John Strachey And Orwell

*

Introduction.  In George Orwell’s time John Strachey (in full, Evelyn John St Loe Strachey) was well-known. Nowadays this is not so. In this two part article I look at first the Collected Works references to Strachey, and then at his life.

Orwell and Strachey. George Orwell first mentioned Strachey in a 20 April 1936 letter to Richard Rees. Orwell asked Rees:

Do you know John Strachey personally? I was at school about the same time as him but didn’t know him. I would like to have a talk about Mosley with him some time if I run across him. I heard Mosley speak in Barnsley and his speech though delivered with an excellent platform technique was the most unutterable bollox, but I heard Strachey state in a speech once that Mosley was a very able man. I suppose Strachey has known Mosley intimately, and I would like to know if M is sincere in what he says or whether he is deliberately bamboozling the public.

This was after Orwell’s investigation into the depressed areas of the north for The Road to Wigan Pier. In that book Strachey is discussed as a writer and critic with Orwell praising Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power for its revelations of the weaknesses in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World but mentioning naught of Strachey’s politics.

The next Collected Works reference to Strachey is editorial. On 4 August 1936 Orwell lectured at the Adelphi Summer School which ran for four weeks in August 1936 and was held at the Adelphi Centre at Langham near Colchester. George Orwell’s talk was about “An Outsider sees the Depressed Areas“. John Strachey also lectured at this school.

The Adelphi Centre was an offshoot of the Adelphi magazine, a literary magazine that was founded in 1923 and survived until 1955. It published work by many well-known authors including Orwell whose article The Spike it published in 1931.

The Adelphi Centre was founded as a small self-supporting community with a guest house for summer schools and conferences designed to promote socialist studies. On 5 October 1936 Orwell wrote in a letter to Jack Common that he regretted missing Strachey’s talk.

In an editorial note to a 19 December 1936 letter Orwell wrote to Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club it is mentioned that Strachey was one of the three selectors for the club. The others were Gollancz, then still a communist, and Harold Laski a prominent Labour Party member.

On 20 October 1937 Orwell wrote to Gollancz asking for help because Strachey and the communists were slandering Orwell and other former POUM Militia members. For instance they claimed that in The Road to Wigan Pier, a Left Book Club publication, Orwell had written that the lower classes smell. In fact he had stated that the middle classes generally believed that the lower classes smell.

The communists had accused other former POUM Militiamen of being Fascist agents. Orwell warned that if this charge was laid against him he would sue for libel; and pointed out that such charges against a Left Book Club writer such as Orwell would not do Gollancz any good. If Orwell was called a fascist people might wonder why Gollancz had published a book by him.

George Orwell explained In “Notes on the Spanish Militias” in early 1939 that he first planned to go to Spain in late 1936 as a reporter. He contacted John Strachey who arranged a meeting with Harry Pollitt, the Communist Party General Secretary, who decided that Orwell was politically unreliable, refused to recruit him, warned him about anarchist terrorism, but suggested he contact the Spanish Embassy in Paris. This rejection led to Orwell joining the POUM Militia instead of the International Brigades.

In his December 1938 Adelphi article “Political Reflections on the Crisis” Orwell wrote that the net result of Strachey and company (i.e. the Left Book Club)’s efforts has been to give a totally false estimate of what the British people were thinking and to push the leaders of the Labour Party a little further on the road to war. The British people wanted peace and war mongering would lose General Elections if not necessarily by elections.

In March 1941 the Left Book Club published The Betrayal of the Left. It included two chapters by Orwell, three by Strachey and several by Gollancz. Strachey and Gollancz bitterly attacked the Communists with the fervour of renegades.

In April 1941 Left News published a letter from Douglas Ede, a Liberal of Withersfield in Suffolk. It queried whether socialism and democracy were compatible. Douglas Ede made six points. Point five read:

We all find democracy a much harder thing to define than Totalitarianism and Mr Strachey would have done us a greater service by writing on the former than by writing on the latter. If Mr Orwell can prove that his Democracy can exist shorn of the evils of capitalism, I for one should be glad. George Orwell wrote his article Will Freedom die with Capitalism?

