Orwell’s Window

“On being demobilised in 1945—having by then lived through the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War—I found that my social conscience was sufficiently blunted to allow me to consider devoting my whole time to painting, which I had already toyed with as a sort of occupational therapy in 1935–6; and for nearly ten years I did in fact devote myself to it. During the first five of these years, until his death in 1950, I was in close touch with George Orwell, whom I had known well ever since 1930, when he began contributing to The Adelphi.”
                                                                     Richard Rees, A Theory of My Time (1963)

After demobilisation, Sir Richard Rees wasted no time in devoting himself to painting. He studied at Camberwell under William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers during 1945-1946 and exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy of Arts during 1949. “The Blue Cushion” – along with several oil paintings by Winston Churchill, who now had the time to pursue his hobby after losing the prime ministership – were hung in Gallery III and two more of Rees’ oil paintings – “King’s Road” (1953) and “In the Mantel-mirror” (1954) – were to follow during his decade of painterly endeavour.

Rees edited The Adelphi during the period 1930-1937 and was instrumental in assisting Orwell to expand his professional and personal networks to include editors, agents, publishers, poets and writers connected to London’s literary and artistic coteries. This long-lived literary journal (1923-1955) published fifty of his essays and reviews, including his first significant pieces of writing, ‘The Spike’ and ‘A Hanging’, in 1931. By the time Down and Out in Paris and London was published, in January 1933, the ‘Adelphi circle’, who actively supported him until his death in 1950, included some of his best friends of which Richard Rees would be the most important.

On the 5th July 1946, Orwell wrote to Rees from the Hebridean island of Jura:

“I have named you as literary executor in my will, which has been properly drawn up by a lawyer, and Gwen O’Shaughnessy, who will be Richard’s guardian if anything happens to me, knows all about it. Richard, I hope and trust, is well provided for. I had managed to save a little over the last year or two, and having had this stroke of luck with the American Book of the Month people, I can leave that money untouched, as it is so to speak over and above my ordinary earnings.”

Orwell had been living at Barnhill – “a nice big farmhouse with a bathroom” – since the middle of May and even though the “house hadn’t been inhabited for 12 years” it was now “quite comfortable”:

“Getting the house running has cost a bit, but the rent is almost nothing and it’s nice to have a retreat like this to which one can disappear when one likes and not be followed by telephone calls etc. At present it’s about a 2-day journey from London, door to door, but one could do it in a few hours if one flew to the neighbouring island (Islay), which we shall be able to do another time because we shall leave clothes and so forth here.

Orwell suggested to his friend that he may like to come and stay in September, acknowledging the “real snag” was transport and there was the challenge of having to “walk the last 8 miles”. Rees was living in Edinburgh at the time and had commenced painting. Orwell’s letter concluded with further encouragement for his friend to make the journey to Jura:

“P.S. You might find it rather paintable here.”

Rees ended-up spending many months on the island (1946-1949) and invested at least £1,000 in improving life there for Orwell, his family and friends by ensuring the land could be properly farmed. One biographer describes Rees as “somewhere between a pioneer of the ‘good earth’ folk of the 1960s and a survivor of the ‘simple-lifers’ of the 1920s”. Although Rees had a Pantisocractic vision, he “spent most of the summer painting landscapes”. A footnote in the Complete Works of George Orwell indicates Rees produced “several oil paintings at Barnhill” including the “one of Orwell’s bedroom” which is now “located in the Orwell Archive, University College London”. I had seen a photo of this painting previously but was unaware of any of Rees’ other oil paintings from Jura.

In the dying days of 1948, Rees bought “an enormous ex-Army truck for the farm” which terrified Orwell as the roads were so narrow that there was “no room for mistakes or else one is in the ditch”.  Sadly, shortly after this purchase, Rees had to drive Orwell “over the terrible moorland road” to depart his island home for the final time, as he was admitted on the 6th January 1949 to The Cotswold Sanatorium at Cranham.

AN IMPORTANT SOURCE

Malcolm Muggeridge and Sonia Brownell felt that Richard Rees’, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961) the “best book ever written on him”. Rees and Orwell shared many political beliefs and experiences, including service in the Spanish Civil War. Rees was the inspiration for the character of Ravelston in Orwell’s novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).

Their relationship is effectively recreated in The Crystal Spirit (1983), a film set on Jura and at Barnhill. David Swift played Rees and Ronald Pickup gave a performance hard to fault as Orwell. Even though it is a fictional account of Orwell’s last years of life, the authenticity of the setting and convincing portrayals make it an important artefact. Those who knew Orwell thought Pickup had done a superb job in capturing the writer’s ironic sense of humour.

One obituary of Richard Rees goes some way towards capturing their easy-going familiarity in a recount of an evening where he and Orwell relaxed in Edinburgh. The two men had not known each other since Eton as suggested in the article (Rees was three years older) but “superlative talkers” with many shared experiences of life and outlook they must have been.

Although Rees is an important figure in the biographical story of Orwell, their relationship has not been explored as throughly at it may have been. Muggeridge claimed that Orwell’s son was named Richard after Rees. Orwell’s own father’s name was Richard so it is not really knowable but what do you make of Orwell’s choice of the 4th of April, Richard Rees’ birthdate, in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the day Winston Smith commences his forbidden diary? Rees was physically present during the long drafting process on Jura and was Orwell’s literary executor.

