Eileen Maud O’Shaughnessy Blair
Born: 25 September 1905, South Shields
Died: 29 March 1945, Newcastle
Although she lived in South Shields, Eileen attended the fee-paying Sunderland Church High School. A ‘star’ pupil in English, she received the school’s Scholarship to go to university. She was so highly regarded by the school, she also received Fellowship awards for the last two years of her university studies. No other pupil’s name appears more than once in the school’s records of such awards. Three of the commemorative boards recordings this are on display in Langham Tower bar (formerly part of Sunderland Church High School) in Sunderland, and a fourth is now held by the Orwell Society. As an ‘Old Girl’ of the school, they approached Eileen to contribute to a special issue of the school magazine to mark its Golden Jubilee in 1934. Eileen wrote a poem, probably influenced by her interest in European politics (such as the worrying rise of fascism), in which she described a dystopian world but hints at a brighter future in the next 50 years. The poem: Century’s End, 1984 is now thought to have influenced Orwell’s most famous work, the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. You can read the poem here.
Eileen studied English at St Hugh’s College, Oxford when it was still very unusual for women to go to university. She graduated in 1927 after which she moved to London and did several secretarial jobs, as well as working as a freelance journalist. She also worked as a freelance typist, proof-reader and editor. This was initially mainly for her brother Eric, who was a surgeon, but she also took in work from a wide variety of other sources.
She studied for a Masters in Psychology at University College London from 1934. There she met fellow students Lydia Jackson and Rosalind Obermeyer who remained close friends for the rest of her life. It was at a party hosted by Rosalind that Eileen met Eric Blair/George Orwell in 1935. They married on 9th June, 1936.
Eileen is described as being slender, with blue eyes and dark wavy hair. She was very intelligent, but the thing that everyone commented on was her ready sense of fun and great sense of humour. Eric Blair/George Orwell was ‘moth-eaten and prematurely aged’ (according to Lydia). He was also very tall: 6’ 2”. Both Eileen and Orwell were chain smokers, long before we became aware of the terrible things smoking does to our health.
After their marriage, they moved to the village of Wallington in Hertfordshire and lived in a dilapidated cottage that had no electricity or internal water supply. They ran a small village shop from there for the first few years, supplementing it with produce from their garden, eggs from their hens, and milk from the goats (including Muriel, their first goat).
In Christmas 1936, Orwell left England and volunteered to fight against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He enlisted in the POUM (Worker’s Party of Marxist Unification), which was the anarchist militia rather than the Communist-controlled International Brigade.
Eileen decided to join Orwell in Spain. She volunteered to work as an assistant to John McNair, who was the Independent Labour Party’s representative in the war, and was responsible for coordinating the ILP’s volunteers with POUM. She arrived in Barcelona in February 1937, having finalised the printing of The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell would send notes for his next book to Eileen to type when she was in Barcelona. Orwell got leave to join Eileen in Barcelona in late April. It was at this time that the various anti-fascist factions started to splinter, and it seemed that the POUM would be declared illegal. The in-fighting was very dispiriting for both Eileen and Orwell. He was shot in the neck a few days after returning to the front. Eileen arranged his care, and helped nurse him and planned their return to England. However, the POUM was declared illegal by the Communists at this time, and many of the people Ellen worked with were arrested, as were soldiers identified as belonging to that faction. It was Eileen who got them out of the country and to safety by posing as English tourists on the train to France, using her supply of Romantic poetry books as reading materials to imply they were harmless when the train was stopped and searched. They had to leave behind all of the notes Eileen had been typing for Orwell. The book, A Homage to Catalonia, was written later that year, and Orwell acknowledged that it would not have been possible to write it had Eileen not been on hand to remind him of so many passages. She continued to be type, proof-read and edit her husband’s work right up to her death.
Orwell was suffering from increasingly debilitating lung problems, variously described as tuberculosis or bronchiatis. This led to occasional serious haemorrhaging, and Eileen saved his life on several occasions by her actions in getting him to hospital. Eileen herself was not well at various times with chronic conditions that were largely ignored as she prioritised Orwell’s health.
On the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, they left their Wallington cottage and moved to London. Eileen worked in the Censorship Department of the Ministry of Information, later moving to work at the BBC where she liaised with the Ministry of Food in public information programmes on the radio. She was responsible for co-writing scripts and dialogue for a daily programme called The Kitchen Front. Orwell was also working at the BBC at this time. He wrote Animal Farm (1945) as an allegory, based on Eileen’s suggestion.
Eileen and Orwell adopted a baby, Richard, in June 1944. Eileen gave up paid work to look after the baby shortly after this. They were forced to leave their home in London after it was bombed, and went to a family house called Greystones, near Stockton. They planned to move to another dilapidated cottage, this time on Jura. Orwell went to France to cover the German retreat in early 1945. Eileen was in very poor health, and agreed to have an operation to remove her uterus in an attempt to resolve many of her long-term health issues. However, she died on the operating table on 29 March 1945.
You can find out more about Eileen’s fascinating life in Sylvia Topp’s biography of her: Eileen: The Making of George Orwell. (2020) Unbound: London