In response to this letter.George Orwell in his October 1941 Horizon article Why not Writers? A Manifesto called on the government to support creative writers. He wrote that journalists usually make bad novelists and novelists bad journalists. Therefore journalists could get the information but not make a good story of it; and novelists could not get the access to news on which to base their stories. He mentioned some exceptions such as Priestley, Wells, Leo Walmsley, John Strachey, and Eric Linklater.

In his 24 December 1943 As I Please, Tribune, column, Orwell quoted from Philip Jordan’s Tunis Diary. John Strachey had asked an American journalist if he wanted a Carthaginian peace with Germany. The American replied that since Carthage was destroyed after the Third Punic War we have not had any trouble from the Carthaginians. John Strachey was delighted by this quip but Orwell was not amused. He pointed out that when the Romans destroyed Carthage five thousand people were killed. In contrast there were seventy million Germans. There had to be generous peace terms after a war or there would be another war a generation later.

George Orwell in his Tribune, As I Please column on 17 November 1944 criticised writing schools. He argued that if those running them were good writers why did they make their living by teaching writing, rather than by writing themselves? He said that if George Bernard Shaw or J. B. Priestly taught writing skills he would take them seriously but not otherwise any more than he would buy a hair restorer from a bald person. George Orwell criticised the allegedly conservative ethos of writing schools.

Three letters replying to this article were published in the 8 December 1944 Tribune. One was from Martin Walter, the Director of the British Institute of Fiction Writing Science Ltd. He wrote said that good piano teachers were not necessarily great concert pianists. As for the other Orwell allegation Walter said that one of his course booklets had advised its readers to read Strachey’s book The Theory and Practise of Socialism. Martin Walter wrote that Tribune routinely carried adverts for writing schools. This hinted that Tribune should not bite hands that fed it.

On 14 February 1947 Orwell wrote in his As I Please, Tribune column about Scottish and Welsh grievances, the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and internal Scottish tensions. He quoted a circular letter a Scottish whiskey distiller had sent out:

We regret we are reluctantly compelled to return your cheque as owing to Mr Strachey’s failure to fulfil his promise to release barley for distilling in Scotland we dare not take on any new business….When you have difficulty in obtaining a drink it will be some consolation to you to know that Mr Strachey has sent 35,000 tons of barley to NEUTRAL Eire, for brewing purposes. John Strachey was then Minister for Food in the Attlee Labour government.

Orwell said that Scottish and Welsh grievances for instance over economic and language issues should be taken seriously. While Scottish and Welsh nationalism were weak in this period, as Orwell pointed out, the 1848 Communist Manifesto was once an obscure document; and that when Hitler joined the Nazi Party in 1919 he was its seventh member.

Progressive a liberal, Madison, Wisconsin, American journal, in June 1948, published Orwell’s article “Britain’s Left Wing Press“. It described the New Statesman as run by fellow travellers, though he admitted it had occasionally criticised Stalin for instance during 1939-1941 after the Hitler-Stalin pact. It listed several prominent British left wing intellectuals who had written for it, including Strachey.

George Orwell’s final reference to Strachey was in a 29 October 1948 letter to Julian Symons criticising British state education and saying that in 1936 Strachey had said that he had put his baby son on an Eton waiting list. George Orwell criticised him for this but Strachey replied that given our existing society it was the best education.

In fact good state schools existed in middle class and better off working class areas that routinely sent pupils to Grammar Schools, which in turn sent pupils to universities including Oxford and Cambridge. British education was multi-layered with Eton at the top; then the other great public schools; then the lesser ones, the better private schools and the grammar schools; and then secondary schools. Then, as now, the worst private schools were worse than any but the worst state schools.