George Orwell Diaries

Second War-time Diary

On August 18, 1941, Orwell was appointed a Talks Assistant in the Overseas Service of the BBC at a salary of £640 a year – perhaps about £22,000 at today’s values. He attended an induction course of two 5½-day weeks, held at Bedford College, University of London in Regent’s Park. The course was called, sardonically, by the poet and scholar, William Empson, ‘the Liars’ School’. In fact, the schedule of talks and classes (which has survived) suggested a sensible, if basic, introduction to broadcasting given the short time available. (See CW, XIII, pp. 3–21 and 82–92.) Orwell then joined the Eastern Overseas Service and worked broadcasting to India, Malaya and Indonesia until November 24, 1943, when he became Literary Editor of Tribune. Orwell first worked at 55 Portland Place, the source of his ‘Room 101’. This was a committee room where Orwell suffered meetings of the Eastern Services Committee. Although in Nineteen Eighty-Four Room 101 is a place of physical torture, it should be borne in mind that O’Brien describes Room 101 as varying from individual to individual: ‘It may be burial alive, or death by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal’. For Orwell it was the deadly boredom of meetings; for Winston Smith it was rats – and rats, of course, had caused Orwell problems at various times, notably in the Spanish front line. Early in June 1942 the department moved to 200 Oxford Street. The late Eric Robertson, who worked there and knew Orwell, told me that it was familiarly known as not 200 but ZOO – and that, he thought, had a link with Animal Farm. Orwell produced and wrote an enormous number of programmes. For example, he wrote 104 or 105 newsletters in English and 115 or 116 for translation in vernacular languages. Fifty scripts of broadcasts made to India have survived. Orwell’s idea of propaganda was very much slanted in the direction of literature and culture. One important series was ‘Let’s Act it Out’ in which its participants learnt techniques which they introduced into travelling drama productions on their return to India. He also initiated what would now be called ‘Open University’ courses on literature, science, and psychology. For these he was able to recruit outstanding writers and scholars, such as T.S. Eliot, Herbert Reed, E.M. Forster, Joseph Needham, and C.D. Darlington. Orwell, in a typical self-denigrating tone, described his time at the BBC as ‘two wasted years’. Certainly the broadcasts were heard by few people but that was not because of the quality of what he produced, and was no reflection on his laudable intentions, but because there were few radios, poor reception, many time shifts, and a multitude of languages. A full record of Orwell at the BBC will be found in The Complete Works, volumes XIII, XIV, and XV.

For much time covered by these diary entries, Orwell was also a very active member of the Home Guard. He was a sergeant in command of a section, one of whom was his publisher, Fredric Warburg (who had served as a Second Lieutenant at Passchendaele); see also War-time Diary, 3.1.41, n. 143. He still found time to write articles, notably his ‘London Letter’ for the American journal, Partisan Review.

This Diary exists in two versions: manuscript (without a heading) and typewritten by Orwell headed ‘WAR DIARY (continued)’. The manuscript has words and passages omitted from the typescript (which notes where cuts have been made). Orwell probably intended the shorter typed version to be published jointly with Inez Holden’s diary (see headnote to War-time Diary, May 28, 1940 – August 28, 1941) but the diary was not published in Orwell’s lifetime. Here, passages appearing only in manuscript are printed in italics within square brackets; they follow the typed version. Titles (e.g. of journals) that would be italicized within roman setting are left in italic in the passages in italic but are underlined. If a name is given only by initials in the typescript but is spelt out in the manuscript the full name is incorporated in roman type. Only a few significant verbal differences between typed and handwritten versions are footnoted. Full details are recorded in Complete Works.

Footnotes are numbered from 1.

3.14.42: I reopen this diary after an interval of about 6 months, the war being once again in a new phase.

The actual date of Cripps’s departure for India was not given out,1 but presumably he has gone by this time. Ordinary public opinion here seems gloomy about his departure. A frequent comment – “They’ve done it to get him out of the way” (which is also one of the reasons alleged on the German wireless). This is very silly and reflects the provincialism of English people who can’t grasp that India is of any importance. Better-informed people are pessimistic because the non-publication of the Government’s terms to India indicates almost certainly that they are not good terms. Impossible to discover what powers Cripps has got. Those who may know will disclose nothing and one can draw hints out of them only by indirect means. Eg. I propose in my newsletters,2 having been instructed to give Cripps a buildup, to build him up as a political extremist. This draws the warning, “Don’t go too far in that direction”, which raises the presumption that the higher-ups haven’t much hope of full independence being granted to India.

Rumours of all descriptions flying round. Many people appear to suspect that Russia and Germany will conclude a separate peace this year. From studying the German and Russian wireless I have long come to the conclusion that the reports of Russian victories are largely phony, though, of course, the campaign has not gone according to the German plan, [I think the Russians have merely won the kind of victory that we did in the Battle of Britain – ie., staving off defeat for the time being but deciding nothing.] I don’t believe in a separate peace unless Russia is definitely knocked out, because I don’t see how either Russia or Germany can agree to relinquish the Ukraine . [On the other hand some people think (I had this, eg. from Abrams, a Baltic Russian of strong Stalinist sympathies though probably not a C.P. member) that if the Russians could get the Germans off their soil they would make a sort of undeclared peace and thereafter only keep up a sham fight.]

Rumours about Beaverbrook’s departure:3

a. Cripps insisted on this as a condition of entering the Government.

b. Beaverbrook was got rid of because he is known to be in contact with Goering with a view to a compromise peace.

c. The army insisted on Beaverbrook’s removal because he was sending all the aeroplanes etc. to Russia instead of to Libya and the Far East.

I have now been in the BBC about 6 months. Shall remain in it if the political changes I foresee come off, otherwise probably not. Its atmosphere is something halfway between a girls’ school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless. Our radio strategy is even more hopeless than our military strategy. Nevertheless one rapidly becomes propaganda-minded and develops a cunning one did not previously have. Eg. I am regularly alleging in my newsletters that the Japanese are plotting to attack Russia. I don’t believe this to be so, but the calculation is:

a. If the Japanese do attack Russia, we can then say “I told you so”.

b. If the Russians attack first, we can, having built up the picture of a Japanese plot beforehand, pretend that it was the Japanese who started it.

c. If no war breaks out at all, we can claim that it is because the Japanese are too frightened of Russia.

All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.

[Current story:

An A.T.4 stops a Home Guard: “Excuse me, but your front door is open”.

H.G. “Oh. And did you by any chance see a tall strong sentry guarding the door?”

A.T. “No, all I saw was an old Home Guard lying on a pair of sandbags.”

On 3.11.42 I started the rumour that beer is to be rationed, and told it to 3 different people. I shall be interested to see at what date this rumour comes back to me.] 5.30.42: Never came back. So this casts no light on the way in which rumours come into being.

Talked for a little while the other day to William Hickey,5 just back from the USA. He says morale there is appalling. Production is not getting under way and anti-British feeling of all kinds is rampant, also anti-Russian feeling, stimulated by the Catholics.

3.15.42: Short air raid alert about 11.30 this morning. No bombs or guns. The first time in 10 months that I had heard this sound. Inwardly rather frightened, and everyone else evidently the same, though studiously taking no notice and indeed not referring to the fact of there being a raid on until the All Clear had sounded.

3.22.42: Empson tells me that there is a strict ban by the Foreign Office on any suggestion that Japan is going to attack the USSR. So this subject is being studiously avoided in the Far Eastern broadcasts while being pushed all the time in the India broadcasts. They haven’t yet got onto the fact that we are saying this, we haven’t been warned and don’t officially know about the ban, and are making the best of our opportunity while it lasts. The same chaos everywhere on the propaganda front. [Eg. Horizon was nearly stopped from getting its extra paper to print copies for export on the strength of my article on Kipling (all well at the last moment because Harold Nicolson6 and Duff Cooper7 intervened), at the same time as the BBC asked me to write a “feature” based on the article.]

German propaganda is inconsistent in quite a different way – ie, deliberately so, with an utter unscrupulousness in offering everything to everybody, freedom to India and a colonial empire to Spain, emancipation to the Kaffirs and stricter race laws to the Boers, etc., etc. All quite sound from a propaganda point of view in my opinion, seeing how politically ignorant the majority of people are, how uninterested in anything outside their immediate affairs, and how little impressed by inconsistency. A few weeks back the NBBS8 was actually attacking the Workers’ Challenge [Station],9 warning people not to listen to it as it was “financed from Moscow.”

The Communists in Mexico are again chasing Victor Serge10 and other Trotskyist refugees who got there from France, urging their expulsion, etc., etc. Just the same tactics as in Spain. Horribly depressed to see these ancient intrigues coming up again, not so much because they are morally disgusting as from this reflection: for 20 years the Comintern has used these methods and the Comintern has always and everywhere been defeated by the Fascists; therefore we, being tied to them in a species of alliance, shall be defeated with them.

