Rev Thomas Blair d 1867 small

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago,
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.

 (The Adelphi, December 1936)

A Clergyman’s Daughter, Orwell’s experimental novel published a year before his wistful poem appeared in The Adelphi, offers a great deal to those willing to carefully re-read it with the author’s personal and family history in mind. 

The novel follows Dorothy Hare, the dutiful daughter of an arrogant, financially struggling clergyman in a rural English parish. Dorothy’s life is upended when she is sexually assaulted. She experiences amnesia, is thrust into a series of disorienting environments – wandering among London’s urban underclass, working on a farm and teaching in a private school – before returning home, resigned to her constrained, dutiful existence. Orwell explores many of his life-long preoccupations, employing his own personal experiences in the early 1930s as a ‘down and out’, schoolteacher and resident of a conservative English town. Dorothy’s struggles with existential questions, class disparity, faith and atheism reflect these preoccupations.

Orwell’s impish sense of humour, often taking the form of inside jokes at the expense of his family and friends, is very detectable in his early novels. Although Orwell wrote to his publisher, who was understandably wishing to not fall foul of the libel laws, that Dorothy Hare was “entirely fictitious” she is usually viewed as at least partly based on Brenda Salkeld, a clergyman’s daughter and local Southwold school mistress whom he corresponded for nearly twenty years. In one letter prior to publication he quipped, “I understand that the prayers of clergyman’s (sic) daughters get special attention in Heaven, at any rate in the Protestant quarter”. In early March 1935, he alerted Salkeld that her copy of A Clergyman’s Daughter was in the post:

As you will see, it is tripe, except for chap 3, part 1, which I am pleased with, but I don’t know whether you will like it. It is billed to come out on Monday next, so don’t show it to anyone before that, will you?

Orwell also told his publisher that “the biographical details of the Rector (Dorothy’s father) are totally imaginary, & so too are all the people mentioned on p. 51” (pages 44-45 of the CWGO edition). This character, Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan’s, Knype Hill, Suffolk is described as follows:

He had been born in 1871, the younger son of the younger son of a baronet, and had gone into the Church for the outmoded reason that the Church is the traditional profession for younger sons. His first cure had been in a large, slummy parish in East London – a nasty, hooliganish place it had been, and he looked back on it with loathing. Even in those days the lower class (as he made a point of calling them) were getting decidedly out of hand. It was a little better when he was curate-in-charge at some remote place in Kent (Dorothy had been born in Kent), where the decently down-trodden villagers still touched their hats to ‘parson’. But by that time he had married, and his marriage had been diabolically unhappy; moreover, because clergymen must not quarrel with their wives, its unhappiness had been secret and therefore ten times worse. He had come to Knype Hill in 1908, aged thirty-seven and with a temper incurably soured – a temper which had ended by alienating every man, woman, and child in the parish.

It was not that he was a bad priest, merely as a priest. In his purely clerical duties he was scrupulously correct – perhaps a little too correct for a Low Church East Anglian parish. He conducted his services with perfect taste, preached admirable sermons, and got up at uncomfortable hours of the morning to celebrate Holy Communion every Wednesday and Friday. But that a clergyman has any duties outside the four walls of the church was a thing that had never seriously occurred to him. Unable to afford a curate, he left the dirty work of the parish entirely to his wife, and after her death (she died in 1921) to Dorothy. People used to say, spitefully and untruly, that he would have let Dorothy preach his sermons for him if it had been possible. The ‘lower classes’ had grasped from the first what was his attitude towards them, and if he had been a rich man they would probably have licked his boots, according to their custom; as it was, they merely hated him. Not that he cared whether they hated him or not, for he was largely unaware of their existence. But even with the upper classes he had got on no better. With the County he had quarrelled one by one, and as for the petty gentry of the town, as the grandson of a baronet he despised them, and was at no pains to hide it. In twenty-three years he had succeeded in reducing the congregation of St Athelstan’s from six hundred to something under two hundred.

