Facing Unpleasant Facts (40 page)

46. Ministry of Information, which was responsible for wartime propaganda. It had offices in the Senate House of the University of London, the city's tallest new building of the interwar years. It suggested Minitrue of
1984.

47. R. A. Butler (1902–1984; Life Peer, 1965) was Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, 1938–1941, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and later Foreign Secretary in the Conservative government of 1951–1964.

48. Sir Samuel Hoare (see
n. 42,
above) was at this time British Ambassador to Spain.

49. L. H. Myers was a novelist and good friend to Orwell.

50. Weekly newspaper of the Independent Labour Party, which Orwell had joined in June 1938, having fought with the ILP contingent in Spain. He left the party at the beginning of the war.

51. Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) was at this time leader of the Free French and the inspiration for continuing French resistance to Germany after the fall of France. After the war, he was interim president 1945–1946. He returned to power in 1958 as a result of the crisis in Algeria, and, as architect and president of the Fifth Republic, 1959–1969, maintained France's military and strategic independence.

52. Italo Balbo (1896–1940), head of the Italian Air Force, was responsible for the bombing of Ethiopians during the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–1936.

53. Cyril Connolly.

54. Unidentified. Probably not L. H. Myers and his wife, for whom the description "all but pure pacifists" is inappropriate.

55. The home of Gwen O'Shaughnessy in Greenwich.

56. In June 1939 the British submarine
Thetis
failed to surface on its trials. Only four of the complement of 103 were saved, owing to faulty escape apparatus. The submarine was recovered and entered active service as HMS
Thunderbolt
in November 1940. All the crew were told of the submarine's history and given the opportunity to decline to serve in her. After a successful career, she was depth-charged and lost with all hands in March 1943. The non sequitur here is a result of Orwell's cut.

57. Werner von Fritsch (1880–1939), an old-guard general on the German Army General Staff, never concealed his contempt for Hitler. His death in action in 1939 was always thought to have been engineered by the Führer.

58. Buenaventura Durruti (1896–1936), a gunman who became a general and popular leader. He was killed in the defense of Madrid, possibly by Communists. His funeral gave rise to a great popular demonstration in Barcelona. Emilio Mola Vidal (1887–1937), an equal colleague of Franco, was killed in the early stages of the civil war, before the question of primacy with Franco could arise.

59. On July 3, the Royal Navy under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir John Somerville attacked French warships at Oran and Mers el-Kébir, in Algeria. Among the French ships sunk or damaged were the battleships
Provence
and
Bretagne
and the fast battlecruiser
Dunkerque;
1,300 French seamen were killed. Several ships, including the battlecruiser
Strasbourg
and the aircraft carrier
Commandant Teste,
escaped to Toulon. French ships at Portsmouth and Plymouth were also seized, including two battleships, two cruisers, eight destroyers, some two hundred small craft, and a number of submarines. Crews had the option of joining the Allies or being repatriated.

60. On July 8, 1940, Royal Navy torpedo-boats attacked and seriously damaged the
Richelieu
at Dakar and the
Jean Bart
at Casablanca.

61. Vernon Bartlett (1894–1983), author of many books of political affairs, was at this
time a leading liberal political journalist. He won a sensational by-election in 1938 as an Independent MP opposing the Munich Agreement.

62. Edward, Duke of Windsor (1894–1972), had, as Prince of Wales, been extremely popular, and had expressed sympathy with the unemployed and those living in depressed areas. He ascended the throne, as Edward VIII, on January 20, 1936, but his decision to marry a twice-divorced woman, Mrs. Wallis Simpson, caused a crisis that led to his abdication on December 10, 1936. He and Mrs. Simpson married and lived in France thereafter except for the war years, when he acted as governor of the Bahamas. Ill-feeling and controversy about "the Abdication Crisis" and his association with Nazi Germany have not entirely evaporated.

63. Unidentified; possibly Tosco Fyvel (1907–1985). He was Jewish; his parents had emigrated from Vienna to what was then Palestine, where he was associated with the Zionist movement and had worked with Golda Meir. Orwell and he met in January 1940, with Fredric Warburg and others. The outcome of a series of further meetings was Searchlight Books, of which
The Lion and the Unicorn
(1941) was the first; see
306, n. 1.

