Orwell in Camden by Lorcan Greene

‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’

[1] The White Horse public house, South End Green

South End Green

he quoted sentence, the first in George Orwell’s novel 1984, chimes distinctly with the opening to one of his earlier works, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. This begins: ‘The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr. McKechnie’s bookshop, Gordon – Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already – lounged across the table, pushing a four-penny packet of Player’s Weights open and shut with his thumb. The ding-dong of another, remoter clock – from the Prince of Wales, the other side of the street – rippled the stagnant air’. But while the clock in 1984 may exist only in some imagined dystopia, the ‘remoter clock – from the Prince of Wales’ is still to be seen, at Hampstead’s South End Green, sited in the gable above the White Horse pub [1]. The clock survives thanks to a public appeal launched in 1998 to fund its preservation.

‘Mr. McKechnie’s bookshop’ was modelled on the second-hand bookshop ‘Booklovers’ Corner’ – across the road from the pub and the clock (on the west side of South End Green, on the corner of Pond Street and numbered 1 South End Road) – where Orwell worked and above which he lived for six months. It was Orwell’s aunt, Nellie Limouzin, who secured for him this first Hampstead job and residence: through her work in the Esperanto movement, she knew the owners of Booklovers’ Corner, Francis and Myfanwy Westrope. The couple also owned Flat 3 in Warwick Mansions (alias 37 Pond Street), one of three apartments above the shop, each occupying a whole floor of the L-shaped block and accessed by a splendid, wide internal staircase at the rear. It was in the top-floor flat that Orwell occupied a room from October 1934 to March 1935, free of rent (according to Bernard Crick’s George Orwell: a Life). Orwell worked in the bookshop [2a] during the afternoons, leaving him free to spend mornings and evenings writing

T

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in his ‘dim furnished room with its view of the backs of the row of shops in South End Road’ (Stansky & Abrahams’ Orwell: the Transformation). In fact, the top floor of Warwick Mansions [2b] would have offered Orwell some wonderful views: eastward, beyond the drinking-fountain on South End Green, and its tram (now bus) terminus, to the east London skyline; and north towards the greenery of Hampstead Heath, rising beyond Keats Grove, a road featuring, as ‘Coleridge Grove’, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying. What went on in the flat above the bookshop was probably more interesting than what happened in it. It was in his lodgings here that Orwell wrote much of this book; and Jon Kimche – a future editor of the weekly magazine Tribune, who worked the morning shift in the shop had another rent-free room in the flat – told of how, in their shared sitting-room, ‘Orwell would at times hold forth in long harangues against the smooth literary young men of Cambridge who had everything going for them, the British Empire, the Catholic Church, or the filthy rich’. The bookshop below, though described by one customer (quoted by John Thompson in his Orwell’s London) as ‘a gloomy cave of a place’, had an ‘exceptionally interesting stock’ according to Orwell himself. He apparently found some contributions to the Girl’s Own Paper’s letters page extremely amusing: according to Roger Tagholm in Walking Literary London, one particular favourite was a reader’s question pertaining to whether or not it was ladylike to ride a tricycle. The best record of Orwell’s Booklovers’ Corner days is his short 1936 essay on the subject, aptly entitled Bookshop Memories. In this he describes the shop’s clientele, composed predominantly of ‘first edition snobs’, ‘oriental students’ and ‘vague-minded women’; and also of the particularly peculiar ‘paranoiacs’, who were enthused by the act of ordering ‘some rare and expensive book’ with no intention of ever returning to collect it, thereby leaving it doomed forever to exist chiefly as a collecting-point for dust. It is again in reference to the store’s customers that Orwell neatly

surmises the divide which then existed between affluent Hampstead and the less wealthy areas nearby. With considerable geographical inaccuracy, he writes: ‘Our shop stood exactly on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town, and we were frequented by all types from baronets to bus-conductors’. Booklovers’ Corner did not only sell books, and in Bookshop Memories Orwell makes light of some of the ancillary