Suspicion that Russia intends making a separate peace now seems widespread. Of the two, it would be easier for Russia to surrender the Ukraine, both on geographical and psychological grounds, but they obviously couldn’t give up the Caucasus oilfields without a fight. One possible development is a secret agreement between Hitler and Stalin, Hitler to keep what Russian territory he has overrun, or parts of it, but thereafter to make no further attacks but to direct his offensive southward towards the oilfields of Irak and Iran, Russia and Germany keeping up a sham war meanwhile. It appears to me that a separate peace is distinctly likelier if we do make a continental invasion this year, because if we succeed in embarrassing the Germans and drawing off a large part of their armies, Russia is immediately in a much better position both to win back the occupied territories, and to bargain. I nevertheless think we ought to invade Europe if the shipping will run to it. The one thing that might stop this kind of filthy doublecrossing is a firm alliance between ourselves and the USSR, with war aims declared in detail. Impossible while this government rules us, and probably also while Stalin remains in power: [at least only possible if we could get a different kind of government and then find some way of speaking over Stalin’s head to the Russian people] .

The same feeling as one had during the Battle of France – that there is no news. This arises principally from endless newspaper-reading . [In connection with my newsletters I now read four or five morning newspapers every day and several editions of the evening ones, besides the daily monitoring report.] The amount of new matter in each piece of print one reads is so small that one gets a general impression that nothing is happening. Besides, when things are going badly one can foresee everything. The only event that has surprised me for weeks past was Cripps’s mission to India.

3.27.42: News of the terms Cripps took to India supposed to be bursting tomorrow. Meanwhile only rumours, all plausible but completely incompatible with one another. The best-supported – that India is to be offered a treaty similar to the Egyptian one. K.S.S.11 who is our fairly embittered enemy, considers this would be accepted if Indians were given the Ministries of Defence, Finance and Internal Affairs. All the Indians here, after a week or two of gloom, much more optimistic, seeming to have smelt out somehow (perhaps by studying long faces in the India Office) that the terms are not so bad after all.

[Terrific debate in the House over the affaire Daily Mirror.12 A. Bevan13 reading numerous extracts from Morrison’s14 own articles in the D.M., written since war started, to the amusement of Conservatives who are anti-D.M. but can never resist the spectacle of two Socialists slamming one another. Cassandra15 announces he is resigning to join the army. Prophecy he will be back in journalism within 3 months. But where shall we all be within 3 months any way?]

Government candidate defeated (very small majority) in the Grantham by-election. The first time since the war started that this has happened, I think.

Surprise call-out of our Company of Home Guard a week or two back. It took 4½ hours to assemble the Company and dish out ammunition, and would have taken them another hour to get them into their battle positions. This mainly due to the bottleneck caused by refusing to distribute ammunition but making each man come to HQ to be issued with it there. Sent a memo on this to Dr Tom Jones,16 who has forwarded it direct to Sir Jas. Grigg.17 In my own unit I could not get such a memo even as far as the Company Commander – or at least, could not get it attended to.

Crocuses now full out. One seems to catch glimpses of them dimly through a haze of war news.

[Abusive letter from H. G. Wells, who addresses me as “You shit”, among other things.18

The Vatican is exchanging diplomatic representatives with Tokio. The Vatican now has diplomatic relations with all the Axis powers and – I think – with none of the Allies. A bad sign and yet in a sense a good one, in that this last step means that they have now definitely decided that the Axis and not we stand for the more reactionary policy.]

4.1.42: Greatly depressed by the apparent failure of the Cripps mission. Most of the Indians seem down in the mouth about it too. Even the ones who hate England want a solution, I think. [I believe, however, that in spite of the “take it or leave it” with which our government started off, the terms will actually be modified, perhaps in response to pressure at this end.] Some think the Russians are behind the Cripps plan and that this accounts for Cripps’s confidence in putting forward something so apparently uninviting. Since they are not in the war against Japan the Russians cannot have any official attitude about the Indian affair, but they may serve out a directive to their followers, from whom it will get round to other pro-Russians. But then not many Indians are reliably pro-Russian. No sign yet from the English Communist party, whose behaviour might give a clue to the Russian attitude. It is on this kind of guesswork that we have to frame our propaganda, no clear or useful directive ever being handed out from above.

Connolly wanted yesterday to quote a passage from Homage to Catalonia in his broadcast. I opened the book and came on these sentences:

“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. . . . It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.”19

Here I am in the BBC, less than 5 years after writing that. I suppose sooner or later we all write our own epitaphs.

4.3.42: Cripps’s decision to stay an extra week in India is taken as a good omen. Otherwise not much to be hopeful about. Gandhi is deliberately making trouble, [sending telegrams of condolence to Bose’s20 family on the report of his death, then telegrams of congratulation when it turned out that the report was untrue. Also urging Indians not to adopt the scorched earth policy if India is invaded]. Impossible to be quite sure what his game is. Those who are anti-Gandhi allege that he has the worst kind of (Indian) capitalist interests behind him, and it is a fact that he usually seems to be staying at the mansion of some kind of millionaire [or other. This is not necessarily incompatible with his alleged saintliness. His pacifism may be genuine, however. In the bad period of 1940 he also urged non-resistance in England, should England be invaded]. I do not know whether Gandhi or Buchman21 is the nearest equivalent to Rasputin in our time.

Anand22 says the morale among the exile Indians here is very low. They are still inclined to think that Japan has no evil designs on India and are all talking of a separate peace with Japan. So much for their declarations of loyalty towards Russia and China. I said to A[nand] that the basic fact about nearly all Indian intellectuals is that they don’t expect independence, can’t imagine it and at heart don’t want it. They want to be permanently in opposition, suffering a painless martyrdom, and are foolish enough to imagine that they could play the same schoolboy games with Japan or Germany as they can with Britain. Somewhat to my surprise he agreed. He says that “opposition mentality” is general among them, especially among the Communists, and that Krishna Menon23 is “longing for the moment when negotiations will break down”. At the same moment as they are coolly talking of betraying China by making a separate peace, they are shouting that the Chinese troops in Burma are not getting proper air support. I remarked that this was childish. A: “You cannot overestimate their childishness, George. It is fathomless”. [The question is how far the Indians here reflect the viewpoint of the intellectuals in India. They are further from the danger and have probably, like the rest of us, been infected by the peaceful atmosphere of the last 10 months, but on the other hand nearly all who remain here long become tinged with a western Socialist outlook, so that the Indian intellectuals proper are probably far worse. A. himself has not got these vices. He is genuinely anti-Fascist, and has done violence to his feelings, and probably to his reputation, by backing Britain up because he recognizes that Britain is objectively on the anti-Fascist side.]

4.6.42: [Yesterday had a look at the bit of the by-pass road which is being built between Uxbridge and Denham. Amazed at the enormous scale of the undertaking. West of Uxbridge is the valley of the Colne, and over this the road runs on a viaduct of brick and concrete pillars, the viaduct being I suppose ¼ mile long. After that it runs on a raised embankment. Each of these pillars is 20 feet high or thereabouts, about 15 by 10 feet thick, and there are two of them every fifteen yards or so. I should say each pillar would use 40,000 bricks, exclusive of foundations, and exclusive of the concrete running above, which must use up tons of steel and concrete for every yard of road. Stupendous quantities of steel (for reinforcing) lying about, also huge slabs of granite. Building this viaduct alone must be a job comparable, in the amount of labour it uses up, to building a good-sized warship. And the by-pass is very unlikely to be of any use till after the war, even if finished by that time. Meanwhile there is a labour shortage everywhere. Apparently the people who sell bricks are all-powerful. (Cf. the useless surface-shelters, which even when they were being put up were pronounced to be useless by everyone who knew anything about building, and the unnecessary repairs to uninhabited private houses which are going on all over London). Evidently when a scandal passes a certain magnitude it becomes invisible.]

Saw in Denham someone driving a dog-cart, in quite good trim.

4.10.42: British naval losses in the last 3 or 4 days: 2 cruisers and an aircraft carrier sunk, 1 destroyer wrecked.24 Axis losses: 1 cruiser sunk.

From Nehru’s speech today: “Who dies if India live?” How impressed the pinks will be – and how they would snigger at “Who dies if England live?”25

4.11.42: It26 has flopped after all. I don’t regard this as final, however.

Listened-in to Cripps’s speech coming from Delhi, which we were re-broadcasting for England etc. These transmissions which we occasionally listen-in to from Delhi are our only clue as to how our own broadcasts sound in India. Always very bad quality and a great deal of background noise which it is impossible to take out in recordings. [The speech good in the earlier part and plain-speaking enough to cause, I should think, a lot of offence. In the later part it rather moved off into the breezy uplands vein.] It is a curious fact that in the more exalted passages in his speeches Cripps seems to have caught certain inflexions of voice from Churchill. This may point to the fact – which would explain his having undertaken this mission when only having such bad terms to offer – that he is at present much under Churchill’s personal influence.