This was not solely due to personal reasons. It was also because the old-fashioned High Anglicanism to which the Rector obstinately clung was of a kind to annoy all parties in the parish about equally. Nowadays, a clergyman who wants to keep his congregation has only two courses open to him. Either it must be Anglo-Catholicism pure and simple – or rather, pure and not simple; or he must be daringly modern and broad-minded and preach comforting sermons proving that there is no Hell and all good religions are the same. The Rector did neither. On the one hand, he had the deepest contempt for the Anglo-Catholic movement. It had passed over his head, leaving him absolutely untouched; ‘Roman Fever’ was his name for it. On the other hand, he was too ‘High’ for the older members of his congregation. From time to time he scared them almost out of their wits by the use of the fatal word ‘Catholic’, not only in its sanctified place in the Creeds, but also from the pulpit. Naturally the congregation dwindled year by year, and it was the Best People who were the first to go. Lord Pockthorne of Pockthorne Court, who owned a fifth of the county, Mr Leavis, the retired leather merchant, Sir Edward Huson of Crabtree Hall, and such of the petty gentry as owned motor-cars, had all deserted St Athelstan’s. Most of them drove over on Sunday mornings to Millborough, five miles away. Millborough was a town of five thousand inhabitants, and you had your choice of two churches, St Edmund’s and St Wedekind’s. St Edmund’s was Modernist – text from Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ blazoned over the altar, and communion wine out of liqueur glasses – and St Wedekind’s was Anglo-Catholic and in a state of perpetual guerrilla warfare with the Bishop. But Mr Cameron, the secretary of the Knype Hill Conservative Club, was a Roman Catholic convert, and his children were in the thick of the Roman Catholic literary movement. They were said to have a parrot which they were teaching to say ‘Extra ecclesiam nulla salus’. In effect, no one of any standing remained true to St Athelstan’s, except Miss Mayfill, of The Grange. Most of Miss Mayfill’s money was bequeathed to the Church – so she said; meanwhile, she had never been known to put more than sixpence in the collection bag, and she seemed likely to go on living for ever.

There is abundant evidence that Knype Hill is partially modelled on aspects of the world Orwell inhabited living with his parents and youngest sister in Southwold. However, Orwell had certainly never met Brenda’s father, another Anglo-Indian, Reverend Frederick Charles Salkeld, who died in 1904 when his daughter was aged 4. Did he have a model for Dorothy’s father, Reverend Charles Hare?

Biographies of Orwell have never grappled successfully with his Anglo-Indian ancestry, contextually misunderstanding how frequently so many branches of his extended family moved between Britain and her colonies, especially the sub-continent. This is a vast area of research which will increasingly challenge standard representations of his background. For example, Orwell’s mother, Ida Limouzin, was not culturally French, being mostly educated, along with her siblings, in England where she was born (not in Moulmein, Burma).  There has been little progress in understanding the Blair side of the family since Stansky and Abrahams published the best overview of his ancestors in The Unknown Orwell (1972). The family’s ancestral links to Dorset, Somerset and Lincolnshire have been neglected as much as their inter-generational connections with India, Burma and South Africa.

Reconsidering Orwell’s Blair ancestry, in this case with A Clergyman’s Daughter and his paternal grandparents in mind – is a contextually interesting exercise which challenges some of the conventional commentary about Orwell’s influences and motivations. 

Orwell’s Grandfather and Grandmother

Reverend Thomas Richard Arthur Blair (1802-1867) was Orwell’s grandfather (pictured above). His wife (and the photos I have are of too poor a quality to publish) was Frances “Fanny” Catherine Hare (1823-1908). Reverend Blair’s father was Charles Blair (1776-1854). The most recent biography of Orwell (2023) has little to say about these patriarchs and misunderstands the genealogy:

Orwell’s grandfather, Richard Arthur Blair (sic), born in 1802, seems to have led a rather desultory early life in the East before becoming a Church of England deacon in 1839, spending a decade or so attached to the Indian army and returning to England in his early fifties. The Reverend Blair may have used his aristocratic connections to acquire the prosperous ecclesiastical living of Milborne St Andrew in Dorset, but his grandson had no doubt of the social class in which he had fetched up. His family, he decided, ‘was one of those ordinary middle-class families of soldiers, clergymen, government officials, teachers, lawyers, doctors’.

The Blairs were descendants of Charles Blair (1743–1801) (sic), who, having built up a fortune in the Jamaican sugar and slave trades, took steps to enhance the family’s social position by marrying his son Thomas (sic) to the daughter of the eighth Earl of Westmorland. A portrait of Lady Mary Blair, née Fane, Orwell’s great-grandmother, survives…

Lady Mary (1741-1813) was in fact the daughter of the eighth Earl of Westmorland, Thomas Fane (1701-1771). She was Orwell’s great-great-grandmother and married to Charles Blair (1743-1802). Their son was Charles Blair (1776-1854). The biographer has also left ‘Thomas’ off Orwell’s grandfather’s name. Orwell’s entry, written by an earlier biographer, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has similar mistakes. However, these errors are relatively superficial ones which few readers will notice.

