ERIC BLAIR ARRIVED AT Wellington College early in 1917. He was still disappointed that he had failed to win a position in the 1916 election at Eton, but this feeling was tempered somewhat by the excitement of attending Wellington. It was, after all, a school at which he expected to be treated as an adult and to be given more responsibility for his actions than he’d enjoyed at St. Cyprian’s. It was an educational institution where, at last, he would receive an education. He expected his teachers and classmates to share his own sense of intellectual adventure. Wellington, Eric was certain, would be a place at which the community of ideas, rather than St. Cyprian’s community of obedience, would dominate daily life.
He was to be disappointed once more. Eric began to see the reality of the students’ situation at Wellington the moment he arrived and started unpacking his belongings. Where he had anticipated a comfortable and cozy private room, he found a small, bare, cold cubicle hardly separated from other similar cubicles. There was no more privacy at Wellington than at the Wilkes’s school. His eager expectation of scholarly discussions faded as well. At Wellington the emphasis was upon the preparation of young men for the military, and the curriculum was bent toward that end. Ideas tended to be discussed in ways that would be useful to commanders of soldiers, not masters of words. Before his first week was out, Eric surrendered his preconceptions, accepted the nature of Wellington, and set his course of action. That course was one of relaxation, independent reading, which did little to help his academic performance, and that diffidence toward the school’s expectations of him that he had practiced so well during his last term at St. Cyprian’s. As class standings were posted, Eric Blair’s name was invariably in the midrange. He had no interest in excelling at Wellington.
Still, he was accomplishing enough to get by, if little more than that. He saw the years of school stretching ahead of him and envisioned his Wellington career: nothing exceptional, nothing outstanding, just average or below average performance. He would go through the motions of being a Wellington student, nothing more.
Barely two months of this dull, militaristic existence had passed, however, when Eric learned that he would be able to attend Eton after all. While elections continued to be limited to only a few Scholars, the demand of the war for young men was drawing many of the older students from Eton. As they departed to be commissioned in the services, their places at Eton were filled by students who’d done well on the qualifying examinations. Eric, with his fourteenth placing on the King’s Scholar exams, was notified in the spring of 1917 that Eton was ready to have him join its classes.
Eric himself was more than ready. He may have gotten into Eton on the coattails of another’s uniform, but he had gotten in, and could not wait to get started. He arrived at Eton in May 1917, a King’s Scholar, once more filled with intellectual expectations, a young man at last certain that he was entering an institution that valued the idea of education.
His first few days at Eton fulfilled his hopes. King’s Scholars lived in the oldest of Eton’s stately buildings, in recognition of the part each generation of Scholars had played in an educational tradition nearly five centuries old. Again, Eric had expected a comfortable private room befitting a Scholar, but his expectations were denied: King’s Scholars were each given a cubicle scarcely larger than those at Wellington, whose walls rose barely six feet, with a gap between the top of the wall and the high ceiling. Voices carried from one cubicle to the next; privacy was virtually nonexistent. Nor were the cubicles warm: each wing of the Scholars’ quarters held a long common room with a central fireplace; other than that, the students shivered.
It was possible, though, to be warmed by inner fires, and Eric’s excitement served him well as he began his career at Eton. He knew that Eton was more than simply a great school—Etonians formed a social community of their own within the British social class system. Etonians could be counted upon to help each other out, forming a not quite unofficial network of contacts and privileges. Position within the Etonian order had to be earned, however, and for each new election there was a barrage of hazings and initiation rites imposed by the upperclassmen. One of his first evenings at Eton, Eric, at an upperclassman’s behest, had to stand on a table in the midst of the evening meal and sing at the top of his lungs a rather bawdy American song. He managed to overcome his customary shyness and gave the song a sufficiently energetic rendition—his performance was applauded. Those who sang less well became targets for food, books, and other projectiles hurled by the upper classmen as demonstration of their criticism.
Eric was less fortunate when it came to the, again traditional, beatings administered by older students. The members of each new election faced bruises from the fists of their elders—the beatings were as much a part of Etonian tradition as the small rooms and ancient buildings. There was nothing to be done about the incidents, other than to hope that they occurred infrequently and that the upperclassmen would choose to be at least somewhat merciful. Eric, though fourteen years old, remained short, and his slight stature seemed to provoke the older students. Like his fellow members of the election of 1916, Eric bore the beatings in silence, understanding that his bruises were symbols of a social ritual and the beatings symbols of an Etonian’s coming of age. But he and his fellows began talking more and more among themselves of how they would change the cruel practices as they became upperclassmen themselves.
