21 October 1938 Typewritten draft
Boîte Postale 48, Gueliz, Marrakesh, French Morocco1
Dear Mr Postgate,2
You may perhaps remember meeting me once at a party of Warburg’s. You also wrote to me once about a book of mine, a letter that never got answered because I was in Spain at the time.
The trial of the Executive Committee of the P.O.U.M., which the Spanish Government has been postponing for about sixteen months, has just begun, and from such reports as I can obtain here I see that, as was to be expected, they are being accused of things which everyone with any knowledge of the facts knows to be untrue. I do not think that we can assume as yet that they will not get a fair trial, and obviously we have no right to obstruct or interfere with the Spanish Government even if we were able to do so. But at the same time in the French press (and I have no doubt it will be the same in the English) all kinds of untruthful statements are being made and it is extremely difficult to get an opportunity of answering them. I expect you have some inner knowledge of this affair and are aware that the accusations against the P.O.U.M. in Spain are only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist trials and that from the start every kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities, has been circulated in the Communist press. It has been almost impossible to answer these because the Communist press, naturally, does not publish letters from opponents and the rest of the left-wing press has been held back by a desire not to embarrass the Spanish Government. At the same time it is difficult to see what good is done by malicious lies directed against innocent people. The accusation (which seems to be fully accepted by the French press of this country – pro-Franco, by the way) which especially troubles me is that the 29th division (the P.O.U.M. troops) deserted from the Aragón front. Everyone with any knowledge of the facts, including those who make the accusation, knows that this is a lie. I myself served with the 29th division from December 30 1936 to May 20 1937, and the I.L.P. could give you the addresses of from ten to twenty other Englishmen, some of whom remained at the front a good deal longer than I did – this in addition to the thousands of Spaniards who could contradict the story. This cowardly libel against brave men can only be circulated because of the perhaps well-meaning refusal of the left-wing press to have this affair properly ventilated.
If this accusation is also flung about in the English press, and any opportunity of contradicting it arises, could you not lend your weight to it? Any statement from such a person as yourself would come much better than from anyone like me, who am obviously a prejudiced witness. The I.L.P. can give you all the details of the affair. You would be perfectly safe in saying that you know on good authority that all the stories of desertion, collaboration with the enemy etc. are untrue.
I enclose a summary of an article from La Flèche giving the views of various members of the Spanish Government on the case. So far as I know it contains no inaccuracies. In any case Maxton and others can verify. Even if you cannot see your way to doing anything about this, please forgive me for writing.
Yours sincerely
[not signed]
1. From 2 September 1938 to 26 March 1939, the Orwells were in French Morocco, mainly at Marrakesh. Orwell had been advised (incorrectly) that the climate would be good for his chest complaint. He was able to go because of an anonymous gift-which Orwell accepted as a loan and which he repaid from the proceeds of Animal Farm – from the novelist L. H. Myers. He never learned Myers was his benefactor. While in Marrakesh he wrote Coming Up for Air. See Crick, 369-74; Shelden, 328-34; and P. Davison, George Orwell: A Literary Life, in —13.
2. Raymond Postgate (1896-1971) edited Tribune, 1940-42 (to which Orwell contributed). Among his best-known books was The Common People, 1746–1938 (1938), written in collaboration with G. D. H. Cole. He also wrote on food and wine. Cole (1889-1959) was an economist and novelist, whose writing on economics was often effectively directed to the general reader – for example, The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos (1932) and What Everybody Wants to Know About Money (1933).