The question deserving greater consideration: does a more historically accurate picture of Orwell’s ancestry illuminate his life and writing in any meaningful way? With this in mind, what follows is a very selective account (from a forthcoming academic paper considering the family’s political network contextually within British history) of Thomas and Fanny which has not previously been explored.

In 1808, Charles Blair (1776-1854) – who had been educated at Westminster School prior to pursuing a military career in the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards – was appointed Collector of Customs at the Cape of Good Hope. This well-connected Blair had married Charlotte Matilda Dawson (1777-1837) in Dublin during 1796 not long after his older brother, Henry Charles Blair (1775-1794), whose family purchased him a commission in the 23rd Regiment of Foot when he was sixteen years of age, died of yellow fever while his regiment was endeavouring to quell the slave revolt on Saint Domingo (now Haiti) in the West Indies. His death resulted in Charles inheriting his father’s considerable wealth in 1802. As Blair was going to be leaving Ensbury in Dorset for an unknown and extended period of time to take up this new appointment in the Cape Colony, he auctioned many of his fine household possessions (see next post).

His son, Thomas Richard Arthur Blair (1802-1867), had been born in Ensbury and, considering his tender age, must have accompanied his parents to their new home at the Cape of Good Hope with four other siblings. Stellenberg, described as one of “the finest of the Cape Dutch gabled houses” continues to be a well-maintained (click on the link) and impressive historic building. Charlotte was to bear three more children in the first four years they resided here.

In 1819, Orwell’s grandfather, Thomas Blair, enlisted as an Ensign in the 72nd Regiment of Foot. During his military career, Blair served at the Cape of Good Hope for nearly four years and the rest of his service was at various postings in the United Kingdom. He was promoted to Lieutenant in 1820 and then Captain in 1825. Both of those promotions were ‘by purchase’, a system, until reformed in 1871, which ensured the officer class would predominantly be gentlemen of means.

Captain Blair resigned on 19 April 1833 and was admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge on the 18th May that same year. Somehow he matriculated with an M.A. by the end of 1833 (can anyone explain this?). Crockford’s Clerical Directory records that Blair was ordained as Deacon in 1839, a Priest in 1843 and the Vicar of Milborne St Andrew in 1854 but does not contain the detail of his religious postings in the Cape Colony. There are several secondary sources which provide quite detailed information about Blair’s work in several churches – in Simonstown, Graaff Reinet, Uitenhage, Capetown and Wynberg – prior to being ordained in 1839 and in the 1840s – but they rarely cite sources. It seems that he was a military chaplain who hoped to become a missionary in the West Indies but his father was against the notion of him working amongst slaves (more on his father and slavery next post).

Blair resided at Green Point, an established Anglo-Indian enclave for retirees from military and civil service who desired a warmer clime to restore their health or were taking their leave here as it was much more affordable than England. Blair’s Anglo-Indian friends purportedly lobbied the Colonial Church Society to find him a position in the early 1840s. However, the arrival of Bishop Robert Gray at the Cape of Good Hope in 1848 led to significant internal strife and ultimately leading to Blair departing the colony for a posting back in England. The internal Church politics of Blair’s final six years in South Africa (1848-1854) are theologically fascinating and very complex.

Gray was to become a significant figure in both South African and Anglican history which happily has resulted in much incidental detail about Reverend Blair, an Evangelical, “Low Church man”, in the historical record. Just prior to Gray’s appointment, the Evangelical congregation at St. George’s, already unhappy that Tractarian theology had infiltrated their church, financed the construction of a second church in Capetown. Holy Trinity was completed in 1846 with Reverend Blair as the officiating minister. Gray, in a decidedly Machiavellian move, appointed Blair to St John’s at Wynberg (which Orwell’s grandfather had helped to build in the 1830s and where he had married) from his current position at Holy Trinity Church in Cape Town for strategic reasons:

I am now aiming at getting all the Churches now under Trustees vested in myself. And I think I have got hold of which the Colonial Church Society looked upon as their own.

