He grew to like the Burmese and to dislike the effect of colonial rule on his fellow British. Blair showed a loathing both for the war and for military values, but also some signs of guilt or regret at having missed it. His fellow recruits were all older than he (though none taller or wearing size eleven boots) and almost all had gone through the First World War. Eric Blair may well have been the only Etonian ever to pass through the police training school at Mandalay to become an assistant superintendent. Burma was then governed as a province of India and did not rate high in the pecking order of ‘the Service’.
He scraped just enough marks to be able to join the Burma police in 1921. It was that kind of attitude that Orwell reacted against.įollowing in his father's footsteps, probably more cynically than purposively, Eric was sent to a crammer's to prepare for the Indian Civil Service exams. The classical scholar Andrew Gow, who as a young man had taught Orwell, in the mid-1970s remembered him only with irritation and annoyance for having wasted his chance to get to university. Orwell's contemporaries agree that, without being openly rebellious, he cultivated a mocking, sardonic attitude towards authority. In Connolly's Enemies of Promise there are good descriptions of Orwell both at prep school and at Eton. He found a few kindred spirits, including Steven Runciman (later the historian of Byzantium) and his prep school friend Cyril Connolly (the critic and writer). As a scholarship boy at Eton he was in the College-an intellectual élite thrust into the heart of a social élite. Young Eric crammed for and eventually won a scholarship to Eton College, but once there he rested on his oars, neglecting the set tasks however, he read widely for himself in the canon of English literature and books by rationalists, freethinkers, and reformers like Samuel Butler, George Bernard Shaw, and H. However, whether or not he was caned in front of the school for bed-wetting, the school was bad enough. Some have taken this to be a literal account of the horrors of an oppressive and socially discriminatory regime, but it is more likely a polemic against private education based on fact and with a reimagined Eric Blair as the observer, hero, or rather anti-hero. Late in his life he wrote a long account of his prep school days, 'Such, such were the joys', that could not be published in his lifetime for fear of libel. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell described his family with sardonic precision as 'lower-upper middle class', that is the 'upper-middle class without money' ( Complete Works, 5.113–14). His fees were topped up by his mother's unmarried brother, who like his sister, and totally unlike Richard Blair, seems to have had intellectual interests and ambitions for his nephew. Eric attended a small Anglican convent school in Henley-on-Thames until he gained a part scholarship to St Cyprian's, a fashionable preparatory school in Eastbourne where Cyril Connolly was among his contemporaries. Ida Blair took three-year-old Eric and his older sister, Marjorie, back to England just before the birth of her third and last child, Avril. Her mother was English and her father French she was born in Penge but had spent most of her life in Moulmein, Burma, where her father was a teak dealer and boat builder. He married Ida Limouzin, who was eighteen years his junior, late in his career. Richard Blair's great-grandfather Charles Blair (1743–1820), a Scot, had been a rich man, a plantation and slave owner in Jamaica who had married into the English aristocracy the money had run out by Richard Blair's time, who all his career held poor posts, and was on the move constantly. Man / National Portrait Gallery, Londonīlair, Eric Arthur ( 1903–1950), political writer and essayist, was born in Motihari, Bengal, India, on 25 June 1903, the only son of Richard Walmesley Blair (1857–1938), a sub-deputy opium agent in the government of Bengal, and his wife, Ida Mabel Limouzin (1875–1943).