4.18.42: No question that Cripps’s speeches etc. have caused a lot of offence, ie. in India. Outside India I doubt whether many people blame the British government for the breakdown. One trouble at the moment is the tactless utterances of Americans who for years have been blahing about “Indian freedom” and British imperialism, and have suddenly had their eyes opened to the fact that the Indian intelligentsia don’t want independence, ie. responsibility. Nehru is making provocative speeches to the effect that all the English are the same, of whatever political party, and also trying to make trouble between Britain and the USA by alleging that the USA has done all the real fighting. At the same time he reiterates at intervals that he is not pro-Japanese and Congress will defend India to the last. The BBC thereupon picks out these passages from his speeches and broadcasts them without mentioning the anti-British passages, whereat Nehru complains (quite justly) that he has been misrepresented. [A recent directive tells us that when one of his speeches contains both anti-British and anti-Japanese passages, we had better ignore it altogether. What a mess it all is. But I think on balance the Cripps mission has done good, because without discrediting Cripps in this country (as it so easily might have done) it has clarified the issue. Whatever is said officially, the inference the whole world will draw is that (a) the British ruling class doesn’t intend to abdicate and (b) India doesn’t want independence and therefore won’t get it, whatever the outcome of the war.

Talking to Wintringham27 about the possible Russian attitude towards the Cripps negotiations (of course, not being in the war against Japan, they can’t have an official attitude) I said it might make things easier if as many as possible of the military instructors etc. who will later have to be sent to India were Russians. One possible outcome is that India will ultimately be taken over by the USSR, and though I have never believed that the Russians would behave better in India than ourselves, they might behave differently, owing to the different economic set-up. Wintringham said that even in Spain some of the Russian delegates tended to treat the Spaniards as “natives”, and would no doubt do likewise in India. It’s very hard not to, seeing that in practice the majority of Indians are inferior to Europeans and one can’t help feeling this and, after a little while, acting accordingly.]

American opinion will soon swing back and begin putting all the blame for the Indian situation on the British, as before. It is clear from what American papers one can get hold of that anti-British feeling is in full cry and that all the Isolationists, after a momentary retirement, have re-emerged with the same slogans as before. [Father Coughlin’s paper,28 however, has just been excluded from the mails.] What always horrifies me about American anti-British sentiment is its appalling ignorance. Ditto presumably with anti-American feeling in England.

4.19.42: Tokio bombed, or supposed to have been bombed, yesterday.29 Hitherto this comes only from Japanese and German sources. Nowadays one takes it so much for granted that everyone is lying that a report of this kind is never believed until confirmed by both sides. Even an admission by the enemy that his capital had been bombed might for some reason or other be a lie.

[E[ileen] says that Anand remarked to her yesterday, as though it were a matter of course, that Britain would make a separate peace this year, and seemed surprised when she demurred. Of course Indians have to say this, and have been saying it ever since 1940, because it furnishes them if necessary with an excuse for being anti-war, and also because if they could allow themselves to think any good of Britain whatever their mental framework would be destroyed. Fyvel told me how in 1940, at the time when Chamberlain was still in the government, he was at a meeting at which Pritt and various Indians were present. The Indians were remarking in their pseudo-Marxist way “Of course the Churchill-Chamberlain government is about to make a compromise peace”, whereat Pritt told them that Churchill would never make peace and that the only difference (then) existing in Britain was the difference between Churchill and Chamberlain.]

More and more talk about an invasion of Europe – so much so as to make one think something of the kind must be afoot, otherwise the newspapers would not risk causing disappointment by talking so much about it. Amazed by the unrealism of much of this talk. Nearly everyone seems still to think that gratitude is a factor in power politics. Two assumptions which are habitually made throughout the Left press are a. that opening up a second front is the way to stop Russia making a separate peace, and b. that the more fighting we do the more say we shall have in the final peace settlement. Few people seem to reflect that if an invasion of Europe succeeded to the point of drawing the German armies away from Russia, Stalin would have no strong motive for going on fighting [and that a sell-out of this kind would be quite in line with the Russo-German pact and the agreement which the USSR has evidently entered into with Japan]. As to the other assumption, many people talk as though the power to decide policy when a war has been won were a sort of reward for having fought well in it. Of course the people actually able to dominate affairs are those who have the most military power, cf. America at the end of the last war.

Meanwhile the two steps which could right the situation, a. a clear agreement with the USSR and a joint (and fairly detailed) declaration of war aims, and b. an invasion of Spain, are politically quite impossible under the present government.

4.25.42: U.S. airmen making a forced landing on Russian soil after bombing Tokio have been interned. According to the Japanese wireless the Russians are expediting the movement of Japanese agents across Russia from Sweden (and hence from Germany) to Japan. [If true, this is a new development, this traffic having been stopped at the time when Germany attacked the USSR.]

The mystery of Subhas Chandra Bose’s whereabouts remains impenetrable . [The leading facts are: –

i. At the time of his disappearance, the British government declared that he had gone to Berlin.

ii. A voice, identified as his, broadcasts on the Free India radio (Germany).

iii. The Italian radio has claimed at least once that Bose is in Japanese territory.

iv. Indians here seem on the whole to think that he is in Japanese territory.

v. Escape to Japanese territory would have been physically easier than escape in the other direction, though the latter would not be impossible.

vi. The Vichy report of his death in a plane accident between Bangkok and Tokio, though almost certainly mistaken, seemed to suggest that Vichy quarters took it for granted that he was in Japanese territory.

vii. According to engineers it would not be impossible to broadcast his voice scrambled from Tokio to Berlin and there unscramble and rebroadcast it.

There are innumerable other considerations and endless rumours.] The two questions hardest to answer are: If Bose is in Japanese territory, why this elaborate effort to make it appear that he is in Berlin, where he is comparatively ineffectual? If Bose is in German territory, how did he get there? Of course it is quite reasonably likely that he got there with Russian connivance. Then the question arises, if the Russians had previously passed Bose through, did they afterwards tip us off when they came into the war on our side? To know the answer to that would give one a useful clue to their attitude towards ourselves. Of course one can get no information about questions of that type here. One has to do one’s propaganda in the dark, discreetly sabotaging the policy directives when they seem more than usually silly.30

To judge from their wireless, the Germans believe in a forthcoming invasion, either of France or Norway. What a chance to have a go at Spain! As, however, they have fixed a date for it (May 1st) they may merely be discussing the possibility of invasion in order to jeer when it does not come off. No sign here of any invasion preparations – no rumours about assembly of troops or boats, re-arrangement of railway schedules etc. The most positive sign is Beaverbrook’s pro-invasion speech in the USA.

[There seems to be no news whatever. It must be months since the papers were so empty.]

Struck by the mediocre physique and poor general appearance of the American soldiers one sees from time to time in the street. The officers usually better than the men, however.

4.27.42: [Much speculation about the meaning of Hitler’s speech yesterday. In general it gives an impression of pessimism. Beaverbrook’s invasion speech is variously interpreted, at its face value, as a pep talk for the Americans, as something to persuade the Russians that we are not leaving them in the lurch, and as the beginning of an attack on Churchill (who may be forced into opposing offensive action). Nowadays, whatever is said or done, one looks instantly for hidden motives and assumes that words mean anything except what they appear to mean.]

From the Italian radio, describing life in London:

“Five shillings were given for one egg yesterday, and one pound sterling for a kilogram of potatoes. Rice has disappeared, even from the Black Market, and peas have become the prerogative of millionaires. There is no sugar on the market, although small quantities are still to be found at prohibitive prices’’.

One would say that this is stupid propaganda, because if such conditions really existed England would stop fighting in a few weeks, and when this fails to happen the listener is bound to see that he has been deceived. But in fact there is no such reaction. You can go on and on telling lies, and the most palpable lies at that, and even if they are not actually believed, there is no strong revulsion either.

We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends. The Indian nationalist is sunken in self-pity and hatred of Britain and utterly indifferent to the miseries of China, the English pacifist works himself up into frenzies about the concentration camps in the Isle of Man and forgets about those in Germany, etc., etc. One notices this in the case of people one disagrees with, such as Fascists or pacifists but in fact everyone is the same, at least everyone who has definite opinions. Everyone is dishonest, and everyone is utterly heartless towards people who are outside the immediate range of his own interests. What is most striking of all is the way sympathy can be turned on and off like a tap according to political expediency. [All the pinks, or most of them, who flung themselves to and fro in their rage against Nazi atrocities before the war, forgot all about these atrocities and obviously lost their sympathy with the Jews etc. as soon as the war began to bore them. Ditto with people who hated Russia like poison up to June 22, 1941, and then suddenly forgot about the purges, the G.P.U. etc. the moment Russia came into the war. I am not thinking of lying for political ends, but of actual changes in subjective feeling.] But is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless. All power is in the hands of paranoiacs.

