2. The June Purge, or Night of the Long Knives, led to the execution, without trial, of Hitler's close friend Ernst Rohm (head of the'S.A., the Brownshirts) and seventy-seven leading Nazis plus many others, prompted initially by Goering and Himmler, later by Hitler, in June 1934.
3. Orwell is not quite correct. He overlooks, for example, "A Ballad of Waterloo" by Thomas Hood (1799-1845 ), a poem sardonic in words and illustration. Byron wrote a notable, and anthologized, poem, "The Eve of Waterloo."
4. Orwell is indirectly referring to the poem by Charles Wolfe (1791-1823), "The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna," much anthologized and often set, in the first decades of the twentieth century, for schoolboys to learn.
5. William Richard Morris (1877-1963; Viscount Nuffield) was largely responsible for the establishment of an automobile-manufacturing industry in Cowley, Oxford, following the success of his Morris-Oxford car in 1913. He devoted much of his wealth to philanthropic purposes.
6. Baron Montagu Norman (1871-1950) was governor of the Bank of England, 1920-44. He was decorated for service in the Boer War. For Orwell's grouping of him with those who supported Fascism, see "Looking Back on the Spanish War," 163.
7. Anthony Eden (1897-1977, Earl of Avon, 1961) Conservative MP, was then Secretary of State for War in Churchill's war cabinet. The Local Defence Volunteers became the Home Guard.
8. For Pierre Laval, see 300, n. 42. Vidkun Quisling (1887-1945), Norwegian Fascist who led the puppet government of Norway under the Germans, was executed for treason. His name has been applied generally to collaborators.
9. Half of the extracts abstracted by Orwell for his Diary of Events Leading Up to the War were taken from the Daily Telegraph.
10. Lord Halifax (1881-1959), Edward Frederick Lindley Wood (Lord Irwin, 1925; 3rd Viscount Halifax, 1934; Earl of Halifax, 1944), was a Conservative politician.
11. Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947, Earl Baldwin 1937), thrice Conservative prime minister, was blamed for Britain's failure to prepare for war.
12. Fashionable "society" magazines; the Tatler was founded in 1901 and amalgamated with the Bystander (founded 1903) in November 1940.
13. John Simon (1873-1954, Viscount 1940), Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1937-40, was a supporter of Neville Chamberlain. Samuel Hoare, a close associate of Chamberlain, served in several Conservative-led administrations; see 300, n. 42. For Neville Chamberlain, see 299, n. 35.
14. John Nicholson (1821--1857), soldier and administrator, played an important role in the Indian Mutiny, 1857. He effected the Relief of Delhi but was mortally wounded after leading an assault on the Kashmir Gate.
15. "Lawrence of Arabia" (1888-1935) led the Arab Revolt against the Turks, 1916-18; see his Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), abridged by Lawrence as Revolt in the Desert (1927).
16. Founded by Edward Hulton, October 1, 1938, it ran until June 1, 1957. Its marriage of illustrations, captions, and text, coupled with its social and political concerns, especially in its early days, showed how effectively popular interest could be aroused.
Looking Back on the Spanish War
1. The Oxford Union's motion in 1935 supporting the refusal to fight "for King and Country" initiated a series of alternating demands that Britain abstain from and engage in military action.
2. The source of this quotation has not been traced.
3. "A resolution, / To fight to the end"
4. Homage to Catalonia.
5. Orwell possibly had in mind Gerald Heard (1889-1971), whom he mentions in his September 1943 review in Horizon of Lionel Fielden's Beggar My Neighbour; also Aldous Huxley, and possibly Christopher Isherwood, all of whom settled in Los Angeles just before the war. In California, Isherwood developed an interest in Yoga and Vedanta (though whether Orwell knew this is uncertain), edited and introduced Vedanta for the Western World (Hollywood, 1945 ; London, 1948 ), and with Swami Prabhavananda translated The Bhagavad-Gita (1944) and other related works. It is possible that this reference was inspired by Orwell's preliminary arrangements for G. V. Desani to talk on the Bhagavad-Gita in his BBC series "Books that Changed the World."
6. From Auden, "Sir, No Man's Enemy" (1930): "New styles of architecture, a change of heart."
As I Please, 1
1. Robin Maugham (Robert Cecil Romer Maugham, 2nd Viscount Maugham, 1916-1981 ), barrister, prose writer, and dramatist.
2. Orwell probably had in mind Major-General J. F. C. Fuller (1878-1966). He wrote a pamphlet, Back to Sanity, which was published by the British Union of Fascists in the thirties. He was listed by British Intelligence (MI 5) as a prospective gauleiter if the Germans had successfully occupied Britain (although in 1943 Orwell would not have known that).