Completely unexplored is that, like Orwell, Rees was from an Anglo-Indian family with long connection to the sub-continent. This is not mentioned in any of the few brief obituaries or his own unusually titled memoir, A Theory of My Time: An Essay in Didactic Reminiscence, which is as intentionally far from autobiography as one could imagine. Rees has neither an ODNB entry nor a biography.

A letter Orwell wrote to Rees’ mother from Morocco in February 1939, asking after his friend who was driving an ambulance in Spain, is worth reconsidering in this light as Orwell clearly knew of her life in India:

Dear Lady Rees,

I do so hope all is well with Richard. The last I heard from the Plowmans some months back was that he was still in Barcelona, but since the retreat I have had no news of him, of course. I hope and trust he got out all right and isn’t too overcome by all he must have been through. If he is home and cares to write, our address is the above until about the end of March….

It is very quiet and peaceful here. We have a little house a few miles out of Marrakech and we don’t see any other Europeans except when some of the soldiers from the Foreign Legion come and see us. A short while back we spent a week about 5000 feet up in the mountains, where the Berber race called the Chleuh live. They are rather interesting people, very simple, all free and equal, very dirty but splendid to look at, especially the women. They have beautiful little pastures with grass almost like England, and you can lie about on the snow in blazing sunshine. Down here the country is flat and very dried up, with no natural trees, much like northern India, I should think. The Arabs are terribly poor and most of the people work for about a penny an hour…

We were most thankful to be out of England during the war crisis, and I trust we shan’t get back just in time to meet another. The idea of war is just a nightmare to me, and I refuse to believe that it can do the slightest good or even that it makes much difference who wins. If Richard is back and doesn’t feel up to writing, could you give him all our love and say we hope to see him when we get back?

Yours sincerely
Eric Blair

Mary Catherine Dormer, the future Lady Rees, married Sir John David Rees KCIE, CVO in Madras in 1891. Both sides of Richard Rees’ family were Ango-Indians with long family histories connected to the sub-continent. Her father, General James Charlemagne Dormer, served with distinction in the British Army during the height of the British Raj and had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Madras Army in the year Mary married. His service ended in untimely death less than two years after his daughter’s marriage. While on a hunting expedition, he was mauled to death by a tigress.

Sir John, Richard Rees’s father, was in the Indian Civil Service for 25 years. He served on the Legislative Council of the Governor-General of India from 1895 to 1897 and again in 1898, marking his influence at the highest levels of the Raj. Sir John Rees was unusual among ICS officers in his prolific literary output about India. His works—Notes of a Journey from Kasween to Hamadan in N.W. Persia, The Real India, Modern India, and several others—are notable for their blend of travel writing, imperial justification, and administrative memoir. After retiring from the ICS he entered parliament for two terms, often giving speeches on matters related to India.

Sir John fell out of a carriage and died in in 1922. He had only been made a baronet in 1919 and the title fell to his son on his death. Rees was thus entitled to be known as Sir Richard for most of his adult life.

Orwell and Rees had more in common than their literary endeavours, schooling, political beliefs or experiences in Spain.

ORWELL’S WINDOW

In 2018, I had the privilege of visiting Jura and exploring Barnhill. One can never take enough photos of such an experience and looking at the view from the window in Orwell’s bedroom was a magical experience, as was having Richard Blair, who had lived with his father on this farm in the late 1940s, inscribe my first editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Late last year, patient staff assisted with my requests to look at all paintings held in the Orwell Archive. As expected, there was one by Rees of “Orwell’s Bedroom” but, wrapped in heavy canvas was another painting showing the view from Orwell’s window. This painting has apparently not been viewed since it was placed in the archive after Richard Rees’ death in 1970, along with the books he had inherited from Orwell’s library. This was a treat, straight from 1947.

Richard Blair may have a vague memory of seeing the painting – but is not sure where or when. Peter Davison and other Orwellian chroniclers do not reference it at all!

After some months of pursuing the copyright owner, permission has been granted by the Orwell Archive to share Richard Rees’ work, painted well before it was at all certain, so ill was its author while pounding away on his typewriter to all hours in his bedroom, that Nineteen Eighty-Four would ever see the light of day!

REFERENCES

Buckman, David, The Dictionary of Artists in Britain Since 1945, 1998, Bristol: Art Dictionaries Ltd., p.1014

Crick, Bernard, George Orwell: A Life, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, second edition, 1992

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

Muggeridge, Malcolm, ‘Obituary: Sir Richard Rees’, Times, 4 August 1970

Orwell, George, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. IV, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg, 1997

Orwell, George, A Kind of Compulsion: The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. X, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg, 1998

Orwell, George, Smothered Under Journalism: The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. XVIII, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg, 1998

Orwell, George, It Is What I Think: The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. XIX, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg, 1998

Orwell, George, Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living: The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. XX, Davison, Peter (ed.) London: Secker & Warburg, 1998

Rees, Richard, Fugitive from the Camp of Victory, London: Secker & Warburg, 1961

Rees, Richard, A Theory of My Time: An Essay in Didactic Reminiscence, Secker & Warburg, 1963

Taylor, Wilfred, ‘The Baronet, the Boy, the Westering Sun’, Scotsman, 31 July 1970

UK, Registers of Employees of the East India Company and the India Office, 1746-1939
Record of Service, 1915. p. 646

University of London, The India Office List, Reference Number: b2166033S10 1915

Wadhams, Stephen, Remembering Orwell, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984