4.29.42: Yesterday to the House to hear the India debate. A poor show except for Cripps’s speech. They are now sitting in the House of Lords.31 During Cripps’s speech one had the impression that the house was full, but on counting I found only about 200–250 members, which is enough to fill most of the seats. Everything had a somewhat mangy look. Red rexine cushions on the benches – I could swear they used to be red plush at one time. The ushers’ shirt fronts were very dingy. When I see this dreary rubbish going on, or when I read about the later days of the League of Nations or the antics of Indian politicians, with their endless changes of front, line-ups, demarches, denunciations, protests and gestures generally, I always remember that the Roman Senate still existed under the later Empire. [This is the twilight of Parliamentary democracy and] these creatures are simply ghosts gibbering in some corner while the real events happen elsewhere.

5.6.42: People do not seem pleased about Madagascar32 as they did about Syria,33 perhaps not grasping equally well its strategical significance, but more, I think, for want of a suitable propaganda buildup beforehand. [In the case of Syria the obviousness of the danger, the continual stories about German infiltration, and the long uncertainty as to whether the Government would act, gave people the impression that it was public opinion which had forced the decision. For all I know it may even have done so, to some extent. No similar preparation in this case.] As soon as it became clear that Singapore was in danger I pointed out that we might have to seize Madagascar and had better begin the buildup in our Indian newsletters. I was somewhat choked off even then, and some weeks back a directive came, I suppose from the Foreign Office, that Madagascar was not to be mentioned. Reason given (after the British troops had landed) “So as not to give the show away”. Result, the seizure of Madagascar can be represented all over Asia as a piece of imperialist grabbing.

Saw two women driving in an old-fashioned governess cart today. A week or two back saw two men in a carriage and pair, and one of the men actually wearing a grey bowler hat.

[Much speculation as to the authorship of articles in the Tribune, violently attacking Churchill and signed “Thomas Rainsborough”.34 Considered by some to be Frank Owen,35 which I do not believe.]

5.8.42: According to W.36 a real Anglo-Russian alliance is to be signed up and the Russian delegates are already in London. I don’t believe this.

The Turkish radio (for some time past I think this has been one of the most reliable sources of information) alleges that both Germans and Russians are preparing to use poison gas in the forthcoming battle.

[Great naval battle in progress in the Coral Sea.37 Sinkings claimed by both sides so vast that one does not know what to believe. But from the willingness of the Japanese radio to talk about the battle (they have already named it the Battle of the Coral Sea) the presumption is that they count on making their objective.

My guess as to the identity of ‘Thomas Rainsboro’: Tom Wintringham. (Right!)

(5.30.42. Wintringham denies authorship of these articles, but I still think he wrote them.)38]

5.11.42: Another gas warning (in Churchill’s speech) last night. I suppose we shall be using it before many weeks are over.

From a Japanese broadcast: “In order to do justice to the patriotic spirit of the Koreans, the Japanese Government have decided to introduce compulsory military service in Korea”.

Rumoured date for the German invasion of Britain: May 25th.

5.15.42: I saw Cripps on Wednesday, the first time I had actually spoken to him. Rather well impressed. He was more approachable and easy-going than I had expected, and quite ready to answer questions. Though aged 53 some of his movements are almost boyish. On the other hand he has decidedly a red nose. [I saw him in one of the reception rooms, or whatever they are called, off the House of Lords. Some interesting old prints on the walls, coronets on the chairs and on the ashtrays, but everything with the vaguely decayed look that all Parliamentary institutions now have. A string of non-descript people waiting to see Cripps. As I waited trying to talk to his secretary, a phrase I always remember on these occasions came into my mind – “shivering in ante-rooms”. In eighteenth-century biographies you always read about people waiting on their patrons and “shivering in ante-rooms”. It is one of those ready made phrases like “leave no stone unturned”, and yet how true it is as soon as you get anywhere near politics, or even the more expensive kinds of journalism.]

Cripps considers that Bose is definitely in German territory. He says it is known that he got out through Afghanistan. I asked him what he thought of Bose, whom he used to know well, and he described him as “a thoroughly bad egg”. I said there seemed little doubt that he is subjectively pro-Fascist. Cripps: “He’s pro-Subhas. That is all he really cares about. He will do anything that he thinks will help his career along”.

I am not certain, on the evidence of Bose’s broadcasts, that this is so. I said I thought very few Indians were reliably anti-Fascist. Cripps disagreed so far as the younger generation go. He said the young Communists and left wing Socialists are wholeheartedly anti-Fascist and have a western conception of Socialism and internationalism. Let’s hope it’s so.

5.19.42: Attlee reminds me of nothing so much as a recently dead fish, before it has had time to stiffen.

5.21.42: Molotov is said to be in London. I don’t believe this.

5.22.42: It is said that Molotov is not only in London but that the new Anglo-Russian treaty is already signed.39 This however comes from Warburg, who is alternately over-optimistic and over-pessimistic – at any rate, always believes in the imminence of enormous and dramatic changes. If true it would be a godsend for the filling-up of my [BBC] newsletters. It is getting harder and harder to find anything to put into these, with nothing happening except on the Russian front, and the news from there, whether from Russian or German sources, growing more and more phony. I wish I could spare a week to go through the Russian and German broadcasts of the past year and tot up their various claims. I should say the Germans would have killed 10 million men and the Russians would have advanced to somewhere well out in the Atlantic Ocean.

5.27.42: Cutting from the D. Express of 5.26.42:

CAIRO, Monday. – General Auchinleck, in a drive against red tape hindering the war effort in the Middle East, has sent this letter “to all officers and headquarters of this command”: –

“An extract from a letter written by Wellington from Spain about 1810 to the Secretary for War, Lord Bradford:

“ ‘My lord, if I attempted to answer the mass of futile correspondence that surrounds me, I should be debarred from all serious business of campaigning.

“ ‘So long as I retain an independent position I shall see to it that no officer under my command is debarred, by attending to the futile drivelling of mere quill driving in your lordship’s office, from attending to his first duty – which is, as always, to train the private men under his command.’ ”

General Auchinleck40 adds: “I know that this does not apply to you; but please see to it that it can never be applied to you or to anyone working under you.” – A.P.

This is printed in the papers and even given out over the air, but, after all, the operative fact is that no one does or can talk like that to the War Office nowadays.

More rumours that Molotov is in London. Also cryptic paras in the papers suggesting that this may be so (no mention of names, of course).

5.30.42: Almost every day in the neighbourhood of Upper Regent Street one can see a tiny, elderly, very yellow Japanese, with a face like a suffering monkey’s, walking slowly along with an enormous policeman walking beside him. On some days they are holding a solemn conversation. I suppose he is one of the Embassy staff. But whether the policeman is there to prevent him from committing acts of sabotage, or to protect him from the infuriated mob, there is no knowing.

The Molotov rumour seems to have faded out. Warburg, who accepted the Molotov story without question, has now forgotten it and is full of the inner story of why Garvin41 was sacked from the Observer. It was because he refused to attack Churchill. The Astors are determined to get rid of Churchill because he is pro-Russian and the transformation of the Observer is part of this manoeuvre. The Observer is to lead the attack on Churchill and at the same time canalise the gifted young journalists who are liable to give the war a revolutionary meaning, making them use their energies on futilities until they can be dispensed with. All inherently probable. On the other hand I don’t believe that David Astor,42 who acts as the decoy elephant, is consciously taking part in any such thing.* It is amusing to see not only the Beaverbrook press, which is now plus royaliste que le roi so far as Russia is concerned, but the T.U.43 Weekly Labour’s Northern Voice, suddenly discovering Garvin as a well-known anti-Fascist who has been sacked for his radical opinions. One thing that strikes me about nearly everyone nowadays is the shortness of their memories. Desmond Hawkins44 told me a little while back that he recently bought some fried fish wrapped up in a sheet of newspaper dating from 1940. On one side was an article proving that the Red Army was no good, and on the other a write-up of that gallant sailor and well-known Anglophile, Admiral Darlan.45

Pasted into the Diary is ‘That Monstrous Man’, a poem by Nicholas Moore46 (for which see CW, XIII, p. 341). This is followed by Orwell’s comment:

Cf. Alexander Comfort’s letter in the last Horizon47

6.4.42: Very hot weather. Struck by the normality of everything – lack of hurry, fewness of uniforms, general unwarlike appearance of the crowds who drift slowly through the streets, pushing prams or loitering in the squares to look at the hawthorn bushes. It is already noticeable that there are much fewer cars, however. Here and there a car with a fuel converter at the back, having slightly the appearance of an old-fashioned milkcart. Evidently there is not so much bootleg petrol about after all.

6.6.42: The Molotov rumour still persists. He was here to negotiate the treaty, and has gone back, so it is said. No hint of this in any newspaper, however.

There is said to be much disagreement on the staff of the New Statesman over the question of the Second Front.48 Having squealed for a year that we must open a second front immediately, Kingsley Martin49 now has cold feet. He says they now say that the army cannot be trusted, the soldiers will shoot their officers in the back etc. – this after endeavouring throughout the war to make the soldiers mistrust their officers. Meanwhile I think now that a second front is definitely projected, at any rate if enough shipping can be scraped together.