[2] (a) Booklovers’ Corner in its heyday as a bookshop; (b) Warwick Mansions in 2014

articles on sale: ‘Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps – used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent, fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums.’ Jon Kimche cited one especially humorous occasion when Orwell, ‘tall and gaunt, looking straight ahead of him, as he always did in argument, held forth to a very small boy about the value of a foreign stamp on the pavement outside the shop. Far below, the boy, not at all overawed, keeps up his end of the argument as to why he should have the stamp for a penny or two less.’ Orwell was, though, by all accounts, an exemplary employee when in the shop, being ‘uniformly polite, helpful and informative’ As Orwell further recalls, ‘We also sold sixpenny horoscopes compiled by somebody who claimed to have foretold the Japanese earthquake. They were in sealed envelopes and I never opened one of them myself, but the people who bought them often came back and told us how “true” their horoscopes had been. (Doubtless any horoscope seems “true” if it tells you that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.)’

Orwell also observes that ‘the top of a book is the place where every bluebottle prefers to die’, and laments the fact that he ‘lost [his] love for books’ during his time in the shop, concluding the essay by stating that ‘the sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles’. Orwell’s experiences in Booklovers’ Corner are perhaps best

summed up by a question he poses to himself earlier in the essay: ‘Would I like to be a bookseller de metier?’ he asks. The reply: ‘On the whole – in spite of my employer’s kindness to me, and some happy days I spent in the shop – no.’ No.1 South End Road remained a bookshop until the mid-1950s and, indeed, Bernard Crick recounts having bought books there himself as a student, just after World War II. Since then, however, it has undergone a series of transmutations, becoming firstly the Prompt Corner Café, where for many years earnest patrons could be seen through plate-glass windows, enjoying a game of chess while drinking strong Greek/Turkish coffee. The café, sadly, closed in 1983, to become a ‘takeaway’ selling pizzas and later hamburgers before metamorphosing in 2009 into its present incarnation as a branch of the Belgian artisan bakery chain ‘Le Pain Quotidien’. Orwell’s stay in Warwick Mansions was known to John Wyndham, whose 1951 sci-fi novel, The Day of the Triffids, opens with the striking of a distant clock, and includes one episode set at (an unnamed) South End Green. The hero Bill Masen, cornered by the poisonous, mobile plants in a grocery store (the Co-op at No.7, now a Starbucks!), uses the small alleyway behind the shops to escape. In May 2015 the South End Green Association named this passage ‘Triffid Alley’.

Parliament Hill In 1933 Orwell had contracted pneumonia, probably as a result of venturing out on his motorbike in the driving rain, and the disease very nearly proved fatal. This was to be the first serious indication of the lung problems that were to plague Orwell throughout the rest of his life. When he was told that he could no longer stay above Booklovers’ Corner, it was largely through concern for his pulmonic health that his friend Mabel Fierz – who paid in part for the typing up of the first draft of Down and Out in Paris and London – wanted to move him closer to Hampstead Heath, believing that the air there would be purer and so healthier for him. She therefore contacted her friend Rosalind Obermeyer, a South African then taking a postgraduate course in psychology at University College London, who owned a property at 77 Parliament Hill [3]. It is easy to see why Fierz thought the place ideal: one could scarcely be any closer to the Heath without actually living on it. The room rented by Orwell was on the first floor and looked out over the back. It was, according to Orwell’s London, ‘very untidy and with mice nesting in a spare blanket’ while occupied by Orwell, who nevertheless used to invite guests over and cook for them on his broiler-grill. One evening, having decided to throw one such party, Orwell asked Obermeyer if she would invite some of her friends

[3] No.77 Parliament Hill

from University College. She obliged, and one of her guests was fellow psychology student Eileen O’Shaughnessy, whom Orwell walked down to Hampstead Heath station at South End Green at the end of the evening. Upon returning to Obermeyer, he apparently said: ‘Now that is the kind of girl I would like to marry!’ Camden History Review Vol.39 (2015)

