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This essay, then, explores the crucial theme of fatherhood in a number of contrasting ways. It first examines the responses of both Orwell and his contemporaries to his father. It then looks at the many fascinating representations of fathers in his novels. Orwell's own strikingly progressive attitudes as a dad are highlighted as are, finally, the responses of his son, Richard Blair, to having the celebrated author of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a father. Richard Walmesley Blair - Long Due a Re-Assessment The conventional view of Orwell's father as a rather drab and dull figure was set by Jacintha Buddicom, his childhood friend, in her wonderfully engaging memoir of their times together, Eric & Us (2006 [1974]). With Orwell known to her at the time as Eric Blair, she writes: Eric's father Richard Walmesley Blair (called Dick) was born on 7 January 1857 so belonged to the previous generation. .. He certainly seemed to us children to be very ancient and not sympathetic. He was not unkind - he never beat Eric - but he did not understand nor, I think, much care for children - after all, he hardly saw his own till he was fifty. He always seemed to expect us all to keep rather out of his way which we were reciprocatively glad to do (ibid: 13-14). Richard Blair, a lowly Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in Upper Bengal, married Ida Mabel Limouzin, a high-spirited vivacious woman, in Naina Tal on 15 June 1897. He was 39; she was 22. Their first child, Marjorie, was born on 21 April 1898; after they moved to Motihari, Eric was born on 25 June 1903. In the following year, Ida with her two children moved to Henley-on-Thames leaving father in India. And though Richard spent a short time on leave at Henley in 1907 - during which time Eric's sister, Avril, was conceived, being born on 6 April the following year - he was mostly absent until he joined the family - now living in Shiplake - in 1912. As Gordon Bowker comments: 'Aged 55, after 37 years of service, Richard Blair retired from the Bengali Opium Service on a pension of just over PS400 a year probably with additions from contributions set aside and a family supplement. Risen to the rank of Sub-Opium Agent Class 1. Ida determined not to fall pregnant again banished Dick to his own room' (Bowker 2003: 38). He occupied himself becoming secretary of the local golf club. In his essay, 'Why I Write' (1970 [1946]: 23), Orwell says: 'I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely say my father before I was eight.' Now Orwell found himself confronted by 'a gruff elderly man forever saying "Don't"' (Bowker 2003: 38). And Buddicom comments: 'The Blairs, though certainly not demonstrative, were nevertheless a united family, and their home seemed to us a happy one. I do not think Eric was fond of his father, although he respected and obeyed him but without doubt he was genuinely fond of his mother and sisters, especially Avril' (op cit: 19). Then in 1917, aged 60, Richard Blair surprised everyone by becoming the oldest second lieutenant in the British Army, being put in charge of the mules in a camp and depot near Marseilles. How remarkable! Orwell is noted for his extraordinary pluck - living with the down-and-outs in London and Paris (1928-1931), going down coal mines while investigating poverty in the north of England (1936), fighting alongside Republican militiamen during the Spanish civil war and only narrowly escaping being fatally wounded (1937), reporting from the frontlines on the Continent during the final days of the Second World War (1945) and going to live the 'simple life' on a remote Scottish island with his newly adopted son (1946-1949). Perhaps this was a trait he inherited from his father. L. J. Hurst is also right to stress the crucial role played by mules and horses in the First World War (Hurst 2019). 'The British Army discovered they needed to buy about 15,000 horses a month. It has been calculated that almost half a million horses owned by the British Army were killed during the First World War' (ibid: 20). Moreover, while old enough to be father to some of his colleagues, Richard Blair 'would not stand out in the crowd' since in November 1918 the Remount Department numbered 18,766 officers and men (ibid: 21). [RW-Blair-and-family-300x225]Mr Blair on leave, 1916 (Parents - Ida Mabel and Richard Walmesley Blair with children Marjorie and Eric) (Dakin family) Yet Orwell appeared strangely embarrassed by his father's 'heroics'. As Bernard Crick reports (1980: 107): 'None of Eric's contemporaries at Eton can remember him mentioning that he had a father in the Army. By now habitually reticent about his family, he may have found his father's posting ludicrous and his age embarrassing. When George Bowling in Coming up for Air [1939] becomes a second lieutenant, he was given eleven tins of bully beef to guard in a forgotten military dump on the north coast of remote Cornwall.' In 1922, soon after Orwell left Eton, the Blairs moved to Southwold on the Suffolk coast and there is evidence that Richard, away from all the stresses of full-time employment, relaxed into happy retirement and became a 'new man'. Conventional biographies of Orwell have been too slow to acknowledge this. Let's consider two photographs. In Bowker's biography, on the second, un-numbered page of illustrations, Richard is shown sitting with Eric, Ida and Avril, while on leave from the Army in 1918. He appears stiff and formal in his military gear - and separate from the tender intimacy of the other group. Compare this with the later photograph of Richard strolling down a Southwold road - a walking stick held elegantly before him. He is smiling and looking extremely relaxed and dapper. He's wearing a light suit, white polo-necked jumper, white shoes, a flowery buttonhole on his left lapel together with a colourfully displayed handkerchief in his top left blazer pocket and a lovely, large, white sun hat (with a fetching dark band) which bends enticingly over his forehead. D. J. Taylor examines the films of Southwold in the 1920s and 1930s shot by Barrett Jenkins and in one, dated 