Peter Davison: A Personal Memoir

Ron Bateman, a founder member of the Orwell Society, gives us his memories

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The passing of Professor Peter Davison on the 16^th August had led many among us to reflect on an unsurpassable legacy that amounts to an enormous body of research towards the study of all things Orwell. For me, and no doubt for many others, Peter was a guiding light, an inspiration and, above all else, a much loved and treasured friend. It is with deep regret that being based in Italy it might prove problematical for me to be present on the day that family, friends and acquaintances of Peter’s will come together to pay their respects and to celebrate his life. Instead, if I may, I would like to share this personal memoir of Peter stretching across almost two decades of very rewarding friendship.

I first became familiar with Peter’s name in connection with George Orwell during the mid-nineties after making several trips to the Orwell Archive at the UCL library in Gower Street to compile my own research. Having been overwhelmed by so much material; including so many pages written in Orwell’s own hand, with that unmistakable sweep of his pen to cross his letter ‘t’s, and the thrill of holding an original completed manuscript of Animal Farm – faultlessly typed by his wife Eileen, I soon realised there was far too much material to sift through in a hundred visits – let alone several. When I finally got up to leave, the archivist Gill Furlong reminded me that ‘a lot of what we have will be so much more accessible when Peter Davison finishes his Complete Works.’ His name etched itself on my mind, and it seems that simple comment goes a long way towards explaining Peter’s legacy – the fact that the completion of his entirely self-financed, seventeen-year project has made Orwell so much more accessible for students and casual readers all over the world. In short, his dedication and determination effectively brought, and still brings, Orwell to the people.

My first meeting with Professor Peter Davison was at the Orwell Centenary Summer School at the Wedgewood Memorial College at Barlaston, Staffordshire in the summer of 2003. The main event in commemoration of Orwell’s 100^th birthday might well have been in Boston, Massachusetts with over 300 attendees. However, our own small gathering (amounting to no more than a couple of dozen) was memorable for the calibre of speakers on our agenda. Following on from two days in the company of Orwell biographer Sir Bernard Crick, Peter arrived on day 3 to deliver a memorable talk on his mammoth twenty-volume Complete Works project that had already taken pride of place on my bookshelves. On the evening before his lecture Peter joined us for dinner where another student introduced me to him. I remember we immediately hit it off following that first introduction; for he was at first thrilled that I was an ex-railwayman (Peter edited a railway magazine for three years) and that I lived only a short distance from him. I also think that it had as much to do with the fact that I worked in a factory and had financed my academic qualifications from my own pocket, in the same way that he had achieved his own much more remarkable academic success – without any contribution from the public purse. ‘I sometimes have a chip on each shoulder’ he jokingly told me; ’one is Oxford, and the other is Cambridge.’ I think this also gives us a subtle clue as to why Peter had been drawn towards editing Orwell – to quote his own words ‘Orwell’s formative experience was not in the groves of academe or among the literary coteries of the capital, but was in the police service in Burma, in hopping, tramping amongst the dispossessed, and fighting in Spain.’

Thereafter, along with the other students I enjoyed a terrific couple of days in Peter’s company. Following his lecture, we retraced Orwell’s footsteps around the shore of Rudyard Lake in the Potteries – famous as the lake from which Kipling’s parents took their son’s Christian name. Along the way we visited Cliffe Park Hall where Peter described how the building had once been a hostel where Orwell passed a lonely and bitterly cold night of 3 February 1936 while doing research for The Road to Wigan Pier. The following day Peter dedicated a Walnut tree in the college arboretum to commemorate the occasion of Orwell’s 100^th birthday. There were evening walks to the local pub wherein he relayed countless stories from a remarkable life that included being appointed OBE for services to literature in June 1999 – arising specifically from his work on Orwell. It was also fitting that in that year of Orwell’s 100^th birthday in 2003 Peter was awarded the Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society, an award drawn from around the world of which he was only the thirty-sixth person to be so honoured.