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Lawford Road Orwell’s stay at 77 Parliament Hill, though, was to be a short one; he next found a flat on the top floor of 50 Lawford Road, in Kentish Town but not too far from Booklovers’ Corner where he still worked. Orwell was joined there, at the suggestion of Mabel Fierz, by Rayner Heppenstall, the Yorkshireborn ballet critic and author, together

[4] No.50 Lawford Road

with the Irish poet Michael Sayers. Heppenstall, in his autobiographical work Four Absentees, details the arrangement of the flat when occupied by the trio. ‘‘We had three rooms’, he writes, ‘a kitchen and a lavatory, compactly disposed. One of the two rooms at the front was very small, a mere boxroom. I, able to pay the least rent, had this. Michael had the other front room, but seemed likely to spend little time in it. Eric had the big room at the back. In it, all eating was done at a big scrubbed table.’ (Orwell’s real name was Eric Blair, George Orwell his nom de plume.) The new household was dubbed ‘the Junior Republic’ by Fierz, ‘a denomination which none of its members thought witty enough to adopt’. Routines were quickly established. Orwell woke first and made breakfast; indeed, he did most of the cooking, Heppenstall’s responsibilities being confined to bending the spaghetti into the boiling water, and taking the lids off jars and bottles. This Orwell couldn’t do because (as Heppenstall notes) ‘there was a curious lack of strength in that tall, raw-boned frame’. Heppenstall further states that ‘we fetched our beer from the Duke of Cambridge, at the corner’ of Bartholomew Road – a pub now converted into apartments behind its original façade – and Thompson elaborates on this, recording that ‘Heppenstall went, jug in hand, to get in the evening’s beer’. Orwell also frequented the St Pancras Public Baths (now Kentish Town Sports

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Centre) in Prince of Wales Road, although Heppenstall was less keen on bathing there and instead went to visit Mabel Fierz and her husband. Michael Sayers (as Heppenstall had predicted) was rarely present at No.50, though he is mentioned as once having stumbled upon Orwell transcribing passages from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, in an effort to perfect writing without adjectives, a stylistic feature of the ‘windowpane prose’ for which he has achieved much critical acclaim. Orwell and Heppenstall enjoyed a friendly relationship for most of their time at Lawford Road [4]. Orwell told what Heppenstall branded ‘recurrent, worked out jokes’, such as one about ‘his publisher’s way, in advertisements and on wrappers, of quoting bits of reviews with words missed out’, so that if, for instance, a reviewer said ‘this is by no means a masterpiece’, the statement would appear on the jacket as ‘this is … a masterpiece’. Unbeknown to Heppenstall, however, Orwell was beginning to harbour some ill-feeling towards him, perhaps (he later speculated) because ‘I had got a bit behind with the rent’ and ‘I didn’t really do my share of the washing up’. One incident is recorded in detail in Four Absentees. Having returned home the worse for wear one night, after watching a performance at the Mercury theatre, Heppenstall was confronted by Orwell, who proceeded to reprimand him for arriving so late and so drunk: ‘Bit thick, you know ... This time of night ... Wake up the whole street ... I can put up with a lot ... A bit of consideration ... After all …’. Heppenstall, dazed, groggy, and presumably wanting some reprieve from Orwell’s ‘nattering’, threatened him, warning that ‘if you don’t go away, I shall have to hit you’. Orwell stood his ground; Heppenstall ‘tottered, feebly swinging a bandaged fist’ towards him (having previously gashed his hand, sawing wood with the writer John Middleton Murry). He ‘came to, perhaps ten minutes later, sitting on the floor in a pool of blood’. Having ascertained that his nose was the source of the bleeding, he went to the kitchen to wash it at the sink, and to look for a cloth ‘to wipe the blood off the floor’ in his room. Heppenstall was too tired for this, though, and so went to sleep in the absent Michael Sayers’ room instead. Orwell locked him in. ‘This’, he felt, ‘was too much’, having presumed that the earlier incident had occurred simply because Orwell ‘had panicked’; he ‘went to the door and banged on it’, shouting ‘Eric, open this bloody door’. But nothing stirred on the other side. He kicked

