Orwell the Old Etonian

The basic facts about George Orwell’s years at Eton are well known. But we don’t precisely know which Etonian values he retained and what influence the school had on his later life. John le Carré wrote me (on September 27, 1998), “I taught at Eton. It always amused me that Blair-Orwell, who had been to Eton, always took great pains to disown the place.” 

Responding to Twentieth Century Authors, Orwell categorically declared: “I was educated at Eton, 1917-1921, as I had been lucky enough to win a scholarship, but I did no work there and learned very little, and I don’t feel that Eton has been much of a formative influence on my life.” ¹ This statement is misleading and even false. He won the scholarship by enormous effort, not by pure luck. Though he forcefully denied its influence, he did work at Eton and had an excellent education. Above all, he learned how to write and to think for himself.

In “Inside the Whale” Orwell quoted his school chum Cyril Connolly, who echoed Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution in Enemies of Promise: “Were I to deduce anything from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development” (12.104). Though Orwell made strenuous efforts to dissociate himself from Eton and its values, the very force of his denials suggest that his education had a lasting effect.

The great ambition of Orwell’s cruel but effective prep school, St Cyprian’s, was to train pupils to win scholarships at Eton and other prestigious public schools. He won the glittering prize and became a King’s Scholar at Eton, where he was a student from the ages of 14 to 18½. The 70 brainy Scholars, a minority within the elite institution, lived in the ancient College buildings. They were quite different from the 930 wealthy, upper-class Oppidans (town dwellers), who often had generations of family connections with the school, paid full fees and lived in separate houses supervised by the Masters. This difference gave Orwell an acute awareness of class distinctions that would inform all his future work.

After the horrors of St Cyprian’s, Eton seemed to be a cultured place. Orwell praised its positive aspects and reluctantly admitted that he had been “relatively happy” there. In a 1948 review of Eton Medley he implicitly contrasted it to his prep school and allowed that it “has magnificent buildings and playing-fields, and . . . beautiful surroundings. It also has one great virtue . . . a tolerant and civilised atmosphere which gives each boy a fair chance of developing his own individuality. . . . Some of its traditions deserve to be remembered” (19.412). Eton gave him what prep school had failed to provide: freedom, leisure, stimulating classmates, lively teachers, an enlightened environment and a cubicle of his own. He recalled that “at Eton you had a room to yourself—a room which might even have a fire in it . . . there would be more privacy.” He even made a virtue of ostensibly negative qualities. There would be “more neglect, more chance to be idle and self-indulgent and degenerate.” He insisted, with the crucial qualifier “avoidable,” that from 1916 to 1925, from the unremitting pressure in prep school to the demanding duties in Burma, “between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two or three I hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work” (19.381-2).

Eton’s wartime military training gave Orwell great advantages in Burma, in Spain and during the London Blitz. The half-blind Aldous Huxley taught him French, useful except for the absence of obscenities that he learned when slaving as a dishwasher in a posh Paris hotel, and gave him a valuable taste for “rare and strange words . . . and their accurate and significant use” (18.520). Orwell claimed that the tedious drill of classical languages with an unsympathetic teacher had no practical benefit: “I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet” (5.128). But it was a tremendous help when he learned modern languages – French, Spanish and Catalan – as well as Hindi, Burmese, Shaw-Karen and a bit of Urdu. In his police exams he earned the highest grades for Greek and Latin.

After spending some time at Eton, Orwell became increasingly critical of its faults, and devised a cunning strategy to deal with his class enemies: “On the one hand [the King’s Scholarship] made me cling tighter than ever to my gentility; on the other hand it filled me with resentment against the boys whose parents were richer than mine and who took care to let me know it. . . . The correct and elegant thing, I felt, was to be of gentle birth but to have no money. This is part of the credo of the lower-upper-middle class” (5.128). The hostile feelings of a boy who had neither gentle birth nor money turned him into a shabby-genteel rebel. 

George Orwell and Etonian friends in 1919. (PA Images)

King’s Scholars, who were known as “Tugs,” from “toga”, wore academic gowns that marked them off from other boys. Orwell’s Eton friend Richard Rees recalled that “Tug” remained a contemptuous term in adult life: “when I had known [Orwell] for eighteen years, I incautiously used the word ‘Tug and although he was too polite to say anything he winced as if I had trodden on his tenderest corn. That a famous middle-aged writer should have retained such a deep trace of boyhood sensitiveness and suffering seems remarkable.” ² The pain went deep.

Orwell was highly critical of the food, cruelty and snobbery at Eton. In “Such, Such Were the Joys” he recalled that a hungry “boy was given no solid meal after mid-day dinner. For his afternoon tea he was given only tea and bread and butter, at eight o’clock he was given a miserable supper of soup or fried fish” (19.369). The triple repetition of “was given” suggests that the meager rations were doled out like charity. 