6.7.42: The Sunday Express has also gone cold on the second front. The official line now appears to be that our air raids are a second front. Obviously there has been some kind of government handout to the papers, telling them to pipe down on this subject. [If the government merely wishes to stop them spreading misleading rumours, the puzzle is why they weren’t silenced earlier.] It is just possible that the invasion has now been definitely decided on and the papers have been told to go anti-second front in order to throw the enemy off the scent. In this labyrinth of lies in which we are living the one explanation one never believes is the obvious one. [Cf. David Astor’s story about the two German Jews meeting in the train:

First Jew. Where are you going to?

Second Jew. Berlin.

First Jew. Liar! You just say that to deceive me. You know that if you say you are going to Berlin I shall think you are going to Leipzig, and all the time, you dirty crook, you really are going to Berlin!]

Last Tuesday [June 2, 1942] spent a long evening with Cripps (who had expressed a desire to meet some literary people) together with Empson, Jack Common, David Owen, Norman Cameron, Guy Burgess50 and another man (an official) whose name I didn’t get. About 2½ hours of it, with nothing to drink. The usual inconclusive discussion. Cripps, however, very human and willing to listen. The person who stood up to him most successfully was Jack Common. Cripps said several things that amazed and slightly horrified me. One was that many people whose opinion was worth considering believed that the war would be over by October – ie. that Germany would be flat out by that time. When I said that I should look on that as a disaster pure and simple (because if the war were won as easily as that there would have been no real upheaval here and the American millionaires would still be in situ) he appeared not to understand. He said that once the war was won the surviving great powers would in any case have to administer the world as a unit, and seemed not to feel that it made much difference whether the great powers were capitalist or socialist.* [Both David Owen and the man whose name I don’t know supported him.] I saw that I was up against the official mind, which sees everything as a problem in administration and does not grasp that at a certain point, ie. when certain economic interests are menaced, public spirit ceases to function. [The basic assumption of such people is that everyone wants the world to function properly and will do his best to keep the wheels running. They don’t realise that most of those who have the power don’t care a damn about the world as a whole and are only intent on feathering their own nests.] I can’t help feeling a strong impression that Cripps has already been got at. Not with money or anything of that kind of course, nor even by flattery and the sense of power, which in all probability he genuinely doesn’t care about: but simply by responsibility, which automatically makes a man timid. Besides, as soon as you are in power your perspectives are foreshortened. Perhaps a bird’s eye view is as distorted as a worm’s eye view.

[Wintringham denies being “Thomas Rainboro’”, I think perhaps with truth. If not Wintringham, it might perhaps be Lord Winster (Commander Fletcher).51]

Jack Common (1903–68), a worker from Tyneside employed by The Adelphi, first as a circulation pusher from June 1930, then as assistant editor, from 1932. He and Orwell became friends and he stayed in the Orwells’ cottage at Wallington when they were in Marrakech. He achieved success with The Freedom of the Streets, which Orwell reviewed on June 16, 1938 (CW, X, pp. 162–3). See also Orwell Remembered, pp. 139–43.

Arthur David Kemp Owen (1904–70) personal assistant to Sir Stafford Cripps, February 19 to November 21, 1942.

Norman Cameron (1905–53) was a friend and disciple of Robert Graves, with whom he and Alan Hodge edited Work in Hand (1942). His The Winter House and Other Poems was published in 1935. He also translated from French and German.

Guy Burgess (1911–63), educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, was a good talker and a man of considerable gifts, which he used to proselytise the cause of Communism. He worked for the British security services and the BBC (as a Home Service talks producer) and then joined the Foreign Office. His pro-Soviet activities were not suspected until, in May 1951, he suddenly left with Donald Maclean for Moscow remaining there until his death.

6.10.42: The only time when one hears people singing in the BBC is in the early morning, between 6 and 8. That is the time when the charwomen are at work. A huge army of them arrives all at the same time, they sit in the reception hall waiting for their brooms to be issued to them and making as much noise as a parrot house, and then they have wonderful choruses, all singing together as they sweep the passages. The place has a quite different atmosphere at this time from what it has later in the day.

6.11.42: [The Germans announce over the wireless that as the inhabitants of a Czech village called Ladice° (about 1200 inhabitants) were guilty of harbouring the assassins of Heydrich they have shot all the males in the village, sent all the women to concentration camps, sent all the children to be “re-educated”, razed the whole village to the ground and changed its name. I am keeping a copy of the announcement, as recorded in the BBC monitoring report.]

From the BBC monitoring report: –

It is officially announced: The search and investigation for the murderers of S.S. Obergruppenfuehrer Gen. Heydrich52 has established unimpeachable indications (sic) that the population of the locality of Lidice, near Kladno, supported and gave assistance to the circle (sic) of perpetrators in question. In spite of the interrogation of the local inhabitants, the pertinent means of evidence were secured without the help of the population. The attitude of the inhabitants to the outrage thus manifested, is manifested also by other acts hostile to the Reich, by the discoveries of printed matter hostile to the Reich, of dumps of arms and ammunition, of an illegal wireless transmitter, of huge quantities of controlled goods, as well as by the fact that inhabitants of the locality are in active enemy service abroad. Since the inhabitants of this village (sic) have flagrantly violated the laws which have been issued, by their activity and by the support given to the murderers of S.S. Obergruppenfuehrer Heydrich, the male adults have been shot, the women have been sent to a concentration camp and the children have been handed over to the appropriate educational authorities. The buildings of the locality have been levelled to the ground, and the name of the community has been obliterated.

(Note: This is an identical repetition, in German, of an announcement made in Czech, from Prague at 19.00, when reception was very bad).

It does not particularly surprise me that people do this kind of thing, nor even that they announce that they are doing them. What does impress me, however, is that other people’s reaction to such happenings is governed solely by the political fashion of the moment. Thus before the war the pinks believed any and every horror story that came out of Germany or China. Now the pinks no longer believe in German or Japanese atrocities and automatically write off all horror stories as “propaganda”. In a little while you will be jeered at if you suggest that the story of Lidice could possibly be true. And yet there the facts are, announced by the Germans themselves and recorded on gramophone discs which no doubt will still be available. Cf. the long list of atrocities from 1914 onwards [German atrocities in Belgium, Bolshevik atrocities, Turkish atrocities, British atrocities in India, American atrocities in Nicaragua, Nazi atrocities, Italian atrocities in Abyssinia and Cyrenaica, red and white atrocities in Spain, Japanese atrocities in China53 ----] in every case believed in or disbelieved in according to political predilection, with utter non-interest in the facts and with complete willingness to alter one’s beliefs as soon as the political scene alters.

Under the Government Regulation 18B, because of exaggerated fears that amongst those who had come to Britain as refugees, especially from Nazi Germany, there were concealed spies and saboteurs, thousands of innocent people were interned on the Isle of Man. Although bitterly ironic, this hardly amounted to an atrocity in the grim scale of such horrors. The deporting of Jews on the S.S Dunera to Australia on similar grounds was also misconceived, and led to treatment that was cruel as well as stupid.

6.13.42: The most impressive fact about the Molotov visit is that the Germans knew nothing about it. Not a word on the radio about Molotov’s presence in London till the signature of the treaty was officially announced, although all the while the German radio was shouting about the bolshevisation of Britain. Obviously they would have spilt the beans if they had known. Taken in conjunction with certain other things (eg. the capture last year of two very amateurish spies dropped by parachute, with portable wireless transmitters and actually with chunks of German sausage in their suitcases) this suggests that the German spy system in this country cannot be up to much.

A sequence of four newspaper cuttings is pasted into the manuscript Diary at this point. For full details see Complete Works, XIII, pp. 362–3.:

1. From editorial in Tribune of 6.12.42, on the death of Wm. Mellor.55 Their idea of “Vigorous style”.

2. From Hitler’s speeches, quoted in Reynolds’s56 of 6.21.42.

3. Tribune of 6.12.42 . (article by Wilfred Macartney). Cf. prewar references to Axis censorship, radio hypnosis etc. Cf. also German official statements in the Cologne raid.

4. How we live in 1942 (cutting from E. Standard: Illustration of five women, captioned ‘Russia’s Tommy-Gun Girls are Ready to Fight’).

6.15.42: No question now that the second front has been decided on. All the papers talk of it as a certainty and Moscow is publicising it widely. Whether it is really feasible remains to be seen, of course.

Cutting from BBC monitoring report. Typical of many similar German announcements.

Pasted sideways in the manuscript is the BBC monitoring report and his own typed report of the liquidation of Lidice. The texts are verbally the same. (See CW, XIII, p. 364.)