Academically, Eton was closer to the ideal school Eric envisioned than Wellington had been, and his classes were infinitely superior to those he had endured at St. Cyprian’s. He was enrolled as a classics major, immersing himself in the great works and languages of the ancient world. The students’ days began at 7:30, not with breakfast but with an hour of classes, boys leaping from their beds, bathing hurriedly, donning their uniforms, and seating themselves for concentration before many of them were well awake. After a brief breakfast—scarcely less meager than the morning meal at St. Cyprian’s—the students returned to class for three hours of group study, which was followed by a session of one hour with a tutor.
Eric’s tutor was A. S. F. Cow, a classics scholar who sought not only to have his students memorize important works, but also to awaken the boys to the artistic and intellectual greatness of the Greek and Roman writers they studied. Cow was a brilliant man and a great teacher who made a favorable impression upon Eric. As he grew to know Cow better, Eric revealed his interest in writing, and although Cow maintained that Blair had no future as a creative writer, he did acknowledge the boy’s ability to write stories with morals. Eric worked hard during his first months at Eton on a variety of short pieces, each of which built toward a succinct moral lesson, as did many of the classical pieces he studied.
Classics were not the only elements of Eric’s curriculum. As a specialist—as those studying classics were called—he spent seven classroom hours each week studying Latin, and another six studying Greek, but he was also responsible for three hours each in French and mathematics, two hours of classes in English, and an hour of divinity. Classroom and tutorial sessions were only preparation, however, for the long hours of individual study and memorization expected of the boys in the evenings and on holidays.
Three afternoons were set aside from each week for athletic endeavors. Sports, and the sportsmanship and lessons of proper conduct learned on the playing fields, held even more importance at Eton than they had at St. Cyprian’s. Etonians were expected to be fierce competitors, both on the playing fields and in their classrooms. Excellence at athletics mattered greatly and exercised an important and unavoidable effect upon one’s standing at Eton, in the eyes of the administration and of one’s classmates. Detailed diaries were kept recording team performance in each game.
Eric’s athletic performance at Eton was as poor as it had been at St. Cyprian’s. He lacked the natural grace of the other boys, and could not master the coordination necessary to boot a soccer ball accurately toward a goal, or swing a cricket bat for a solid hit. He did not even run well. The sports diaries soon grew full of neatly recorded comments on Eric Blair’s poor showings, many of the records blaming Eric for lost games and the loss of honor that accompanied defeats. He’d sung with enough proficiency to escape mockery during the hazings, but he could not escape humiliation during sporting events. Gradually he gave up even trying to play, accepting for himself the dubious distinction of being the worst athlete among his election, and, according to some of his classmates, working hard to enhance that reputation.
As the school year deepened, Eric’s performance in the classroom began to sink toward a level nearly as dismal as his performance on the field. It was as though, having studied and crammed to win his appointment as a King’s Scholar, Eric felt he had done enough. He began to be known as a complainer, telling the others in no uncertain terms that the offerings of their teachers were of little use to a man with an independent turn of mind. He would not be content to be one of the old Etonians who went through their years there by the book, blindly following the dictates of tradition and expectation. He took to going out of his way to say shocking, unconventional things, often using crude and undignified language. Among the objects of his disdain were, suddenly, his parents. In discussions with the other boys he listened as they spoke of their parents’ achievements, then studied their faces as he spoke rudely of Richard and Ida Blair. They knew nothing, they were provincial in their outlook, their minds were dull and uninformed. Eric became more and more provocative, attacking not only his parents’ provincialism, as he saw it, but also the doctrinaire thoughts and minds of his classmates. Even the great classical writers they studied came under disparaging attack as Eric worked to develop his reputation as a rebel and an iconoclast. He was, he showed the others, different.
For one thing, he was more intelligent, in many ways, than other boys of his age. Certainly he was well read, and his fine, accurate memory gave him the advantage in debate of invoking writers and quotations to prove his points. Little response was possible, for the other fourteen-year-olds had not read so widely as had Eric, and were less interested in putting ideas together in new ways than they were in acquiring information that would earn them high standings in their class. Already, in his first season at Eton, Eric made no pretense of seeking to place high in his election, or even in the general College standings. Rebels had no need of such things as prestige and rank, and Eric was perceived as a rebel.