The Evangelicals, including Blair, initially had no inkling of the extent of the Bishop’s plans. He lured Orwell’s grandfather to St John’s strategically to free Cape Town of Evangelical influence. He convinced Blair, as one of three Trustees of Trinity Church property to transfer titles to himself as “Bishop of Cape Town and his Successors in the See.” without consulting the congregation who had financed and built this place of worship. Blair was out-manoeuvred as Gray would not finalise his appointment to St John’s until this transfer was completed. Gray wrote a self-satisfied letter to a friend explaining that he had prescribed his own rules “and have got hold of the Church, which the Colonial Church Society thought would always be in their hands”.

Gray’s letters reveal his intense dislike of the Anglo-Indians from his earliest days at Cape Colony:

The Wynberg Parish is overrun by East India visitors, who, with long purses and pious purposes, are the pest of the place. I caught one of them praying extempore in the Church here last Sunday.

In 1849, Gray continued to describe describe the Anglo-Indian community in unflattering terms:

The Colonial Society has been behaving in a strange way to its three agents, two Clergymen and one layman. They have dismissed, or all but dismissed, them all. Blair is about to withdraw from the Society. The parish of Wynberg is very much afraid of losing him; they will raise £200, and I shall have to add £50. This place is the focus of Indianism. The Indians who come for the recovery of health are very peculiar. It is very rare to find a real Churchman among them. They have founded various dissenting institutions here. I am not without hope of getting some control over them, but it is doubtful. They are frequently Plymouth Brethren — preach, and have even administered the Holy Communion. They give largely when they take an interest in anything, and hang together a good deal. It will be some time before they are brought round, if ever. You need not be surprised if you hear I am unpopular. I have been compelled to be firm, especially about putting the conveyances of churches on a proper footing.

It is possible that Gray was initially impressed with Blair’s family status but soon grew critical of him for theological and more trivial reasons. He disliked that Blair lived at Green Point, five kilometres away from St John’s. Gray, considered “snobbish”, knew he was unpopular and was not at all hopeful he could align his clergymen to official church policy but certainly intended to do everything possible to ensure doctrinal obedience, forcing clergy and layman to sign declarations:

‘I do declare that I am a member of the Church in the Diocese of Cape Town in communion with the Church of England, and that I will conform to the doctrine and discipline of the said Church.’ I have not yet settled the exact wording, but it is most important on many grounds that all Church people, in a country circumstanced like this, should sign some such declaration.

In 1854 Blair fled to St. Andrew Milborne, in Dorset with the support of influential patrons (more on this in another post). Orwell’s father, Fanny and Thomas’ youngest child, Richard Walmesley Blair (1857-1939) was born here in 1857. 

Fanny Blair

Official marriage documentation often hold important contextual clues and when Thomas Blair married Fanny Hare, at St John’s in Wynberg during September 1839, she was “a minor” and he was a “widower” more than twice her age. Fanny, the daughter of Sally Bird (1793-1862) and Joseph Hare (1772-1856) was one of sixteen children. Orwell’s sister Avril recounted variations of this family story in several interviews with some amusement (evident in her tone and giggle):

My paternal grandfather was in the Indian Army. My father was the youngest of twelve children, so it was a very long time ago that my grandfather was born. In those days there was no Suez Canal: all the ships went round the Cape. Once, coming home on leave, my grandfather stopped off at the Cape and got to know a family called Hare and actually got engaged to one of the elder sisters, then went on home to England for his leave. On the way back, intending to marry this girl, he found that she’d already married somebody else. He said, ‘Oh, well, if Emily’s married it doesn’t matter, I’ll have Fanny.’ Fanny at that time was fifteen, and I believe that she played with dolls after her marriage.

Eileen, Orwell’s first wife, wrote about this to a friend after she first met Mr and Mrs Blair:

Nothing has surprised me more, particularly since I saw the house which is very small & furnished almost entirely with paintings of ancestors. The Blairs are by origin Lowland Scottish & dull but one of them made a lot of money in slaves & his son Thomas who was inconceivably like a sheep* married the daughter of the Duke of Westmorland (of whose existence I never heard) & went so grand that he spent all the money & couldn’t make more because slaves had gone out. So his son went into the army & came out of that into the church & married a girl of 15 who loathed him & had ten children of whom Eric’s father, now 80, is the only survivor & they are all quite penniless but still on the shivering verge of gentility as Eric calls it in his new book which I cannot think will be popular with the family. *scroll back to Reverend Blair’s photograph to see why Eileen made such a quip.