6.21.42: The thing that strikes one in the BBC – and it is evidently the same in various of the other departments – is not so much the moral squalor and the ultimate futility of what we are doing, as the feeling of frustration, the impossibility of getting anything done, even any successful piece of scoundrelism. Our policy is so ill-defined, the disorganisation is so great [there are so many changes of plan] and the fear and hatred of intelligence are so all-pervading, that one cannot plan any sort of wireless campaign whatever . [When one plans some series of talks, with some more or less definite propaganda line behind it, one is first told to go ahead, then choked off on the ground that this or that is “injudicious” or “premature”, then told again to go ahead, then told to water everything down and cut out any plain statements that may have crept in here and there, then told to “modify” the series in some way that removes its original meaning; and then at the last moment the whole thing is suddenly cancelled by some mysterious edict from above and one is told to improvise some different series which one feels no interest in and which in any case has no definite idea behind it.] One is constantly putting sheer rubbish on the air because of having talks which sounded too intelligent cancelled at the last moment. In addition the organisation is so overstaffed that numbers of people have almost literally nothing to do. But even when one manages to get something fairly good on the air one is weighed down by the knowledge that hardly anybody is listening. Except, I suppose, in Europe the BBC simply isn’t listened to overseas, a fact known to everyone concerned with overseas broadcasting. [Some listener research has been done in America and it is known that in the whole of the USA about 300,000 people listen to the BBC. In India or Australia the number would not be anywhere near that.] It has come out recently that (two years after the Empire service was started) plenty of Indians with shortwave sets don’t even know that the BBC broadcasts to India.

It is the same with the only other public activity I take part in, the Home Guard. After two years no real training has been done, no specialised tactics worked out, no battle positions fixed upon, no fortifications built – all this owing to endless changes of plan and complete vagueness as to what we are supposed to be aiming at. Details of organisation, battle positions etc. have been changed so frequently that hardly anyone knows at any given moment what the current arrangements are supposed to be. To give just one example, for well over a year our company has been trying to dig a system of trenches in Regents Park, in case airborne troops land there. Though dug over and over again these trenches have never once been in a completed state, because when they are half done there is always a change of plan and fresh orders. Ditto with everything. Whatever one undertakes, one starts with the knowledge that presently there will come a sudden change of orders, and then another change, and so on indefinitely. Nothing ever happens except continuous dithering, resulting in progressive disillusionment all round. The best one can hope is that it is much the same on the other side.

6.24.42: Listened-in last night to Lord Haw Haw – not Joyce,57 who apparently has been off the air for some time, but a man who sounded to me like a South African, followed by another with more of a cockney voice. There was a good deal about the Congress of the Free India movement in Bangkok. Was amazed to notice that all the Indian names were mispronounced, and grossly mispronounced – eg. Ras Behari Bose58 rendered as Rash Beery Bose. Yet after all the Indians who are broadcasting from Germany are available for advice on these points. They probably go in and out of the same building as Lord Haw Haw every day. It is rather encouraging to see this kind of slovenliness happening on the other side as well.

6.26.42: Everyone very defeatist after the Libya business.59 Some of the papers going cold on the Second Front again. Tom Driberg (“William Hickey”) wins the Malden by-election, scoring twice as many votes as the Conservative candidate. That makes 4 out of the last 6 elections that the Government has lost.

7.1.42: At Callow End, Worcs. (staying on a farm).60 No noise except aeroplanes, birds and the mowers cutting the hay. No mention of the war except with reference to the Italian prisoners, who are working on some of the farms. They seem to be considered good workers and for fruit-picking are preferred to the town people who come out from Worcester and are described as “artful”. In spite of the feeding difficulties, plenty of pigs, poultry, geese and turkeys about. Cream for every meal at this place.61

[Huge bombers flying overhead all day. Also aeroplanes doing extraordinary things, eg. towing other planes by a wire (perhaps gliders?) or carrying smaller planes perched on their backs.]

7.3.42: Vote of censure defeated 475–25. This figure means that there were very few abstentions. The same trick as usual – the debate twisted into a demand for a vote of confidence in Churchill himself, which has to be given, since there is no one to take Churchill’s place. Things are made much easier for the government by the obvious bad motives of some of its chief attackers, eg. Hore-Belisha.62 I don’t know how much longer this comedy can go on, but not much longer.

No reference to the second front in Churchill’s speech.

The Japanese are evidently going to attack Russia fairly soon. They appear to be firmly lodged in the outer Aleutians, which can’t have any meaning except as a move to cut communications between Russia and the USA.

The pinks are panicking to an extent they haven’t equalled since Dunkirk. The New Statesman’s leading article is headed “Facing the Spectre”. They take the loss of Egypt for granted. Heaven knows whether this will actually happen, but these people have prophecied° the loss of Egypt so often before that their doing so again is almost enough to persuade one that it won’t happen. It is curious how they always do what the Germans want them to do – eg., for some time past, demanding that we stop the raids on Germany and send our bombers to Egypt. A little earlier we were to send our bombers to India. In each case the same move as was being demanded by the German “freedom” stations. A thing that strikes one also is the airy disdain with which all the pinks talk of our air raids on Germany – air raids make very little impression, etc., etc. And these are the people who squealed loudest during the blitz on London.

7.4.42: Everyone seems stupefied by Wardlaw-Milne’s63 suggestion [in the speech moving the vote of censure,] that the Duke of Gloucester should be made Commander-in-Chief. The most likely explanation is that Gloucester was intended to act as dummy for somebody else [(Possibly Mountbatten?)] Even so one could hardly imagine a worse figurehead than this fat mental defective.

Pubs in this village shut quite a lot of the time for lack of beer. Possibly only due to the recent spell of hot weather. This is a hop area and I find the farmers have been asked not to cut down their acreage of hops, indeed some have increased it. All these hops go for beer, at least all the high-grade ones.

7.10.42: A day or two ago a couple of lorries belonging to the Navy arrived with a party of Wrens64 and sailors who put in several hours work weeding out the turnips in Mr. Phillips’s65 field. All the village women delighted by the appearance of the sailors in their blue trousers and white singlets. “Don’t they look clean, like! I like sailors. They always look so clean”. [The sailors and Wrens also seemed to enjoy their outing and drinks in the pub afterwards. It appeared that they belonged to some volunteer organisation which sends workers out as they are needed] Mrs Phillips explains it: “It’s the voluntary organization from Malvern.66 Sometimes it’s A.Ts67 they send and sometimes sailors. Of course we like having them. Well, it makes you a bit independent of your own work-people, you see. The work-people, they’re awful nowadays. Just do so much and no more. [They know you can’t do without them, you see. And you can’t get a woman to do a bit indoors nowadays. The girls won’t stay here, with no picture-house in the village. I do have a woman who comes in, but I can’t get any work out of her.] It helps a bit when you get a few voluntary workers. Makes you more independent, like”.

How right and proper it all is [when you consider how necessary it is that agricultural work should not be neglected, and how right and proper also that town people should get a bit of contact with the soil.] Yet these voluntary organisations, plus the work done by soldiers in the hay-making etc., and the Italian prisoners, are simply blackleg labour.

The Government wins at Salisbury. Hipwell,68 the editor of Reveille, was the Independent candidate. Wherever this mountebank stands the Government wins automatically. How grateful they must be to him, if indeed they aren’t actually paying him to do it.

The “Blue Bell” again shut for lack of beer. Quite serious boozing for 4 or 5 days of the week, then drought. [Sometimes, however, when they are shut the local officers are to be seen drinking in a private room, the common soldiers as well as the labourers being shut out. The “Red Lion” in the next village, goes on a different system which the proprietor explains to me: “I don’t hold with giving it all to the summer visitors. If beer’s short, let the locals come first, I say. A lot of days I keep the pub door shut, and then only the locals know the way in at the back. A man that’s working in the fields needs his beer, ’specially with the food they got to eat nowadays. But I rations ’em. I says to ’em, ‘Now look here, you want your beer regular, don’t you? Wouldn’t you rather have a pint with your dinner every day than four pints one day and three the next?’ Same with the soldiers. I don’t like to refuse beer to a soldier, but I only lets ’em have a pint their first drink. After that it’s ‘Half pints only, boys’. Like that it gets shared out a bit.”].

7.22.42: From Ahmed Ali’s69 last letter from India:

“Here is a little bit of old Delhi which might interest you.

“In a busy street a newsboy was shouting in Urdu: ‘Pandit Jawaharlal70 saying his rosary the other way round’. What he meant was that he had changed his attitude towards the Government. Questioned he said: ‘You can never be sure of him, today he says side with the Government and help in the war effort, tomorrow just the opposite’. He turned away from me and began shouting his cry, adding: ‘Jawaharlal has given a challenge to the Government’. I could not find this ‘challenge’ in the papers.

“Other newsboys selling Urdu papers: ‘Germany has smashed Russia in the very first attack’. Needless to say I read just the opposite in my English papers the next morning. Obviously the Urdu papers had repeated what Berlin had said. No one stops the newsboys shouting what they like.

“One day going in a tonga I heard the driver shout to his horse as he shied: ‘Why do you get back like our Sarkar! Go forward like Hitler!’ and he swore”.