6 August 1928, he spots 'an elderly man wearing a Panama hat and a summer suit' taking a constitutional down the High Street. He writes: 'I have a hunch that this is Richard Walmesley Blair' (Taylor 2003: 236). Intriguingly, Orwell (perhaps echoing his father's fancy) regularly displays - in a rather dapper style - a handkerchief in his top jacket pocket: for instance, as Bernard Crick (1980) shows him with BBC colleagues, taking a cup of tea or typing in his Islington flat in 1945 and even while chiselling some wood in an office (books piled up in the background) (see Keeble 2020a). There are conflicting accounts of Richard Blair's influence over Orwell's decision to become an Imperial Policeman in Burma in 1922 after Eton. According to Buddicom, Orwell wanted to apply for Oxford University but his father was determined on him following his career and serve the Empire in some capacity: 'Our mother and Mrs Blair united in deploring old Mr Blair's obstinate attitude regarding Eric's future. Indian Civil he had been himself and Indian Civil was the only career he would tolerate for his son. It was the last thing Eric wanted, but the tramlines were laid down' (op cit: 118). John Sutherland suggests that Andrew Gow, Orwell's Classics tutor at Eton, played a major role - telling Richard that his son had disgraced the college by coming so low in the academic lists (coming 137 out of 168) and so should be removed entirely from higher education. 'Richard, a man used to obeying orders, got the message and cut off any further family monetary sacrifice for Eric: no longer the hope of the Blairs' (Sutherland 2016: 75). On the other hand, Orwell's first biographers, Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, suggest that Orwell himself decided against Oxford and Cambridge. They report: 'Orwell in the 1940s told a good friend of that phase that one of his reasons for not going to university was that he felt he had been too long associating mainly with boys who were much richer than he' (Stansky and Abrahams 1972: 125n). However, all commentators are agreed that Orwell's sudden decision to resign his position in the Imperial Police in 1927 while on leave from his duties in Burma and devote his time to becoming a writer shocked his family and was denounced by his father. According to Stansky and Abrahams: 'His presence [at the family home in Southwold] was a source of daily concern and irritation. Eric and his father had never been close: now a kind of estrangement grew up between them, the coldness more pronounced, the differences of opinion more abrasive. While his mother quite soon came round to Eric's point of view ... his father did not and would not virtually until the end of his life'(ibid: 181). To what extent then did Orwell's obsessive work routine - and his constant feelings of failure - all stem from his determination to prove himself to his father? In his last literary notebook of 1949, he writes: It is now 16 years since my first book was published & abt 21 years since I started publishing articles in the magazines. Throughout that time there has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind on the current job & that my total output was miserably small. Even at the periods when I was working 10 hours a day on a book, or turning out 4 or 5 articles a week, I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling that I was wasting time. ... as soon as book is finished I begin, actually from the next day, worrying because the next one is not begun & am haunted with the fear that there never will be a next one - that my impulse is exhausted for good & all (Complete Works of George Orwell XX: 204). Was all that extraordinary effort all an attempt to prove to his critical father that his decision to become a writer was the right one? As Sylvia Topp comments: 'Orwell had struggled throughout his life with the worry that he hadn't lived up to his father's expectations and his greatest wish had been to convince his father that he had made a life choice worthy of his respect' (2020: 268). All commentators tend to agree that Orwell's relationship with his father, never close, soured even further on his return from Burma and did not improve until the late 1930s - just before Richard died in 1939, aged 82. Yet there is evidence that the reconciliation began much earlier. In the early 1930s, joining his family in Southwold, Orwell would accompany his father in one of the old man's favourite pastimes: watching films in the tiny local cinema in Duke of York's Road near the common (Taylor 2003: 137). In 1934, Orwell wrote to his friend, Brenda Salkend: 'I went to the pictures last week and saw Jack Hulbert in Jack Ahoy which I thought very amusing & a week or two before that there was quite a good crook film which, however, my father ruined for me by insisting on telling me the plot beforehand' (Complete Works of George Orwell X: 346). [R-W-Blair-270x300] Michael Shelden writes: 'Of course, [Orwell] had never been as close to his father as he might have hoped to be, but they got on reasonably well in the latter half of the 1930s and Orwell had certainly put to rest any notion that he might be a dilettante as a writer. No doubt his father would still have preferred to see him serve out his ordinary term in the Imperial Police, but any lingering resentment over that issue had faded by 1939' (1991: 340). But here he is - like most of the other biographers - dating the reconciliation between father and son far too late. In June 1939, just as Orwell was visiting his father in Southwold on his deathbed, Coming up for Air had just been given a rave review in the Sunday Times. Sylvia Topp records how Avril took the review to Richard's bedroom and read it to him. 'A little later he lost consciousness for the last time' (op cit: 268). Orwell closed his father's eyes in the traditional way by placing pennies on the eyelids - and later walked down to the sea and threw them in (ibid). * Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] Comment [ ] Name * [ ] Email * [ ] Website [ ] [ ] Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. 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