10 December 1937
The Stores, Wallington, Near Baldock, Herts
Dear Mr Brailsford,1
I cannot exactly claim your acquaintance, though I believe I did meet you for a moment in Barcelona, and I know you met my wife there.
I have been trying to get the truth about certain aspects of the May fighting in Barcelona. I see that in the New Statesman of May 22nd you state that the P.O.U.M. partisans attacked the Government with tanks and guns ‘stolen from Government arsenals’. I was, of course, in Barcelona throughout the fighting, and though I cannot answer for tanks I know as well as one can be certain about such a thing that no guns were firing anywhere. In various papers there occurs a version of what is evidently the same story, to the effect that the P.O.U.M. were using a battery of stolen 75 mm. guns on the Plaza de España. I know this story to be untrue for a number of reasons. To begin with, I have it from eye-witnesses who were on the spot that there were no guns there; secondly, I examined the buildings round the square afterwards and there were no signs of gunfire; thirdly, throughout the fighting I did not hear the sound of artillery, which is unmistakeable if one is used to it. It would seem therefore that there has been a mistake. I wonder if you could be kind enough to tell me what was the source of the story about the guns and tanks? I am sorry to trouble you, but I want to get this story cleared up if I can.
Perhaps I ought to tell you that I write under the name of George Orwell.
Yours truly
Eric Blair
1. Henry Noel Brailsford (1873–1958) was a socialist intellectual, author, political journalist and leader-writer for the Manchester Guardian, Daily News and the Nation; and editor of the New Leader, weekly organ of the ILP, 1922–6. His article in the New Statesman & Nation was published in two parts. In the first, ‘Anarchists and Communists in Spain’, 22 May 1937, he said that the POUM ‘represented the older and now heretical Communist position. It opposed any alliance with the middle-class even for the salvation of the Republic: for the sake of political as distinct from social democracy it would make no sacrifices to unity. Against it, far more fiercely than against the Anarchists, the Communists waged a merciless feud, and charged it with all the treasons ascribed to Trotsky… the Anarchists with whom [the POUM] allied itself stand farther from its unbending Marxism than do the Socialists whom it assailed with its tanks and guns stolen from Government arsenals.’