Others saw him simply as a lazy young man unwilling to exert himself and put his unquestionably great gifts and talents to work. He lacked discipline, concluded the teachers in whose classes he studied, and even Gow, Eric’s tutor, thought that the boy displayed more indolence than independence. There was little doubt that he would manage to survive his career at Eton, but few felt that he would go any farther in his academic career. It seemed unlikely that he would earn entry into any university.
Eric presented a posture of disdain for such criticism. He had, even at fourteen, few intentions of pursuing an academic career beyond Eton. University scholars and graduates went on to teach at schools such as Eton—or St. Cyprian’s if they were of less than first rank—pursuing quiet paths, perhaps teaching at universities themselves. Such paths seemed dull to Eric Blair. He respected scholars such as Gow—as much as he respected anyone in those days—but their lives were too tranquil for him. Eric continued to maintain that he would become a great writer, famous and respected, and that scholars and professors would one day huddle quietly over his works.
Although his attitudes toward academic life were rebellious (or lazy) his decision to go no further than Eton was not unusual. For many members of his election, and for most Etonians, the school provided their final formal schooling. Boys from wealthy industrial families left Eton to take their places in the family business; some Etonians entered immediately a career in banking, others distinguished themselves in civil or military service, or in politics; and some indeed became great scholars and outstanding teachers. But for most, Eton was the platform from which a graduate launched himself into a career.
In 1917 the career that many Etonians found immediately facing them was the military. The toll of young men taken by World War I grew larger hourly; hundreds of thousands of young men were dead, many of them led into battle by officers who’d attended Eton. Chapel services each morning included announcements of Etonians killed or wounded in the war, along with a tabulation of the number of graduates and students from the school who served in Europe. By war’s end nearly one-fifth of the almost six thousand Etonians who served had been killed, with almost fifteen hundred more wounded.
Some students did not wait for graduation to join the army: they left school, enlisted, and many of them died while still teenagers. Those who remained at Eton came to feel—some of them maintaining that they were made to feel—a certain guilt over their avoidance of the battlefield. It was not so bad for Eric’s election: he and his classmates were still too young to serve, but it did strike them occasionally that they might not be aging quickly enough to suit their elders.
Patriotic fervor gripped Britain. Richard Blair, by now sixty years old, enlisted in the army, determined to do his duty despite his age. He did not see combat, but was posted to Marseilles, on the southeastern coast of France, where he helped supply arriving and departing troops. It was not a glamorous position, but Richard Blair was doing his part.
Ida Blair, too, felt the call of patriotism. She shut down the Blair house and moved to London, where she found a secretarial job, working in the government department responsible for pensions. Marjorie also went to London and took a job aiding in the war effort. Such family dedication was common—everyone was eager to do what he or she could for their country and against its enemies. There was a sense in Britain of a nation alive as one being and united by a determination to win the war no matter what the cost in young men’s lives.
Among men even younger than the soldiers, though, the rush of patriotism began slowly to change into something different. It was difficult being a bright adolescent during that war: one day nationalistic fever ran high, while the next would be filled with a hatred of uniforms and flags. Nor was military glory so fashionable as it once had been. Eric and his fellows of the election of 1916 began to express increasingly pacifist sentiments. In part their growing opposition to violence was prompted by the more parochial violence aimed at them by the upperclassmen. Eric and others vowed that with their election an end would be brought to the mildly sadistic tormenting of younger students. Also contributing to their growing unwillingness to be captivated by the war and by military institutions was the fact that Eton had made student participation in the Officers’ Training Corps (OTC) mandatory. Everyone had to serve, all had to march and drill in uniform, no matter what their personal sentiment.
Compulsory participation in a military training program sat no better with Eric than did anything compulsory, and he almost immediately began to search for ways of eluding or defeating the regimen required of OTC cadets. He arranged to be placed in the signal section, with its flags, semaphores, and related paraphernalia, and brought to his position a disregard for responsibility that those who served beneath him enjoyed. During field drills with the other students, Eric Blair would, as often as not, find some means of escaping from the exercise, leading his men to secluded spots where they would loosen their uniforms and relax, reading and chatting. Eric, all realized quickly, had no more future as a soldier than he had as a scholar. None of which mattered to Eric: he was going to be a writer.