Ever since that first meeting I have enjoyed the pleasure of Peter’s intelligent, interesting and often witty conversation on regular visits to his and Sheila’s home in Marlborough, or lunchtime dates in his favourite restaurant The Bell at West Overton. Among the highlights during our long acquaintance was Peter’s presentation of An Orwellian Nightmare at the Marlborough Literary Festival in September 2011 -the nightmare in question being his journey towards the publication of the aforementioned twenty-volume Complete Works of George Orwell in 1998. I previously reviewed the talk for the Society in September 2011; a review that can still be accessed here.

During my time on the committee of the Orwell Society Peter was always a great supporter of the society and always on hand to help out in any way he could. Society founder Dione Venables has made reference to his untiring guidance and encouragement to her over the years, a level of support that continued after Dione had successfully made the Orwell Society become a reality. Sifting through the early editions of the society journal that I edited, I’m reminded that his support for the publication was invaluable as he submitted high quality articles to six of the first eight journals. The subjects he wrote about were wide-ranging, including a piece about Orwell’s time in the Home Guard – an organisation of which Peter himself had first-hand experience. As editor, my favourite among Peter’s contributions was an article included in our third Journal Selecting What Orwell Wrote, a superb account of the occasional dilemmas he encountered when editing Orwell. We discover that among Peter’s lesser known skills was an ability to decipher Elizabethan manuscript (Palaeography). This ability stood him in good stead when he travelled to Boston, Massachusetts to inspect the barely legible surviving manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-Four, for he was able to produce examples of his palaeography work to demonstrate to the owner Dan Siegel that he was the right man to transcribe Orwell’s hand.

Aside from his vast body of literary work (he wrote and edited 115 volumes – 30 of which were dedicated to Orwell) Peter was first and foremost a family man. He loved to talk about the wonderful academic and professional achievements of his sons, their partners, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I have emails dating back many years during which he proudly shared family photographs, with regular Christmas updates about how everyone was getting on. In conversation he liked to reflect on all of his lifetime experiences, and never tired of recollecting the difficult war years he and his brother had endured. His remarkable attention to detail showed itself again in a scrapbook that he once loaned me, detailing the wartime experiences of his and his extended family, containing the exact locations and casualty figures of the V1 and V2 rockets included in his account. I think my favourite trait of Peter’s was that he always seemed able to find the humour in, and laugh at the absurdities, that occasionally made his and Sheila’s life difficult – he frequently laughed with incredulity when talking about how little he had earned from around thirty-five years of editing Orwell.

Returning again to his formidable contribution to the study of Orwell, it is for this that he will be widely remembered and quoted for many years to come. The interviews on radio and TV came thick and fast following the publication of the Complete Works – including an invitation to set the questions on Orwell for an edition of the BBC quiz show Mastermind. It also has to be said that he was very protective of his chief subject, and didn’t take kindly to those who frequently attempted to foretell what Orwell might have said about certain situations; “I sometimes wish they would leave Orwell alone” he once said publically. This extended to academics and journalists who still believed that Orwell’s final novel was a prediction, rather than a warning, and should have known better than to use this as an excuse to discredit him.

Finally, it amused me that on occasions Peter would affectionately refer to Orwell as ‘dear old George’ – “are you still writing about dear old George” he would enquire, before typically disappearing to his study to fetch something new that would be of interest to me. On one occasion the ‘thing’ he brought back was an image of Orwell’s former childhood sweetheart Jacintha Buddicom taken by a street photographer shortly after she had arranged for her child to be put up for adoption; After I had seen the picture Peter looked at me with a pained expression and shook his head “this makes me feel so utterly sad” he said, “Orwell would have raised the child as though it was his own, in fact I’m sure he would!”

Orwell was twenty-three when Peter was born, and Peter was twenty-three when Orwell died. They never met – but I think this shows us just how intimately Peter had come to know his subject.

Ron Bateman

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Portrait: copyright Peter Davison

Event photographs by Ron Bateman