[“Its rather fun going out to the bazars and markets and listening to the loud gossip – provided, of course, it is not unbearably hot. I shall tell you more from time to time, if you are interested.”]

7.23.42: I now make entries in this diary much more seldom than I used to, for the reason that I literally have not any spare time. And yet I am doing nothing that is not futility and have less and less to show for the time I waste. It seems to be the same with everyone – the most fearful feeling of frustration, of just footling round doing imbecile things, not imbecile because they are a part of the war and war is inherently foolish, but things which in fact don’t help or in any way affect the war effort, but are considered necessary by the huge bureaucratic machine in which we are all caught up. Much of the stuff that goes out from the BBC is just shot into the stratosphere, not listened to by anybody and known by those responsible for it to be not listened to by anybody. And round this futile stuff hundreds of skilled workers are grouped [, costing the country tens of thousands per annum,] and tagging on to them are thousands of others who in effect have no real job but have found themselves a quiet niche and are sitting in it pretending to work. The same everywhere, especially in the Ministries.

[However, the bread one casts on the waters sometimes fetches up in strange places. We did a series of 6 talks on modern English literature, very highbrow and, I believe, completely un-listened to in India. Hsiao Chi’en, the Chinese student, reads the talks in the “Listener” and is so impressed that he begins writing a book in Chinese on modern Western literature, drawing largely on our talks. So the propaganda aimed at India misses India and accidentally hits China. Perhaps the best way to influence India would be by broadcasting to China.]

The Indian Communist party, and its press, legalised again. I should say after this they will have to take the ban off the Daily Worker, otherwise the position is too absurd.

This reminds me of the story David Owen* told me and which I believe I didn’t enter in this diary. Cripps on his arrival in India asked the Viceroy to release the interned Communists. The Viceroy consented (I believe most of them have been released since), but at the last moment got cold feet and said nervously: “But how can you be sure they’re really Communists?”

We are going to have to increase our consumption of potatoes by 20 percent, so it is said. Partly to save bread, and partly to dispose of this year’s potato crop, which is enormous.71

7.26.42: Yesterday and today, on the Home Guard manoeuvres, passing various small camps of soldiers in the woods, radiolocation [= radar] stations etc. Struck by the appearance of the soldiers, their magnificent health and the brutalized look in their faces. All young and fresh, with round fat limbs and rosy faces with beautiful clear skins. But sullen brutish expressions – not fierce or wicked in any way, but simply stupefied by boredom, loneliness, discontent, endless tiredness and mere physical health.

7.27.42: Talking today with Sultana, one of the Maltese broadcasters. He says he is able to keep in fairly good touch with Malta and conditions are very bad there. “The last letter I get this morning was like a – how you say? (much gesticulation) – like a sieve. All the pieces what the censor cut out, you understand. But I make something out of it, all the same.” He went on to tell me, among other things, that 5 lbs of potatoes now cost the equivalent of 8 shillings. [He considers that of the two convoys which recently endeavoured to reach Malta the one from England, which succeeded in getting there, carried munitions, and the one from Egypt, which failed to get there, carried food.] I said, “Why can’t they send dehydrated food by plane?” He shrugged his shoulders, seeming to feel instinctively that the British government would never go to that much trouble over Malta. Yet it seems that the Maltese are solidly pro-British, thanks to Mussolini, no doubt.

[The German broadcasts are claiming that Voroshilov72 is in London, which is not very likely and has not been rumoured here. Probably a shot in the dark to offset their recent failure over Molotov,73 and made on the calculation that some high-up Russian military delegate is likely to be here at this moment. If the story should turn out to be true, I shall have to revise my ideas about the German secret service in this country.]

The crowd at the Second Front meeting in Trafalgar Square estimated at 40,000 in the rightwing papers and 60,000 in the leftwing. Perhaps 50,000 in reality. My spy reports that in spite of the present Communist line of “all power to Churchill”, the Communist speakers in fact attacked the Government very bitterly.

7.28.42: Today I have read less newspapers than usual, but the ones I have seen have gone cold on the Second Front, except for the News Chronicle. [The Evening News published an anti-Second Front article (by General Brownrigg74) on its front page.] I remarked on this to Herbert Read75 who said gloomily “The Government has told them to shut up about it”. [It is true of course that if they are intending to start something they must still seem to deny it.] Read said he thought the position in Russia was desperate and seemed very upset about it, though in the past he has been even more anti-Stalin than I. I said to him, “Don’t you feel quite differently towards the Russians now they are in a jam?” and he agreed. For that matter I felt quite differently towards England when I saw that England was in a jam. Looking back I see that I was anti-Russian (or more exactly anti-Stalin) during the years when Russia appeared to be powerful, militarily and politically, ie. 1933 to 1941. Before and after those dates I was pro-Russian. One could interpret this in several different ways.

A small raid on the outskirts of London last night. The new rocket guns, some of which are [now] manned by Home Guards,76 were in action [and are said to have brought down some planes (8 planes down altogether).]

This is the first time the Home Guard can properly be said to have been in action, a little over 2 years after its formation.

The Germans never admit damage to military objectives, but they acknowledge civilian casualties after our bigger raids. After the Hamburg raid of 2 nights ago they described the casualties as heavy. The papers here reproduce this with pride. Two years ago we would all have been aghast at the idea of killing civilians. I remember saying to someone during the blitz, when the RAF were hitting back as best they could, “In a year’s time you’ll see headlines in the Daily Express : ‘Successful Raid on Berlin Orphanage. Babies Set on Fire’.” It hasn’t come to that yet, but that is the direction we are going in.

8.1.42: If the figures given are correct, the Germans have lost about 10 per cent of their strength in each of the last raids. According to Peter Masefield this isn’t anything to do with the new guns but has all been done by the night fighters. He also told me that the new FW 190 fighter is much better than any fighter we now have in actual service . [An aircraft construction man named Bowyer who was broadcasting together with him agreed with this.] Oliver Stewart considers that the recent German raids are reconnaissance raids and that they intend starting the big blitz again soon, at any rate if they can get their hands free in Russia.77

Not much to do over the bank holiday weekend.78 Busy at every odd moment making a hen-house. This kind of thing now needs great ingenuity owing to the extreme difficulty of getting hold of timber. No sense of guilt or time-wasting when I do anything of this type – on the contrary, a vague feeling that any sane occupation must be useful, or at any rate justifiable.

8.3.42: D[avid] A[stor] says Churchill is in Moscow.79 He also says there isn’t going to be any second front. However, if a second front is intended, the Government must do all it can to spread the contrary impression beforehand, [and D.A. might be one of the people used to plant the rumour.

D.A. says that when the commandos land the Germans never fight but always clear out immediately. No doubt they have orders to do so. This fact is not allowed to be published – presumable reason, to prevent the public from becoming over-confident.]

According to D.A., Cripps does intend to resign from the Government80 and has his alternative policy ready. He can’t, of course, speak of this in public but will do so in private. However, I hear that Macmurray81 when staying with Cripps recently could get nothing whatever out of him as to his political intentions.

8.4.42: The Turkish radio (among others) also says Churchill is in Moscow.

8.5.42: General dismay over the Government of India’s rash act in publishing the documents seized in the police raid on Congress headquarters.82 [As usual the crucial document is capable of more than one interpretation and the resulting squabble will simply turn wavering elements in Congress more anti-British.] The anti-Indian feeling which the publication has aroused in America, and perhaps Russia and China, is not in the long run any good to us. The Russian government announces discovery of a Tsarist plot, quite in the old style. I can’t help a vague feeling that this is somehow linked up with the simultaneous discovery of Gandhi’s plot with the Japanese.

8.7.42: [Hugh Slater is very despondent about the war. He says that at the rate at which the Russians have been retreating it is not possible that Timoshenko has really got his army away intact, as reported. He also says that the tone of the Moscow press and wireless shows that morale in Russia must be very bad.] Like almost everyone I know, except Warburg, Hugh Slater considers that there isn’t going to be any Second Front. This is the inference everyone draws from Churchill’s visit to Moscow.83 People say, “Why should he go to Moscow to tell them we’re going to84 open a second front? He must have gone there to tell them we can’t do it”. Everyone agrees with my suggestion that it would be a good job if Churchill were sunk on the way back, like Kitchener.85 [Of course the possibility remains that Churchill isn’t in Moscow.]

Last night for the first time took a Sten gun to pieces.86 There is almost nothing to learn in it. [No spare parts. If the gun goes seriously wrong you simply chuck it away and get another.] Weight of the gun without magazine is 5½ pounds – [weight of the Tommy gun would be 12–15 lb. Estimated price is not 50/– as I had imagined, but 18/–.] I can see a million or two million of these things, each with 500 cartridges and a book of instructions, floating down all over Europe on little parachutes. If the Government had the guts to do that they would really have burned their boats.

8.9.42: Fired the Sten gun for the first time today. No kick, no vibration, very little noise, and reasonable accuracy. Out of about 2500 rounds fired, 2 stoppages, in each case due to a dud cartridge – treatment, simply to work the bolt by hand.