Eric was not, however, doing a great deal of writing. Certainly, he spent a great deal more time talking about the works he would write than he did practicing literature with pencil and paper. His apathy, or antipathy, toward structure and regimen seemed to extend even to the discipline required to master the art of making sentences. Nor did his studies, and the courses he selected, seem to help prepare him for a literary career. He could not make up his mind what area of study he wanted to concentrate upon, shifting from his declared intent as a classical specialist, to the less stringent requirements of the classical general. Generalists, he believed, were in many ways freed from focusing upon individual elements of literature and were more able to see the larger connections between literature and history. That was just talk, though: the generalist faced less strict requirements than the specialist, and the relaxation permitted Eric more time to pursue his own course of outside reading.
By the time of the summer holidays in 1918 and the end of a full year at Eton, Eric Blair had established a rhythm that suited him, if not his teachers or parents. Although he would occasionally apply himself with some discipline to his classwork or pass through a frenzied few days of writing, he preferred to avoid necessary work and spend his time reading and studying contemporary, rather than classical writers.
H. G. Wells remained one of his favorite novelists, and Eric, by now fifteen years old, became increasingly aware of the political messages that underlay much of Wells’s work. In 1918 Wells was at the height of his fame, having coined the descriptive phrase “the war that will end war” to describe World War I, as well as having written Mr. Britling Sees it Through, which was considered to be the great novel of the war years. In this and most of his other works, Wells argued for a revolution in government, an end to nations, an abolition of war, and the formation of a world state. Wells had begun his career more than two decades earlier by writing overtly socialist novels and stories, but by 1918 he was moving beyond socialism in search of his own individual synthesis of government and economics.
For Eric and his classmates of the 1916 election, though, socialism remained attractive, and when queried by Eton as to the most important and influential men still alive, many of the students placed Lenin high on the list. (The Russian Revolution had taken place in 1917.) Such recognition of the Russian revolutionary’s influence was honest and accurate, but it was also indicative of the ways in which Eric and his fellow students were changing. They were not the traditional Etonians, or felt they weren’t, and as World War I drew toward its close they endeavored to put their differences into action. They had promised to do away with the physical torment of new classes, and when the boys of 1916 achieved seniority they did, indeed, inflict less painful initiations upon the newcomers than their own seniors had inflicted upon them. The revolution, as Eric and others saw it, was short lived, bullying being too institutionalized to be done away with for long.
Socialism, pacifism, fascination with revolutionaries, all were indicative of the changes taking place in the world. The ravages of the war made those changes palpable to young men such as Eric Blair. For all his lack of discipline about the process of writing, Eric remained determined to become a writer, and alert for ways in which the changes moving through society would affect a literary career. H. G. Wells had been one of the first serious writers to exploit science as a literary theme, and in the fall of 1918, perhaps thinking about Wells and his masterful scientific romances, Eric abandoned classics and became a science student, concentrating upon biology. If the diffidence he displayed in classics courses was offset somewhat by his genuine literary interests and gifts, his decision to pursue a scientific education proved an almost total disaster. Eric had no aptitude for mathematics, no talent for understanding fundamental scientific principles and theories. The only real gift he showed was the use of his slingshot for killing birds, which he dissected poorly in class. Eric’s flirtation with biology lasted barely a year before he returned to more general studies.
He returned, however, different, his own biology having begun to exact a transformation. During his year in science, as his grades slumped, Eric’s height increased. He’d been accustomed to being one of the shortest boys in his election, standing barely five feet four inches at age fifteen. By the summer of 1919 he’d reached five feet seven inches, and was continuing to grow at a rapid rate. His chubbiness changed into thinness. He wondered how tall he would become, and could see himself now as a young man, still in school, but with adulthood and responsibility coming closer daily. His increased sense of maturity led him to flirt poetically with his childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom, but the poems he wrote to her dripped with such overbearing romanticism that Jacintha was more turned off than attracted. She sought courteously to cool Eric’s ardor, and although he continued to hunt during holidays with Prosper Buddicom, and to discuss literature with Jacintha, their separate courses were becoming established. After Eric left Eton they lost track of each other for decades.
