correspondent
• Naomi Mitchison,^[1] novelist
• Norman Mackenzie, historian and a founding member of the SDP^[14]
• Margaret Stewart,^[14] Tribune industrial/labour correspondent
• Randall Swingler^[18]
• Peter Smollett, a Daily Express journalist later identified as a Soviet agent, Smolka^[14] recruited by Kim Philby. Smollett had headed the Russian section in Britain's wartime information ministry (MOI).^[3]

Academics and scientists

• Gordon Childe,^[17] archaeologist
• John Macmurray,^[17] philosopher
• Patrick Blackett,^[17] physicist
• J. G. Crowther,^[17] The Guardian's first science correspondent
• A. J. P. Taylor,^[19] historian

Actors

• Michael Redgrave^[1]
• Charlie Chaplin^[1]
• Katharine Hepburn^[20]

Labour MPs

• Bessie Braddock^[21]
• Tom Driberg^[3]
• John Platts-Mills^[21]
• Stephen Swingler^[18]

Others

• Commander Edgar Young^[14]

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q} "Orwell's List" by Timothy Garton Ash. The New York Review of Books Volume 50, Number 14. September 25, 2003
2. ^ ^{a b} Obituary The Guardian
3. ^ ^{a b c d} John Ezard "Blair's Babe - Did love turn Orwell into a government stooge?" The Guardian, 21 June 2003
4. ^ Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds.). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose (1945-1950) (Penguin)
5. ^ Celia [Goodman] in Stephen Wadhams Remembering Orwell, Penguin Books, 1984
6. ^ "George Orwell's List" by Timothy Naftali The New York Times, 29 July 1998
7. ^ Michael Shelden Orwell: The Authorised Biography William Heinemann 1991
8. ^ George Orwell "Burnham's View of the Contemporary World Struggle" Collected Essays Volume IV
9. ^ George Orwell Unpublished Notebook 1948
10. ^ "Big Brother with a High Moral Sense" by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. The Independent, June 28, 1998]
11. ^ Richard Rees Letter to Ian Angus 10 June 1967
12. ^ ^{a b c} "Orwell is revealed in role of state informer" by Tom Utley Daily Telegraph 12 July 1996 www.arlindo-correia.com
13. ^ ^{a b} "Why Orwell Matters" by Timothy Garton Ash. The Hoover Institute
14. ^ ^{a b c d e f} "Blacklisted writer says illness clouded Orwell's judgement" by Fiachra Gibbons guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 24 June
15. ^ John Newsinger in Socialist Review Issue 276 July/August 2003
16. ^ ^{a b} Mark Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor Blacklist:The Inside Story of Political Vetting The Hogarth Press LONDON 1988 ISBN 0 7012 0811 2
17. ^ ^{a b c d e} "Archaeologist fingered by Orwell" British Archaeologist No. 73
18. ^ ^{a b} Guardian Andy Croft Ministry of Truth Review of Christopher Hitchins Orwell's Victory
19. ^ "Big Brother with a High Moral Sense" by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. The Independent, June 28, 1998
20. ^ Davison, Peter eds. "The Lost Orwell" (London: Timewell Press, 2006) p. 150
21. ^ ^{a b} D. J. Taylor Orwell: The Life Chatto & Windus 2003

References

• File FO 1110/189 at the British National Archives