Eton gave the older boys ample opportunity to express their sadistic instincts. In an extraordinary event, the 18-year-old Orwell, about to leave school, was beaten by a prefect exactly his own age for a minor infraction: turning up late for prayers. It’s not clear why the rebel submitted to such humiliation unless there was absolutely no way to escape punishment.

Christopher Hollis – his contemporary, son of a bishop and future Conservative MP – noted the all-pervasive snobbery that Orwell particularly hated: “The Etonian of my day was childishly arrogant about anyone who was not at Eton . . . all were dismissed with a sweeping gesture as beyond the pale.” ³ In opposition to the prevailing attitude, where the wealthy and well-connected boys rightly assumed they would achieve worldly success, Orwell was convinced that he was destined for hopeless failure: “The conviction that it was not possible for me to be a success went deep enough to influence my actions far into adult life. Until I was about thirty I always planned my life on the assumption not only that any major undertaking was bound to fail, but that I could only expect to live a few years longer” (19.379). 

In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell, sensitive to bad odours and aromatic pain, confessed that as a schoolboy he was taught to believe that “the lower classes smell” (5.119). But he thought the upper classes were even more offensive. He retained a lifelong interest in the annual Eton-Harrow cricket match at Lords, yet condemned the old Boys’ assumption of superiority and inherited wealth: “The whole value of those [schools], from the point of view of the people who go there, is their exclusiveness” and their luxuries: “high-powered cars, fur coats, yachts, country houses” (16.102). He disliked material possessions, and never owned or wanted to own an expensive boat, even a low-powered car or the meanest country cottage. After the successful publication of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and just before his tragically early death, he remarked, “I have made all this money and now I’m going to die.” His wealth was squandered by the alcoholic Sonia Brownell, who married him on his deathbed. His new fishing rod, planned for use on a lifesaving trip to Switzerland, remained in the corner of his hospital room. 

(Shutterstock)

Orwell also blamed Eton for the decline of moral values in English society. In The Lion and the Unicorn he disputed the Duke of Wellington’s famous epigram and argued, “Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. One of the dominant facts in English life during the past three-quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class” (12.401). He felt equally driven to condemn the upper-class Left, cushioned by luxury and wealth, for their complete lack of awareness of the brutal realities that he himself had experienced: “hunger, hardship, solitude, exile, prison, persecution, manual labour. . . . No wonder that the huge tribe known as ‘the right left people’ found it so easy to condone the purge-and-Ogpu side of the Russian régime and the horrors of the first Five-Year Plan” (12.104).

Orwell’s years at Eton brought out his lifelong rebellious streak and, like James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, he adopted Satan’s motto Non serviam. He mocked everything that was sacred to traditional beliefs: compulsory games, the Officers Training Corps, the Royal Family and the Christian religion. He sneered at the ordained Masters who made a very good living out of the Crucifixion. When the Versailles Treaty was signed in June 1919, he helped torpedo the plan to swagger over the defeat of the enemy. The Masters decided that “we should celebrate the peace in the traditional manner by whooping over the fallen foe. We were to march into the school-yard carrying torches, and sing jingo songs of the type of ‘Rule Britannia.’ The boys—to their honour, I think—guyed the whole proceeding and sang blasphemous and seditious words to the tunes provided” (5.130). 

Orwell was rather shocked to learn that his hero Charles Dickens had sent his eldest son to Eton. In 1936 the communist, John Strachey, also surprised him by saying he’d just had a son and was putting him down for Eton. Orwell asked, “How can you do that?” and he replied, “ ‘given our existing society it was the best education.’ Actually I doubt whether it is the best, but in principle I don’t feel sure that he was wrong” (19.462). As a compromise Orwell put his own son Richard down as a day-boy at Westminster, a grand London public school where, he was glad to hear, the boys no longer wore absurd top hats.

Orwell rejected both the values of Eton and the idea of a university. He did not want to prolong his life as a student and continue to immerse himself in the “lukewarm bath of snobbery.” He was prejudiced against “Nancy boys,” and would not have fitted into the homosexual hothouse at King’s in Cambridge or the social life of the flamboyant aesthetes of Balliol in Oxford. Caustically reviewing Cyril Connolly’s first novel The Rock Pool, he defined the moral chasm between his own world and his friend’s decadent milieu: “even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrayed a kind of spiritual inadequacy” (10.491).

George Orwell with his dog 1945.

Orwell decided, instead of Oxbridge, to become a responsible adult and in his teens took on the graver responsibilities of a colonial policeman. He was strongly attracted to the uniform, the money, the danger, the adventure, the authority and the power of a quasi-military police force. The Eton customs of fagging, when young boys had to obey the call of seniors to perform minor tasks, and the flogging for punishment, prepared Orwell in a negative way to deal with his Burmese servants, whom he kicked and punched, and for the prisoners’ beatings he officially ordered and supervised in Burma. His cruel behaviour later intensified his inherent guilt.