The failure of his courtship, as he thought of it, left no serious scars. Eric Blair, by the summer of 1920, growing toward six feet even as he descended toward the bottom of the class rankings, was a young man who seemed unaffected by life’s disappointments or difficulties, at least in public. He shrugged them off with casual comments and jokes; poor grades and official displeasure were coming to appear almost as goals he sought. Pressed by another mandatory rule at Eton, he allowed himself to be confirmed into the Anglican Church near the end of World War I, with his mother present to witness it. But this was only after he had insulted the teacher who had prepared him and joked loudly about the meaninglessness of religion and religious ceremony. Eric continued to criticize his parents and their beliefs and values, mocking to his friends his father’s position as a mulekeeper during the war, spending much of his holiday time with Prosper and Jacintha, avoiding his own home as much as possible. Books carried home for summer lessons often went unopened through the entire season. And at Eton when he should have been studying, he could often be found fishing, lost in thought, a book open on the riverbank beside him. Usually it was a book he was reading for pleasure or personal enlightenment, not for an assignment.
As the new decade approached, Eric began to display an increasing fascination with the lives and conditions of the very poor. In part this awakening of interest was brought on by his reading of Jack London, and especially London’s The People of the Abyss. First published in 1903, The People of the Abyss was London’s account of his life among the lowest levels of society in Britain. London’s book was filled with great horror and anger, the story of children born into a world with no prospect at all of a better life, of parents who fought in the mud over scraps of food found among garbage, of squalor, of dirt, of odor, of helplessness and hopelessness. Jack London was a powerful writer who made the social forces that condemned people to this abyss come as alive for the reader as he did the forces of nature in books such as The Call of the Wild and White Fang. And just as in those books London wrote of individual strength and willpower being necessary to combat natural forces, in The People of the Abyss and his novel The Iron Heel he wrote of the need for great strength and a willingness to commit, if not embrace, violence in order to triumph over poverty and an unjust social order.
Eric responded emotionally to London’s works, fascinated by this writer who had lived among the poor in order to write truly about them. Despite Eric’s own feelings of insecurity about his family background—he could not forget how he’d felt when he learned that he attended St. Cyprian’s on scholarship—he knew how privileged his own life had been. He had never been hungry as the poor were hungry, never cold as they were cold, never smelled so bad as they did. Yet, even as he was awakening to the plight of the poor, in fact, he spoke harshly of their unpleasant odor, as though to him it were a racial characteristic rather than the result of poor hygiene.
In late summer of 1920, Eric had the opportunity to indulge in a bit of journeying among the poor himself. He’d been in London, in his Officers’ Training Corps uniform and cape, when he missed the train to Looe, in Cornwall, where his family was vacationing. He found himself stranded in a small village station, Seaton Junction. He sent a telegram to inform his parents of the delay and caught a train to Plymouth, where he hoped to make the connection that would carry him on to Cornwall, and his parents.
Arriving in Plymouth, though, he discovered that he’d missed his connection and that another train would not arrive until morning. It was too late for another telegram, and his funds were limited. Eric had enough money to eat or to secure a bed at the Plymouth YMCA, but not enough to do both. It was late afternoon and the demands of his stomach overrode his desire for a warm bed, so he spent his money on sweet rolls, then set about searching for a place to spend the night. He would have to sleep outdoors, exposed to the chilly English evening weather, and looked for a likely spot. As he walked, Eric was pleased to notice that the few people he passed evidently took him for a soldier, asking if he had been demobilized along with others who’d returned from the war in Europe. He was less pleased by a recurrent thought: the punishment for sleeping outdoors, with no visible means of income, was two weeks in jail. He forced himself to be very cautious, moving slowly through a farmer’s field, growing frightened when it seemed that any movement he made awakened the neighborhood dogs whose barking, Eric was certain, would alert the police.
At last he found a spot beneath a tree, but his uniform and cape did little to keep him warm. He tossed and turned fitfully for most of the night, finally falling asleep in the small hours only to sleep so soundly that he missed the first train to Cornwall. He caught the second, though, arrived in Looe, and after a four-mile walk was reunited with his family. He immediately set to writing letters to his classmates in which he told them in great detail of his adventures as a tramp surviving by wit alone, like the boys in The Coral Island, Ballantyne’s book that Eric had loved so much.