3. The passages will be found on pages 168-69 and 208-9 of the second, corrected, edition of 1888.
As I Please, 2
1. Thomas Edmund Dewey (1902-1971), governor of New York for three successive terms (1942-54), was Republican Party's presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948; he lost both elections.
2. Burmese Days (1944).
As I Please, 3
1. See "As I Please," 1, December 3, 1943, 167.
2. Reviewed by Orwell, December 9, 1943. Philip Jordan was a well-known wartime correspondent for the News Chronicle.
3. John Lempriere (d. 1824) produced his Bibliotheca Classicain 1788. It was revised many times and became known by the title given it here.
As I Please, 16
1. The spelling is Inprecor in Homage to Catalonia. Inprecor's title varied. It was published from Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s as Internationale Press, Korrespondenz, and French and Swiss versions were issued. Its frequency was at least weekly, but there was some irregularity in its publication. It was a Communist news sheet opposed to the POUM when Orwell was in Barcelona.
The Sporting Spirit
1. The Moscow Dynamos, a Russian soccer team, toured Britain in the autumn of 1945 and played a number of leading British clubs. "Guest players" were allowed into teams at this time because of wartime conditions, but, even allowing for that, it was claimed that Britain's Arsenal team had been unduly strengthened.
In Front of Your Nose
1. Roger Charles Tichborne (1829-1854), heir to a large estate in Hampshire, was lost at sea in 1854. His mother refused to accept that her son was dead and, when she learned that a butcher working in Wagga Wagga, Australia, claimed to be the heir, she recognized his claim. This led to a trial in 1871-1872, marked by conflicting evidence, which resulted in his being declared an impostor. His true identity was said to be Arthur Orton, of Wapping (a dockland area of London). In 1874 he was found guilty of perjury and imprisoned. He was released in 1884 and died a pauper in 1898.
A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray
1. John Overall (1560-1618) was Regius Professor of Theology, University of Cambridge, 1596-1607, and Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, 1602. Oliver Lawson Dick in his Aubrey's Brief Lives (1949) notes that "He was not given to preaching, because he found he had spoken Latin so long as it was troublesome to him to speak English in a continued oration." His wife Aubrey described as "not more beautifull than she was obliging and kind ... the loveliest Eies that were ever seen, but wondrous wanton." The Dean "knew well enough that he was horned" but loved her infinitely "in so much that he was willing she should enjoy what she had a mind to." This was Orwell's favourite "life," as he told Anthony Powell when sent a complimentary copy of Powell's edition. Powell had evidently considered omitting it. It has not been possible to identify the source of Orwell's text. Powell's follows that of Andrew Clark (1898, vol. 2, 116-18). Orwell's differs from these, and from Dick's, in capitalisation, although it retains most of the seventeenth-century spellings. Orwell may have known Clark's edition, but most probably Powell had sent him a typed copy of this "life" when deciding whether or not to include it.
2. Orwell miscounted the verses; his text has six. In Clark's, Powell's, and Dick's editions there are eight stanzas, of which Orwell reproduces the first, third, and
eighth.
Why I Write
1. Lines 1021-22 of Book II of Paradise Lost. "He" is Satan, "Sin and Death amain / Following his track."
2. These are the last three stanzas of the nine making up "A happy vicar I might have been," The Adelphi, December 1936.
How the Poor Die
1. The admission records of the Hopital Cochin show that Orwell was admitted to the Salle Lancereaux "pour une grippe" on March 7, 1929 and discharged on March 22. This essay, therefore, though based on experience, is not strictly autobiographical. See n. 2. (Information supplied to Sonia Orwell by le Directeur-Adjoint, Hopital Cochin, November 25, 1971.)
2. Orwell was evidently seriously ill with a bad attack of influenza-une grippe--rather than pneumonia; and the month was March, not February. Had Orwell been ill with pneumonia he would hardly have recovered in two weeks after the treatment he described--if he recovered at all. The essay, as indicated in n. 1, is a literary rather than a documentary account.
3. Tennyson's "In the Children's Hospital: Emmie" was published in 1880.
Such, Such Were the Joys
1. Earlier printings of "Such, Such Were the Joys" have shown changes of names to avoid giving offense to those then living. The text given here is that revised by Orwell but with the original names.
* * *
*For example:
I don't want to join the bloody Army,
I don't want to go unto the war;
I want no more to roam,
I'd rather stay at home
Living on the earnings of a whore.
But it was not in that spirit that they fought [Orwell's footnote].
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* It is true that they aided them to a certain extent with money. Still, the sums raised for the various aid-Spain funds would not equal five per cent of the turnover of the Football Pools during the same period [Orwell's footnote].
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George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays
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