at the door and his foot went through the bottom panel. In an instant, the door opened. Orwell stood in its frame, ‘armed with his shooting stick’. He poked Heppenstall in the stomach. Heppenstall made to attack him, but Orwell got there first, and ‘fetched [him] a dreadful crack across the legs.’ The stick was raised aloft in preparation for the deliverance of a much fiercer blow. Fortunately it was met by a chair, raised for protection. On

[5] Orwell at his Remington typewriter

hearing the commotion, a tram-driver and a plumber, who lived on the floors below, had rushed into Sayers’ room. It was probably their presence that drove Orwell away. ‘We never did think much of that Mr. Blair’, said the tram-driver’s wife, in an effort to console the evidently shaken Heppenstall, ‘keeps us awake till three and four o’clock in the morning he does sometimes with his typing’ [5]. The next morning, Heppenstall was turfed out of 50 Lawford Road, although he and Orwell did make peace some years later and were friends again thereafter. Orwell was not long for Kentish Town either; his flatmates had moved out in October 1935, but he remained there, struggling to pay the rent, until the end of January 1936, when he stopped working at Booklovers’ Corner. He had received a commission from his publisher Victor Gollancz to write a book about the social conditions in the north of England, which was to become The Road to Wigan Pier. On 31 January Orwell set out for Wigan. After completing his research there, he moved to Wallington, Hertfordshire, where his Aunt Nellie was living in a very small 16th-century cottage called the ‘The Stores’. On 2 April Orwell took over the tenancy and, after his marriage to Eileen O’Shaughnessy on 9 June 1936, the newlyweds settled into the cottage.

Wartime Born in 1903, Orwell was ineligible for enrolment in the army during the First World War because of his age, a fact about which he, like many other members

of his generation, felt a degree of guilt later in life. For Orwell this compunction was particularly pronounced. His first published lines, part of a poem written as a schoolboy in 1914, a time of ferocious nationwide patriotic fervour, were: Awake! Oh you young men of England For if when your country’s in need You do not enlist by the thousand You truly are cowards indeed.

that same place, five years later, Orwell was to meet his future second wife, Sonia Brownell. The building today forms part of International Hall, a London University hall of residence.