Not long after his night in the field, Eric returned to Eton for his final year. Only one member of the election of 1916 stood lower in the ranks than Eric Blair. In the fall of 1920 Eric concentrated upon history as his major, but by the beginning of 1921 he had returned to classics. Eric now stood more than six feet tall with a slouch that matched his cynical outlook. He indulged in an occasional cigarette, strictly forbidden at Eton, and when he was once caught with an empty cigarette pack he openly showed his contempt for Eton’s rules and those who sought to enforce them. Eric argued with those who lectured him, meeting their scoldings with his own scorn. His time at Eton was drawing to a close, and he felt increasingly free to speak his mind.
There was a brief flirtation with the thought of going on to Oxford, the impetus for the flirtation coming primarily from Jacintha Buddicom. As a King’s Scholar at Eton, Eric could have won entry to Oxford, but because of his grades would not have been eligible for a scholarship. Without the scholarship, his father pointed out, there was no question of Eric’s attending a university: the tuition was more than the family could bear. Besides, with an Eton education, Eric would be able to make his own way in the world, and at age eighteen it was time that he should begin to do so. As the spring of 1921 began to bloom, Eric began to cast about for a career.
He was already half decided. He did not feel himself ready to support himself as a writer, and since he would have to find a job, he wanted one likely to provide him with the materials out of which literature could be fashioned. He recalled his father’s stories of life in India, he had read and reread Kipling’s tales and poems of colonial life, and Ida Blair’s mother still lived in Moulmein, Burma. The colonial service appealed to Eric, and he began to look at the requirements for finding a position in India.
There were not many options open to him. The more prestigious posts required a university education. Eric Blair found himself eligible for positions in the colonial police, the Forestry or Roads Departments, as an official serving the Public Health Department, or even as an officer in his father’s old service, the Opium Department. The opium controversy had continued to grow, however, and by 1921 the department was nearing the end of its existence. Forests, roads, and public health held no appeal for Eric, but the Imperial Indian Police sounded as though it might be exciting, although he was amused by the irony of his choice. By the end of the summer he had essentially made up his mind, and he entered his final season at Eton more uninterested than ever.
In December 1921, Eric Blair left Eton for the last time. His last term had passed uneventfully, with the exception of his sole athletic triumph: the scoring of a difficult goal during an important game. There were no academic triumphs.
Eric spent the Christmas holidays with his parents in their new home in Southwold, a small resort town on the coast. Although school was behind him, study was not, for in January 1922, Eric undertook six months of hard tutoring that would prepare him for the Indian Police’s entrance examinations. The examinations lasted a week, covering the applicants’ knowledge of mathematics, history, English, and French, all of which were required. As his elective examination topics, Eric was tested in his ability to draw, as well as in his mastery of Latin and Greek. Aware that this time a career, and not simply academic standing, was at stake, Eric applied himself diligently, studying hard, no matter how irrelevant the subjects seemed. He was rewarded by placing seventh out of the top twenty-six applicants. That position would be lowered considerably as a result of the poor horsemanship he displayed during the compulsory riding examination, but he’d still done well enough to win a posting.
He was awarded the rank of probationary assistant superintendent of police as soon as he was nineteen, the minimum age for admission into the service. Eric requested assignment to Burma, where he had relatives. As Burma was not one of the more desirable destinations for young men in search of adventure and advancement, his request was granted. He received his orders and would sail in October.
Eric Blair, about to embark upon a career in the civil service, possessed of literary ambitions but with little prospect of making those ambitions a reality, spent the late summer months packing his belongings. He listened dutifully to his father as Richard Blair offered advice based upon experience gained during a life in the colonies. He promised to visit his grandmother in Moulmein.
He passed what free time he had reading, fishing, and talking. He visited Jacintha and Prosper, and made clear that his literary goals still existed, that he was postponing his career, not abandoning it. He’d not written a great deal at Eton. There were his love poems to Jacintha, moral stories and fables for his instructors, pieces for occasional Eton publications, but he showed no signs of being a prodigy. If he was going to become a writer, a good deal of work lay ahead of him.
If Eric Blair had not made his mark on Eton, the school at least had left its ineradicable mark upon him. Despite the disdain he’d been so eager to show, Eric was very much the proper young Etonian. The school’s influence and attitudes were obvious in his demeanor, in his outlook, his sense that he was equal to the challenges that lay ahead of him.
On October 27, 1922, Probationary Assistant Superintendent of Police Eric Blair boarded the SS Herefordshire, bound for Rangoon, and from Rangoon for posting as policeman in Burma.