Orwell tried to suppress his Etonian background, but his accent, attitude and demeanor gave him away. Even though he was disguised as a tramp, the supervisor of the lodging- house recognised and respected his superior origins.

Tramp Major: “Then you are a gentleman?”

Orwell: “I suppose so.”

Tramp Major: “Well, that’s bloody bad luck, guv’nor.”

And thereafter he treated me with unfair favouritism, and even with a kind of deference.

A down-and-out old Etonian in their tramps’ quarters – possibly in search of “Nancy boys” – also recognised his cultivated accent and became quite chummy: “ ‘An old public school boy, what? . . . Don’t meet many of the old school here. I am an old Etonian. You know – twenty years hence this weather and all that.’ He began to quaver out the Eton boating-song, not untunefully.” He then continued to condemn his surroundings and himself: “Very low types. Funny sort of place for you and me, eh? . . . My friends say to me, ‘M—, you are past redemption.’ Quite true, I am past redemption.” (1.197, 160). This pathetic character represents what Orwell might have become if he’d been forced to remain a tramp. The Eton boating song had become so absorbed into popular culture that an 18-year-old boy from the working-class also knew the words and music. His comrade Stafford Cottman recalled that Orwell became nostalgic during guard duty in Spain and asked, “did I remember the Eton boating-song, and I sang it for him, just one verse! And he was delighted.” ⁴ 

Orwell could not entirely eliminate the Etonian outlook. He provoked the wrath of his fellow socialists by taking a condescending view of the crankish lunatic fringe, who were straining to distinguish themselves from conventional dress, behaviour and ideas. In Wigan Pier he exclaimed that socialism draws “with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England” (5.l6l). It’s hard to imagine him as a nudist, though with his early plein-air frolics he might just qualify as a “sex maniac”.

In Wigan Pier Orwell wondered how much of Eton remained in him when he became a socialist. He satirised an old-school communist, rather like himself, who accepted the Party ideology but couldn’t quite extinguish his elite background. Comrade X “is an old Etonian. He would be ready to die on the barricades, in theory anyway, but you notice that he still leaves his bottom waistcoat button undone. He idealises the proletariat, but it is remarkable how little his habits resemble theirs” (5.126-7). Orwell was willing to die on the barricades in Spain. He tried to discard his old habits and become one of them, but would always leave his telltale button undone.

The deliberately déclassé Orwell, like an actor preparing for a role, studiously created a working-class persona. He wore a battered tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows, dark flannel shirt, hairy (never old-school) tie and baggy corduroy trousers. He didn’t wear a flat cap, but rolled his own shaggy cigarettes and even slurped tea from a saucer. At the BBC canteen he adopted an extreme proletarian accent and told a startled colleague: “The FACK that you’re black and that I’m white has nudding whadever to do wiv fit!” ⁵ Yet Harry Pollitt, the Communist Party leader, resented his “cut-glass Eton accent,” and Orwell always remained an outsider and critic of the socialists.

David Astor (PA Images)

In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Gordon Comstock despises and resents the writing that reflects the debased literary taste, superior background and useful connections of the “snooty, refined books on safe painters and safe poets by those moneyed young beasts who glide so gracefully from Eton to Cambridge and from Cambridge to the literary reviews” (4.7). Orwell was not a sleek “moneyed beast, struggling instead of gliding gracefully to success, but he was grateful for the valuable help of many Etonian writers and friends. Connolly, Rees, Hollis and Anthony Powell wrote sympathetically about him. David Astor, who owned and edited The Observer, was his patron. The novelist L H Myers paid for his restorative trip to Morocco. Robin Fletcher was his landlord on the island of Jura. Rees published Orwell in the Adelphi, Connolly in Horizon, John Lehmann in Penguin New Writing, David Astor in the Observer, Roger Senhouse at Secker & Warburg. 

Despite his denial, Eton influenced Orwell throughout his life. He naturally rejected the worst aspects of the school, yet was indelibly marked by its best values. He allowed that in Burma and later life his dislike of racial prejudice, his passion for justice, his fairness in the minutest matters “were the most important part of the education I received at Eton—this and the capacity to think for myself.” ⁶ Most importantly, he retained the languid manner of the old Etonian. He’d received a superior education, was confident and dogmatic, had a commanding presence and assumed authority in dangerous situations: in the Burmese Police, the Spanish Civil War and in the wartime Home Guard. Orwell could not help but be a gentleman in every sense of the word.

 Notes

1. The Complete Works of George Orwell, ed. Peter Davison (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), 12.147.

2. Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1962; Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), p. 134.

3. Christopher Hollis, A Study of George Orwell (Chicago: Regnery, 1956), pp. 20-21.

4. Stephen Wadhams, ed. Remembering George Orwell (Markham, Ontario, Canada: Penguin, 1984), p. 81.

5. Jeffrey Meyers, Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (NY: Norton, 2000), p. 215.

6. W. H. J. Christie, “St. Cyprian’s Days,” Blackwood’s Magazine, 309 (May 1971), 391.

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