Both of these stories are not factually correct about several points, muddling aspects of genealogy and association. Avril’s memory occasionally failed her, most notably telling a biographer that her brother had lived in India until he was 4 years of age. In reality “her father” was one of ten children, not twelve. However, the birth certificate confirms that Fanny was fifteen when she married.

Marriage Register, 1839

One wonders what Fanny’s experiences, as a young mother who does not appear to have visited England before her marriage, were like in the parish her husband had been appointed. Family lore suggests it was an unhappy marriage but Fanny, who was only in her mid-30s in 1857 when Orwell’s father was born, must have been incredibly busy having ten children to raise. Reverend Blair, although praised in some newspaper reports, was not popular with parishioners in Milborne St. Andrew either. In 1856, considering “the existing vicarage not quite dignified enough for the grandson of an earl, he excited great local hostility by building a new one at considerable cost to the parish”. There is quite a good record of his activities in local newspapers. He was supportive of the local temperance movement, often speaking at events. The year before he died, there was a press report about the theft of his sons’ rabbits by a working man and subsequent prosecution:

Charles Bishop, 48, labourer, was charged with stealing three tame rabbits, the property of Thomas Arthur Blair, at Milborne St. Andrew, on the 13th of April. Mr. Fooks prosecuted. Four small boys, appeared to identify the rabbits, and it was somewhat singular that, in one day, the rabbits had been bought and sold four separate times. Prisoner, who was unfavourably known, was sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour.

Reverend Blair may have been Orwell’s nostalgic model of the ‘happy vicar’ and Milborne St Andrew continues to be a pleasant place to live. A contemporary description of  St Andrew’s church described it as “an ancient edifice, in the early English style” and that “a cattle, sheep, corn, and cheese fair” was held every 30th of November. Reverend Blair preached in this parish until his death in 1867. His estate was valued at less than £1500. Quite considerably less than his father’s.

Fanny outlived her husband by more than forty years, a long time to be a clergyman’s widow and annuitant. Ida and Richard Blair named their first child, Marjorie Frances, in a clear nod to their daughter’s paternal grandmother. Marjorie was born in India in 1898 but the 1901 census records her and Ida living with Fanny at 106 Brunswick Place, Bath. This is probably when the Blair family first started making pilgrimages to Cornwall and where Ida became friends with Maud Perrycoste, the illegitimate daughter of her sister’s brother-in-law, who Fanny adopted. 

Ida returned to England permanently with Marjorie and Orwell in 1904. Richard Blair did not commence his retirement until 1912. Fanny’s stories must have formed part of the family inheritance. Widowed for over forty years, she outlived eight of her ten children. When Fanny died, her estate was a meagre £259 18s. 7d. of which £200 was left to Orwell’s father. Horatio, her other surviving son, was not mentioned. It is notable that the probate document lists a Reverend Charles Edward Benedict Barnewell(1848-1921) who was married to Caroline Hare (1848-1918), the daughter of one of Fanny’s sixteen siblings. The extended Hare family’s inter-generational experiences in India and South Africa are worthy of several volumes. 

A Clergyman’s Daughter

What, if anything, does this information about Orwell’s paternal grandparents and theological wrangling in South Africa add to our understanding of the influences on Orwell’s novel? 

Does the fact that Orwell names his long-suffering protagonist “Hare” and the unpopularity of her father, “the younger son of the younger son of a baronet”, in the village indicate his family history was at least partly on his mind? Ida knew Fanny well and is this one of those inside jokes for his family? Reverend Blair’s own inheritance was considerable and one wonders if he had similar proclivities to Reverend Charles Hare:

His broker had advised United Celanese. Here – in Sumatra Tin, United Celanese, and numberless other remote and dimly imagined companies – was the central cause of the Rector’s money troubles. He was an inveterate gambler. Not, of course, that he thought of it as gambling; it was merely a lifelong search for a ‘good investment’. On coming of age he had inherited four thousand pounds, which had gradually dwindled, thanks to his ‘investments’, to about twelve hundred. What was worse, every year he managed to scrape together, out of his miserable income, another fifty pounds which vanished by the same road. It is a curious fact that the lure of a ‘good investment’ seems to haunt clergymen more persistently than any other class of man.

Orwell was very intellectually engaged with the contemporary Anglo-Catholic literary movement and his friend, the poet Ruth Pitter, was a protege of Hillaire Belloc. It is not hard to imagine Orwell browsing “The High Churchman’s Gazette” as one of the “small and select circulation” or looking-up Reverend Thomas Blair in Crockford’s, which he does reference in the experimental section of the novel he mentioned being happy with to Brenda Salkeld. 