64. Unidentified; possibly Fredric Warburg.

65. See
71, 17.6.40
regarding evacuation of children to Canada.

66. David Lloyd George (1863–1945, Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, 1945), Liberal prime minister 1916–1922, had, like Pétain, been cast as a heroic leader during World War I, when he proved an effective prime minister. He was in a minority in seeking a conciliatory peace treaty with Germany after the war.

67. Unidentified.

68. On July 16, 1940, Hitler had said, in Directive 16: "I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and, if necessary, to carry it out. The aim ... will be to eliminate the English homeland... and, if necessary, to occupy it completely" (
Hitler's War Directives
1939–45, edited by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1964).

69. William Joyce (1908–1946), known as Lord Haw-Haw supposedly from his way of speaking, was an American citizen who never acquired British nationality, although he spent most of his life in England and was a rabid nationalist. In August 1939 he went to Germany and in 1940 became a naturalized German. Throughout the early part of the war he broadcast propaganda to England. He was hanged by the British, January 3, 1946.

70. Sir Oswald Mosley, Bt. (1896–1980) was successively a Conservative, Independent, and Labour MP. In 1931 he broke away from the Labour Party to form the 'New Party." Later he became fanatically pro-Hitler and turned his party into the British Union of Fascists. He was interned early in the war.

71. Jacques Doriot (1898–1945), a Communist who had turned to Fascism, was leader of the Parti Populaire Français, which was financed by the Germans. He was behind the formation of La Légion des volontaires français contre bolchevisme (the LVF)—a first step in military collaboration with Germany during the occupation.

72. Gaston Bergery, a French deputy and intellectual, moved from the extreme right to the extreme left, and after the fall of France collaborated with the Germans.

73. Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Viscount Swinton (1884–1972; Earl, 1955), entered Parliament as a Unionist (allied closely with the Conservatives) in 1918. He was Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1931–1935; Secretary of State for Air, 1935–1938; Chairman of the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation, 1940–1942; Cabinet Minister Resident in West Africa, 1942–1944; and Minister of Civil Aviation, 1944–1945.

74. Fewer planes were actually shot down than British and German air forces claimed at the time. On August 14 the Royal Air Force claimed to have shot down 144 German planes; this was revised to 71 after the war, when German records could be examined. On that day the RAF lost 16 planes, but eight pilots were saved. On September 15, 185 German planes were claimed; this proved to be 56; 26 RAF planes were lost, but half the pilots were rescued. This was the largest number claimed for any day of the Battle of Britain. From July to the end of October, the claim was 2,698 German planes shot down; the correct number was 1,733. The Germans claimed 3,058 RAF planes, but only 915 were lost. To what extent this was deliberate official exaggeration and to what degree overenthusiastic reporting by pilots is difficult to assess.

75. The Orwells' dog, a large poodle.

76. This is probably George Mason, a medical consultant and friend of the O'Shaughnessy family.

77. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), a leader of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, and Commissar for Foreign Affairs and for War, 1917–1924, was instrumental in the creation of the Red Army. In the power struggle that followed the death of Lenin in 1924, he lost to Stalin and was exiled. He was assassinated in Mexico because he and those who followed him continued to oppose Stalin. His death was attributed to the Soviet secret police, the OGPU.

78. David Low (1891–1963) was a political cartoonist of left-wing views.

79. Unidentified.

80. Passed over for promotion.

81. "Art of Knowing What Gives One Pleasure,"
Further Extracts from the Note-Books of Samuel Butler,
chosen and edited by A. T. Bartholomew (1934), 165–66. This book was reviewed by Orwell in 1934.

82. In this raid, the first bombs fell on central London; St. Giles's Church, Cripplegate, was hit. Although 11-ton blockbuster bombs were later dropped by the RAF, at this stage of the war 2,000-pound bombs were not available. In the attack on Woolwich Arsenal and the London docks on September 7, 1940, some three hundred German bombers dropped 337 tons of bombs—an average of 2,500 pounds per plane. Orwell may have had parachute mines, or their effect, in mind here. Churchill wrote General Ismay a memorandum on September 19, 1940 noting that the Germans had dropped thirty-six parachute mines. He wanted an appropriate response—1,000-pound bombs if parachute mines were not available. The disadvantage of the parachute mine, except as a weapon of terror, was that, released at five thousand feet, anything might be hit.