Mortimer Crescent

In wartime London, Orwell worked from August 1941 as a BBC radio producer. Orwell’s feelings of guilt may well have In the summer of 1942 he and Eileen been a force behind his decision to moved again, finding accommodation participate in the Spanish Civil War. at 10a Mortimer Crescent, Kilburn, He left for Spain on 23 December 1936 on the site of post-war Kington House and was subsequently joined there by flats. Here Orwell was to write Animal Eileen (who had been dealing with issues Farm. He was enamoured of the regarding the publication of The Road property’s Victorian style, and filled to Wigan Pier). The Spanish experience the place with furniture inherited from yielded for Orwell the material needed previous generations of his family. The to write Homage to Catalonia. He and consensus on the flat was not universally Eileen returned from Spain to England positive, though: ‘a remarkably dreary in June 1937 and to Wallington in early flat’, ‘an icily cold flat’ and ‘a damp July. In September 1938 the novelist L H basement flat’ are among ‘other Myers secretly funded a six-month trip memories’ recorded in Orwell’s London. to French Morocco, so that Orwell might In 1944 the Orwells were forced to avoid the English winter and recover his move out of Mortimer Crescent. ‘On health. Eileen and he arrived back in June 28’, Crick records, ‘their flat was England in March 1939, spending time in bombed. One of the “doodle-bugs” or Wallington and in Southwold (Suffolk). flying bombs landed nearby and brought On the outbreak of the Second World down ceilings, windows and roof. It War, and in spite of having been wounded cracked the main walls, rendering the in the neck in Spain, Orwell was very house uninhabitable’. Searching for keen to fight but was exempt from them in the rubble, Orwell managed to conscription on account of his lungs. salvage his collection of books, pamphlets Feeling that he couldn’t possibly and other documents, carting them off remain in the countryside while millions (according to his friend Inez Holden), were enduring German bombing in in a wheelbarrow to the Tribune offices London, Orwell returned to the capital on the Strand, where he had been with Eileen, and the couple eventually literary editor since November 1943. took up residence at 111 Langford There would, of course, have Court, Abbey Road, St John’s Wood. In been some very precious cargo in this May 1940 he joined the Local Defence wheelbarrow, not least the manuscript Volunteers (later known as the Home of Animal Farm. In a letter dated that Guard) as a Platoon Commander. same day, Orwell wrote to T S Eliot, Bernard Crick conveys the thoughts then a director of Faber & Faber, seeking of some who believed that the ‘sincere publication for Animal Farm: ‘Dear but mechanically inept Sergeant Eliot, This MS has been blitzed which Orwell’ would have made a good extra accounts for my delay in delivering it character in the BBC comedy Dad’s and its slightly crumpled condition, Army. Eileen had remarked to a friend, but it is not damaged in any way’. again according to Crick, ‘I didn’t mind The book was politically controversial, bombs on the mantelpiece, but didn’t particularly so given Britain’s wartime like the machine-gun under the bed’. alliance with Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Between 1940 and 1948 Orwell so the manuscript had already been contributed some of his finest essays to turned down by Gollancz and Cape; Horizon magazine, whose editorial office Faber & Faber were about to do the was in the flat of its co-founder and same. It was Fred Warburg, of Secker co-editor, the poet Stephen Spender, at & Warburg who, in late July 1944, 6 Selwyn House, Lansdowne Terrace, eventually accepted the (as Crick put it) off Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury. ‘much-handled, dog-eared manuscript’. Orwell was seemingly a regular visitor, In the previous month George and and on 12 September 1940 his diary Eileen had adopted a baby boy, whom entry reads: ‘Spent last night at S’s they named Richard Horatio Blair. Crick place with a battery firing in the square notes that Orwell ‘was delighted with at short intervals throughout the night. Richard and talked about him endlessly Slept through it easily enough, no to his friends like any proud parent. He bombs being audible in that place.’ At took his turn at getting up at night and

changing nappies’, while ‘Eileen accepted him as if her own, warmly, completely, protectively’. Crick also states that Orwell spent some of his time during this period ‘drinking in pubs on Haverstock Hill, Rosslyn Hill and Pond Street’ with his friends William and Hetta Empson, who had a flat at 160a Haverstock Hill, NW3, famous (according to Thompson) for its late-night, open-house drinking parties hosted after the pubs had closed.

Last years By early October 1944 the Orwell family found a place to live in Islington, at 27b Canonbury Square. It was while living there that Eileen Blair went into hospital and tragically died, in March 1945, during a hysterectomy, suffering a cardiac arrest under the anaesthetic. Orwell the widower continued to take good care of Richard, as evidenced by Rayner Heppenstall, then living in a firstfloor flat at 38 Rosslyn Hill, NW3. In Four Absentees he touchingly reveals that ‘Orwell appeared one Sunday afternoon between Easter and Whitsuntide [1945]. Under his left arm was Richard Horatio. In his right hand he carried a carpet bag, from which, first a presentation copy of Animal Farm was extracted. Richard and my son crawled about on the floor together and poked at each other’s eyes. Out of the carpet bag, from time to time, further came a bottle of orange juice or a change of napkins. ... After tea we all trooped down to William Empson’s.’ The move to Canonbury Square did not mark the end of Orwell’s connections with what was to become the borough of Camden. On 3 September 1949, having been diagnosed with chronic tuberculosis, he was transferred from the Gloucestershire sanatorium where he had nearly died, to University College Hospital, WC1 – not far from Senate House in Malet Street, which he had used as a model for 1984’s infamous Ministry of Truth. Orwell stayed in the hospital’s private wing [6], his care paid for by the royalties received from the recently published and already immensely popular 1984. While this seems on the surface to go against his left-wing politics, it must be remembered that Nye Bevan’s NHS was at the time little more than a fledgling organisation. Initially the prognosis was good, doctors suggesting that with proper care Orwell’s status could become ‘good chronic’, enabling him to walk around a bit and begin writing again, which he longed to do. On 13 October 1949, Orwell married 31-year-old Sonia Brownell, whom he had met when she worked as a literary editor at the Bloomsbury offices of Camden History Review Vol.39 (2015)

