



The file shows that as far as the intelligence services were concerned, Orwell was the Eton-educated son of a senior figure in the Indian civil service, who had left a job in the Burma police for some unknown reason, drifted to Paris and London, and had written a few books on his experiences. The Wigan police described him as "six foot, slim build with a long pale face".

In 1942, when he was working in the Indian section of the BBC in London, the special branch reported that he had been practically penniless when he found work with the corporation, and "dressed in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours".


According to his biographer, Professor Bernard Crick, Orwell saw himself as a Tribunite socialist whose experiences in the Spanish civil war had left him sharply disillusioned with Soviet communism.

His arrival in Wigan in February 1936 - a year before he went to Spain - to research the book commissioned by Victor Gollancz, the Left Book Club publisher, about the condition of the unemployed in the industrial north, was to lead to a series of special branch reports linking Orwell to known communists and leftwing organisations.


"It would appear from his mode of living that he is an author, or has some connection with literary work as he devotes most of his time in writing. He has collected an amount of local data, eg number of churches, public houses, population, etc, and is in receipt of an unusual amount of correspondence. He had also been asking about local mines and factories."

They reported not only letters addressed to Eric Blair, South End Road, Hampstead, but also in the name of "George Orwell". He had also been sent letters from France, including a newspaper which was the "French counterpart of the Daily Worker".

The police in Wigan wanted to know from Scotland Yard who this man was and whether he was "associated with the Communist Party". Special branch sent them an extensive background report on Orwell. It made much of the fact that he had given no official reason for resigning his job as an assistant superintendent of police in Burma "but he is reported to have told his intimate friends that he could not bring himself to arrest persons for committing acts which he did not think were wrong".

The special branch officers knew he had lived the life of a "down and out" in Paris and London to collect material for the book of the same name, but added that while in France he had eked out a precarious living as a freelance journalist and had taken "an interest in the activities of the French Communist Party and spent a good deal of time studying L'Humanité [the Communist daily]. Information is not available to shew whether he was an active supporter of the revolutionary movement in France, but it is known that whilst there, he offered his services to the Worker's Life, the forerunner of the Daily Worker, as Paris correspondent'.'

The file also reveals that special branch was also watching a close friend of Orwell's, Francis Westrope. Orwell spent much time in his secondhand bookshop in South End Green, Hampstead, which featured in his novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Westrope was "known to hold socialist views, and considers himself an 'intellectual'." They believed he was forwarding "correspondence of a revolutionary character" to his socialist friends.

In 1937 the police noted that Orwell had gone off to Spain as part of an Independent Labour party contingent to fight with the Poum [the Spanish anti-Stalinist Marxist militia]. MI5 took an interest in 1941 when the author reviewed a book written by Richard Terrell, "a well-known communist".





'Sooner or later they were bound to get you'

Archive documents showing the surveillance by special branch of George Orwell have parallels with his novel 1984 in which he describes how his hero Winston Smith defies Big Brother and the thought police


Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed - would still have committed, even if he had never put pen to paper - the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.

The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? ... His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all.

"I didn't want to say anything in the lane," she went on, "in case there's a mike hidden there. I don't suppose there is, but there could be. There's always the chance of one of those swine recognising your voice. We're all right here ... Look at those trees." They were small ashes, which at some time had been cut down and had sprouted up again into a forest of poles, none of them thicker than one's wrist. "There's nothing big enough to hide a mike in."

He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy on you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking ... They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious to yourself, remained impregnable.