83. A suburb of London about a mile from where Orwell was living in Chagford Street.

84. Richard Rees.

85. Unidentified.

86. The number killed in air raids in September was 6,954; 10,615 were seriously injured. The figures during the ensuing winter throughout Britain were:
Killed Injured
October 1940 6,334 8,695
November 4,588 6,202
December 3,793 5,244
January 1941 1,500 2,012
February 789 1,068
March 4,259 5,557
In the devastation of Coventry on November 16 (code-named "Moonlight Sonata" by the Germans), 554 people were killed of a population of a quarter of a million; only one German plane was shot down. Throughout the war, 60,595 civilians were killed by enemy action. This stands in contrast to 30,248 members of the Merchant Marine; 50,75 8 Royal Navy; 69,606 RAF; and 144,079 Army. Of some 36,500 civilians killed in air raids to the end of 1941, more than 20,000 died in London, more than 4,000 in Liverpool, more than 2,000 in Birmingham, and nearly 2,000 in Glasgow.

87. Probably the "M" mentioned in diary entry of
16.6.40,
see
70.
Fifty pounds would be about a week's wages for a total of ten to twelve people.

88. See "My Country Right or Left,"
55.

89. South and east of the Thames, often regarded as if it was an East End community, this area is well known in Cockney tradition.

90. Holborn is in the City of London; Marylebone Railway Station, a London terminus, was only two hundred to three hundred yards from where Orwell was living in Chagford Street.

91. Madame Tussaud's Waxworks Exhibition was in Marylebone Road, a couple of hundred yards from where Orwell lived, in the opposite direction from Marylebone station.

92. Woolwich, some two to three miles east of Greenwich, where the O'Shaughnessys lived, was the location of a Royal Artillery depot, the Royal Military Academy, and the Royal Arsenal.

93. In Piccadilly Circus. The Windmill Theatre, as it proudly boasted, also "never closed"; it was a little to the northeast of Piccadilly Circus.

94. The Elephant and Castle, a public house, gave its name to this major working-class residential area, shopping center, and meeting point of several important roads.

95. Stephen Spender's flat, and the
Horizon
office, in Lansdowne Terrace, WCi. Orwell originally typed "S.S's place" but the first
S
was crossed out.

96. On September 22, 1940, Churchill wrote to President Roosevelt saying that 250,000 rifles "are most urgently needed, as I have 250,000 trained and uniformed men [the Home Guard] into whose hands they can be put." If they could be made available, it would "enable us to take 250,000 .303 rifles from the Home Guard and transfer them to the Regular Army, leaving the Home Guard armed with about 800,000 American rifles."

97. When the Germans first bombed London, there appeared to be no anti-aircraft defense. Sometimes a single plane could be cruising above and people could only wait anxiously, often for seemingly long periods, for a bomb to be dropped. At other times there would be a concentrated attack of incendiary bombs, high explosives, or both. After all the anti-aircraft guns available had been regrouped around London, quite unexpectedly they all opened up on the night of September 10. Orwell is absolutely correct about the effect on morale. See also
98, 12.9.40.

98. Air Raid Precautions.

99. A department store.

100. In September 1940 a British expedition, cooperating with Free French forces under General de Gaulle, made an attempt to recapture the port of Dakar, West Africa, from the Vichy government. The expedition was a failure.

101. Unidentified.

102. Unidentified.

103. Unidentified.

104. J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) was a prolific popular novelist, dramatist, and man of letters. During 1940 and 1941 he gave a series of weekly radio talks urging the nation to determination and unity against Hitler, so as to make the country more democratic and egalitarian.

105. David R. Margesson (1890—1965 ; Viscount, 1942), Conservative MP for Rugby, 1924–1942; Government Chief Whip, 1931–1940, was loyal to each prime minister he served. Under Churchill he continued as Joint Government Whip, and after six months was Secretary of State for War.

106. Probably Tosco Fyvel, with whom Orwell was then working; see
302, n. 63.