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8a

Horizon magazine. Sonia was known to some as ‘the Venus of the Euston Road’, on account of her ‘radiant blond beauty’ (ODNB) and the nude modelling she had done for the Euston Road School of Drawing and Painting. The couple were married by special licence in his room at the hospital, and Orwell was ‘immensely cheered’ by the marriage according to his friend, the novelist Anthony Powell. Afterwards, all (bar one) of the wedding party went to the Ritz to celebrate. Orwell remained in his bed. On 21 January 1950, a little over three

Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. The country churchyard plot was secured by the influence of David Astor, editor of The Observer. And there was buried Eric Arthur Blair the man, as opposed to Orwell the author, who had been commemorated in Christ Church.

b

Orwell remembered Like so many great artists, Orwell, tragically, never lived to see the full extent of his success. Since his death he has been hailed as one of the 20th

c

[6] The Huntley Street entrance to UCH’s Rosenheim Building, formerly its private patients’ wing, and currently earmarked for demolition

[7] St George’s Cathedral, Albany Street, previously Christ Church

months after the wedding, he died of a burst artery in his lung, at 46 years of age. Although an ‘avowed non-believer’ (Crick in ODNB), he did request a Church of England funeral, and wanted to be buried, rather than be cremated. The funeral arrangements were left to his friends Malcolm Muggeridge, the author and journalist, and the aforementioned Anthony Powell. They enlisted the help of the funeral directors Leverton & Sons of Eversholt Street, NW1 – who, ironically, have possessed the Royal Undertaking Warrant since 1991 and therefore assisted in the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales, Princess Margaret, the Queen Mother, and Lady Thatcher. It was apparently because of Levertons’ connection with the Vicar of Christ Church in Albany Street that it was decided Orwell’s funeral would take place there. Leased from the Church of England in 1989, it is now an Antiochian Orthodox church called, rather fittingly, St George’s Cathedral [7]. On account of his height, some 6ft 2ins (188cm), Orwell had to be put into a long coffin. It was in this that he was taken to All Saints’ Church in

century’s most important literary figures, recognised as one of the greatest and most insightful political authors. Orwell’s legacy lives on, not least in Camden; there are presently five plaques in the borough in recognition of the author, erected by five different bodies. The first to appear, at South End Green and commemorating the writer’s time at Booklovers’ Corner, was paid for by private contributors (apparently including Margaret Drabble) and unveiled in 1969 on the former bookshop by his second wife Sonia Brownell, by then remarried and divorced. Featuring a portrait head of Orwell, this plaque was replaced in 2001 by a near replica, funded by the South End Green Association and others. The unveiling ceremony involved Orwell’s adopted son Richard Blair, the actress and then Labour MP Glenda Jackson, and the playwright Alan Plater (who wrote the screenplay for the 1997 film version of Keep the Aspidistra Flying). Sadly, however, in 2010 Orwell’s head portrait mysteriously disappeared from the plaque, leaving it quite literally defaced. [8a].

