Orwell in Spain, December 1936

In George Orwell: A Life (317–18), Bernard Crick quotes from John McNair’s typescript, ‘George Orwell: The Man I Knew’, dated March 1965, in Newcastle upon Tyne University Library. McNair records that Orwell brought him one letter from Fenner Brockway (1888–1988, Lord Brockway, 1964), General Secretary of the ILP, and one from H. N. Brailsford (1873–1958), a socialist intellectual and journalist and leader-writer for several newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian; Orwell later corresponded with him (see below). McNair, a Tynesider, was at first put off by Orwell’s ‘distinctly bourgeois accent’, but, when he realized that this was George Orwell, two of whose books he ‘had read and greatly admired’, he asked what he could do to help him. ‘I have come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism,’ Orwell told him. He also told McNair that ‘he would like to write about the situation and endeavour to stir working-class opinion in Britain and France’. McNair proposed that Orwell base himself in McNair’s offices and suggested he visit Madrid, Valencia and the Aragón front, where the POUM¹ was stationed, ‘and then get down to writing his book’. Orwell told McNair that writing a book ‘was quite secondary and his main reason for coming was to fight against Fascism’. McNair took him to the POUM barracks, where Orwell immediately enlisted, and introduced him to Victor Alba, then a journalist who would later write a history of the POUM (see, p. 2, n. 1, above); Alba showed Orwell round Barcelona. Orwell did not know, and never knew, that two months before he arrived in Spain, the NKVD’s resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had confidently assured NKVD Headquarters, ‘The Trotskyist organization POUM can easily be liquidated’² – by those, the Communists, whom Orwell took to be their allies in the fight against Franco.

1. POUM, Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), was described by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia as ‘one of those dissident Communist parties which have appeared in many countries in the last few years as a result of the opposition to “Stalinism”; i.e. to the change, real or apparent, in Communist policy. It was made up partly of ex-Communists and partly of an earlier party, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc. Numerically it was a small party, with not much influence outside Catalonia, and chiefly important because it contained an unusually high proportion of politically conscious members.… It did not represent any block of trade unions.’ He gives the membership as 10,000 in July 1936; 70,000 in December 1936; and 40,000 in June 1937, but warns that the figures are from POUM sources, and ‘a hostile estimate would probably divide them by four’; see pp. 180–81 [VI/202–3].

2. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (1999), 95, quoting John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions (1993), 281.

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Eileen Blair to Leonard Moore

31 January 1937 Handwritten

The Stores, Wallington, Near Baldock, Herts