21 JANUARY 1950
George Orwell spent the last weeks of his life in Room 65 of the private wing of University College Hospital, London. It is illustrated on p. 101 of John Thompson’s Orwell’s London (1984). The room was later converted to an office. Although he was very ill, arrangements were being made for him to fly to Switzerland for treatment, although that must have been a forlorn hope. Nevertheless, he had evidently not despaired for he had ensured that he had his fishing rod in his room ready to take with him. Sonia spent much of Friday the 20th with him but in the event he died alone, of a massive haemorrhage of the lung, in the early hours of Saturday 21 January 1950.
On 18 January 1950 he had written a will in which he stipulated:
I direct that my body shall be buried (not cremated) according to the rites of the Church of England in the nearest convenient cemetery, and that there shall be placed over my grave a plain brown stone bearing the inscription ‘Here lies Eric Arthur Blair born June 25th 1903, died----’; in case any suggestion should arise I request that no memorial service be held for me after my death and that no biography of me shall be written.
As a memorial to the writer who had done so much to grace Tribune’s pages, the journal reprinted ‘As I Please’, 66, of 3 January 1947. This appropriately dealt with two of Orwell’s concerns, the inequity of financial rewards and the persecution of writers in the USSR (see here).
A funeral service was arranged by Malcolm Muggeridge and this took place on 26 January at Christ Church, Albany Street, London, NW1. It was conducted by the Revd W.V.C. Rose. Later that day Orwell was buried in the churchyard of All Saints, Sutton Courtney, Berkshire, the arrangements for that having been negotiated by David Astor.
On that day Fredric Warburg wrote to Robert Giroux (of Harcourt Brace): ‘This morning I attended the funeral service for George Orwell, one of the most melancholy occasions of my life, and feel not only that a good author and a good friend has passed from this list but that English literature has suffered an irreparable loss.’
Anthony Powell read a lesson from Ecclesiastes, xii, containing the verse: ‘Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.’ Later he would write in his memoirs, ‘For some reason George Orwell’s funeral was one of the most harrowing I have ever attended.’
In his biography of Orwell, D.J. Taylor concludes his account of Orwell’s death with this:
One of Orwell’s peripheral worries about Switzerland – he had been similarly anxious about Spain – was the quality of the tea. How would he get the ‘proper’ brands he liked? Paul Potts, who turned up later in the evening [of the 20th] had brought a packet with him. Looking through the glass window of the door of Room 65 he saw that his friend was asleep, and decided to leave the gift propped against the jamb. With the possible exception of a passing nurse, he was the last person to see Orwell alive.