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: Non sum qualis eram boni sub regno Edwardi! In the days of my innocence, before the Devil carried me up into a high place and dropped me into the Sunday newspapers – that is to say when I was Rector of Little Fawley-cum-Dewsbury …

MR TALLBOYS [to himself]: Happy days, happy days! My ivied church under the sheltering hillside – my red-tiled Rectory slumbering among Elizabethan yews! My library, my vinery, my cook, house-parlourmaid and groom-gardener! My cash in the bank, my name in Crockford! My black suit of irreproachable cut, my collar back to front, my watered silk cassock in the church precincts …

As one biographer pointed out, Orwell “always had a lingering affection for the Anglican Church, identifying with its dissenting martyrs and allowing it to confirm, marry and ultimately to bury him”. At the very least, it cannot be a coincidence that Dorothy is given the surname “Hare” by Orwell but what else can you see in the novel after learning more about his grandfather and grandmother? 

The Adelphi, December 1936

REFERENCES

Binns, Ronald (2008) Orwell in Southwold, Zoilus Press

Bowker, Gordon (2004 [2003]) George Orwell, London: Abacus

Brooke, Audrey (1947) Robert Gray, First Bishop of Cape Town, Oxford University Press

Coppard, Audrey and Crick, Bernard (1984) Orwell Remembered, London: Ariel Books/BBC

Crick, Bernard (1992 [1980]) George Orwell: A Life, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, second edition

Crick, Bernard, “Blair, Eric Arthur [pseud. George Orwell] (1903–1950)“, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 Sep. 2004. Accessed 20th October 2024

Davison, Peter (2006) The Lost Orwell: Being a Supplement to the Complete Works of George Orwell, Timewell Press

Davison, Peter (2006) Orwell: A Life in Letters, London: Harvill Secker, 2010

Fairbridge, Dorothea (1922) Historic Houses of South Africa, London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press

Gray, Charles (1876) Life of Robert Gray – Bishop of Cape Town & Metropolitan of Africa, Volume 1, London: Rivingtons

Hinchliff, Peter (1963) The Anglican Church in South Africa: An Account of the History and Development of the Church of the Province of South Africa, London: Darton, Longman & Todd

Kearns, Robert A.C. (1913) A Brief Sketch of the Church of England in South Africa and the Church of the Province of South Africa, Johannesburg

Moore, Darcy (2020) “Orwell’s Scottish Ancestry and Slavery”, George Orwell Studies (2020) Vol. 5, No. 1 pp. 6-19

Moore, Darcy, ‘Orwell and Bedford‘, History in Bedfordshire, Volume 10, Issue 5, Summer 2024.

National Archives, Thomas [Arthur] Blair, 72nd (Duke of Albany’s own Highlanders) Regiment of Foot, WO 25/799/47 Available online at https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C17355339

Orwell, George, ‘A Happy Vicar’, The Adelphi, Volume 13, Number 3, December 1936

Orwell, George (1997 [1935]) A Clergyman’s Daughter, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 3, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg

Orwell, George (2021 [1935]) A Clergyman’s Daughter, Waddell, Nathan (ed.) Oxford World Classics, 2021

Orwell, George (1998 [1903-1936]) A Kind of Compulsion: The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 10, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg

Pembroke College Archives, Admissions Book, GBR/1058/COL/4/3/1/2

Pocock, Nicholas et al (2004) “Gray, Robert (1809–1872), Bishop of Cape Town.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 30 May. 2024. https://www-oxforddnb-com.ezproxy.sl.nsw.gov.au/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-11351

Stansky, Peter & Abrahams, William, The Unknown Orwell, Alfred A. Knopf, 1972

Taylor, D.J., Orwell – The New Life, London: Constable, 2023

Venn, J. A. (1940) Alumni Cantabrigienses: a Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge from the Earliest Times to 1900, Part 2: From 1752 to 1900. Vol. 1 Abbey – Challis, Cambridge: University Press

Western Gazette, 6 July 1866

Westminster School Archive (N.D.) “Blair, Charles (1776–1854)” Westminster School Collections. Available online at https://collections.westminster.org.uk/index.php/blair-henry-fl-1785, accessed on 8 August 2024

FEATURED IMAGE: Reverend Thomas Blair (1802-1867). Photograph courtesy of Mark Sutton

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