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d

e

f

[8] (a & b) The South End Green plaque when ‘defaced’, and after the reinstatement of Orwell’s portrait head; and the plaques in (c) Lawford Road, (d) Parliament Hill, (e) Mortimer Crescent and (f) Lansdowne Terrace [9] No.2 Lansdowne Terrace on 22 April 2015: (l to r) Phil Robertson (Orwell Society), Quentin Kopp (son of Orwell’s commandant in Spain, George Kopp), Richard Blair (Orwell’s son), Cressida Connolly (Cyril’s daughter), Lazzaro Pietragnoli (Mayor of Camden), Lizzie Spender (Stephen’s daughter), Matthew Spender (his son), Saskia Spender (Matthew’s daughter) and the author, Lorcan Greene

Newspapers at the time speculated that it may have been vandalised, though in an email Richard Blair informed me that he believed ‘the one done in 2001 … was subject to corrosion’. Fortunately, in October 2014 the face was restored Sources Bernard Crick, George Orwell: a Life (Secker & Warburg, 1980) Peter Davidson, George Orwell: a Life in Letters (Liveright, 2010) Rayner Heppenstall, Four Absentees (Barrie & Rockliff, 1960) George Orwell, Bookshop Memories, first published 1936 in The Fortnightly Review, then in Collected Essays (Secker & Warburg, 1961), and again in Shooting an Elephant (Penguin Classics, 2009) – though, interestingly, the piece doesn’t appear in the latter’s original edition (Secker & Warburg, 1950). George Orwell, The Orwell Diaries (Penguin Books, 1970)

[8b], paid for by the Orwell Society and, amongst others, Richard Blair, who wrote to me stating that: ‘the copy is not quite as I would have liked. I’m afraid it lost a little in the “translation” from the model I had and the small reduction that was necessary in order to make it fit the original plaque. Even so, it looks a little cramped. However that is how the original looked.’ Richard further advised me that the replacement head, cast in resin, ‘was from a half sized plaster cast of his head by David Hadfield in 1969 that I own’. He added, ‘I’m pleased that my father’s bust has now been finally restored to its rightful place’. The plaque was rededicated by Richard at a ceremony on 18 July 2015. A second Camden Orwell plaque, an official blue one [8c], was erected at 50

Peter Stansky & William Abrahams, Orwell: the Transformation (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979) Roger Tagholm, Walking Literary London (New Holland, 2001) John Thompson, Orwell’s London (Fourth Estate, 1984) Websites: ‘The Orwell Society’ (www.orwellsociety.com) ‘The Orwell Prize’, in particular Gordon Bowker’s article, ‘Orwell’s Library’ (theorwellprize.co.uk/ george-orwell/about-orwell/ gordon-bowker-orwells-library) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (www.oxforddnb.com

Lawford Road by the Greater London Council in 1980. In the significant year of 1984 a third example [8d], financed by the Hampstead Plaque Fund, was unveiled at 77 Parliament Hill by the former Labour Party leader Michael Foot. Next, in 2012 at Kington House on the site of 10a Mortimer Crescent, a fourth plaque [8e] was put up by the Historic Kilburn Plaque Scheme and unveiled by Richard Blair. Finally, erected in 2015 by the Marchmont Association has been yet another plaque [8f], at what is now 2 Lansdowne Terrace, Bloomsbury [9], commemorating the onetime headquarters of Horizon magazine, to which Orwell is named as a contributor – all proof, if any more were needed, that George Orwell lives on in Camden.

Acknowledgements For their generous assistance and kind encouragement, grateful thanks to Richard Blair, and to The Orwell Society, who are doing wonderful work in keeping Orwell’s writings alive today. Special thanks also to the following for their kind permission to reproduce photographs: [2a] The Orwell Archive, UCL Library Special Collections [5] The Orwell Archive, and Vernon Richards’ Estate [6] Fitzrovia News [7] Andy MacDonald [8e] The London Historians [8f, 9] Marchmont Association Other photos © author

Our youngest ever contributor, Lorcan Greene attends University College School (the alma mater of Stephen Spender). He is a member of the Orwell Society and would be very interested in hearing any additional information about Orwell’s time in Camden.

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