8.10.42: Nehru, Gandhi, Azad87 and many others in jail. Rioting over most of India, a number of deaths, countless arrests. Ghastly speech by Amery,88 speaking of Nehru and Co. as “wicked men”, “saboteurs” etc. This of course broadcast on the Empire service and rebroadcast by AIR.89 The best joke of all was that the Germans did their best to jam it, unfortunately without success.

Terrible feeling of depression among the Indians and everyone sympathetic to India. [Even Bokhari, a Moslem League90 man, almost in tears and talking about resigning from the BBC.] It is strange, but quite truly the way the British Government is now behaving upsets me more than a military defeat.

8.12.42: Appalling policy handout this morning about affairs in India. The riots are of no significance – situation is well in hand – after all the number of deaths is not large, etc., etc. As to the participation of students in the riots, this is explained along “boys will be boys” lines. “We all know that students everywhere are only too glad to join in any kind of rag”, etc., etc. Almost everyone utterly disgusted. Some of the Indians when they hear this kind of stuff turn quite pale, a strange sight.

Most of the press taking a tough line, the Rothermere press disgustingly so. If these repressive measures in India are seemingly successful for the time being, the effects in this country will be very bad. All seems set for a big come-back of the reactionaries, and it almost begins to appear as though leaving Russia in the lurch were part of the manoeuvre. [This afternoon shown in strict confidence by David Owen Amery’s statement [on] postwar policy towards Burma, based on Dorman-Smith’ s91 report. It envisages a return to “direct rule” for a period of 5 –7 years, Burma’s reconstruction to be financed by Britain and the big British firms to be re-established on much the same terms as before. Please God no document of this kind gets into enemy hands. I did however get from Owen and from the confidential document one useful piece of information – that, so far as is known, the scorched earth policy was really carried out with extreme thoroughness.]

8.14.42: Horrabin was broadcasting today, and as always we introduced him as the man who drew the maps for Wells’s Outline of History and Nehru’s Glimpses of World History.92 This had been extensively trailed and advertised beforehand, Horrabin’s connection with Nehru being naturally a draw for India. Today the reference to Nehru was cut out from the announcement – N. being in prison and therefore having become Bad.

8.18.42: From Georges Kopp’s93 last letter from Marseilles (after some rigmarole about the engineering work he has been doing): “. . . I am about to start production on an industrial scale. But I am not at all certain that I shall actually do so, because I have definite contracts with my firm, which has, I am afraid, developed lately connections which reduce considerably its independence and it is possible that another firm would eventually profit by my work, which I should hate since I have no arrangements at all with the latter and will not, for the time being, be prepared to sign any. If I am compelled to stop, I really don’t know what I am going to do; I wish some of my very dear friends to whom I have written repeatedly would not be as slow and as passive as they seem to be. If no prospects open in this field, I contemplate to make use of another process of mine, related to bridge-building [, which, you may remember, I have put into successful operation at San Mateo before the war.”]

Translated: “I am afraid France is going into full alliance with Germany. If the Second Front is not opened soon I shall do my best to escape to England”.

8.19.42: Big Commando raid on Dieppe today. Raid was still continuing this evening. Just conceivably the first step in an invasion, or a try-out for the first step, though I don’t think so. The warning that was broadcast to the French people that this was only a raid and they were not to join in would in that case be a bluff.

8.22.42: D[avid] A[stor] very damping about the Dieppe raid, which he saw at more or less close quarters and which he says was an almost complete failure except for the very heavy destruction of German fighter planes, which was not part of the plan. He says that the affair was definitely misrepresented in the press94 and is now being misrepresented in the reports to the P.M., and that the main facts were: – Something over 5000 men were engaged, of whom at least 2000 were killed or prisoners. It was not intended to stay longer on shore than was actually done (ie. till about 4 pm), but the idea was to destroy all the defences of Dieppe, and the attempt to do this was an utter failure. In fact only comparatively trivial damage was done, a few batteries of guns knocked out etc., and only one of the three main parties really made its objective. The others did not get far and many were massacred on the beach by artillery fire. The defences were formidable and would have been difficult to deal with even if there had been artillery support, as the guns were sunk in the face of the cliffs or under enormous concrete coverings. More tank-landing craft were sunk than got ashore. About 20 or 30 tanks were landed but none got off again. The newspaper photos which showed tanks apparently being brought back to England were intentionally misleading. The general impression was that the Germans knew of the raid beforehand.95 Almost as soon as it was begun they had a man broadcasting a spurious “eye-witness” account from somewhere further up the coast, and another man broadcasting false orders in English. On the other hand the Germans were evidently surprised by the strength of the air support. Whereas normally they have kept their fighters on the ground so as to conserve their strength, they sent them into the air as soon as they heard that tanks were landing, and lost a number of planes variously estimated, but considered by some RAF officers to be as high as 270. Owing to the British strength in the air the destroyers were able to lie outside Dieppe all day. One was sunk, but this was by a shore battery. When a request came to attack some objective on shore, the destroyers formed in line and raced inshore firing their guns while the fighter planes supported them overhead.

David Astor considers that this definitely proves that an invasion of Europe is impossible. [Of course we can’t feel sure that he hasn’t been planted to say this, considering who his parents are.] I can’t help feeling that to get ashore at all at such a strongly defended spot, without either bomber support, artillery support except for the guns of the destroyers (4.9 guns I suppose) or airborne troops, was a considerable achievement.

8.25.42: One of the many rumours circulating among Indians here is that Nehru, Gandhi and others have been deported to South Africa. This is the kind of thing that results from press censorship and suppressing newspapers.

8.27.42: Ban on the Daily Worker lifted.96 [It is to reappear on Sept. 7th, same day as Churchill makes his statement to Parliament.]

[German radio again alleging S. C. Bose is in Penang. But the indications are that this was a slip of the tongue for R. B. Bose.]

8.29.42: Advert in pub for pick-me-up tablets – phenacetin or something of the kind: –

Another rumour among the Indians about Nehru – this time that he has escaped.

9.7.42: There is evidently trouble in Syria. Handout this morning to the effect that – most unfortunately and much against H.M. Government’s will – General de Gaulle is insisting that Syria is still under a French mandate and it is impossible yet to make a treaty, as in the case of Irak. General de Gaulle’s attitude is considered most deplorable, but as he is, after all, the accredited leader of the Free French and the whole legal position is very obscure (the matter should be decided upon by the League of Nations which unfortunately no longer exists) H.M. Government is unable, etc. etc. In other words the Syrians will get no treaty, the blame for this is placed on our puppet de Gaulle, and if possible we shall swipe Syria for ourselves. When I heard this hollow rubbish trotted out by Rushbrooke-Williams97 this morning and we all had to listen and keep straight faces, there came into my head, I don’t quite know why, the lines from Hardy’s Dynasts about the crowning of Napoleon in Rome:

The Daily Worker reappeared today – very mild, but they are urging (a) a second front (b) all help to Russia in the way of arms etc., and (c) a demagogic programme of higher wages all round which would be utterly incompatible with (a) and (b).

9.10.42: Lecturing last night at Morley College, Lambeth. Small hall, about 100 people, working-class intelligentsia (same sort of audience as Left Book Club branch99). During the questions afterwards, no less than 6 people asked “Does not the lecturer think it was a great mistake to lift the ban from the Daily Worker ” – reasons given, that the D.W’s loyalty is not reliable and it is a waste of paper. [Only one woman stood up for the D. W., evidently a Communist at whom one or two of the others expressed impatience (“Oh, she’s always saying that”!)] This after a year during which there has been a ceaseless clamour for the lifting of the ban. One is constantly being thrown out in one’s calculations because one listens to the articulate minority and forgets the other 99 per cent. Cf. Munich, when the mass of the people were almost certainly behind Chamberlain’s policy, though to read the New Statesman etc. you wouldn’t have thought so.

9.15.42: Ghastly feeling of impotence over the India business, Churchill’s speeches, the evident intention of the blimps to have one more try at being what they consider tough, and the impudent way in which the newspapers can misrepresent the whole issue, well knowing that the public will never know enough or take enough interest to verify the facts. This last is the worst symptom of all – though actually our own apathy about India is not worse than the non-interest of Indian intellectuals in the struggle against Fascism in Europe.

9.21.42: Yesterday met Liddell Hart for the first time. Very defeatist and even, in my judgement, somewhat inclined to be pro-German subjectively. [In a great stew about the barbarism of bombing Lübeck. Considered that during the wars of recent centuries the British have the worst record of all for atrocities and destructiveness.] Although, of course, strongly opposed to the Second Front, also anxious for us to call off the bombing. There is no point in doing it, as it can achieve nothing and does not weaken Germany. On the other hand we ought not to have started the bombing in the first place (he stuck to it that it was we who started it), as it merely brought heavier reprisals on ourselves.

Osbert Sitwell100 was also there. [He was at one time connected with Mosley’s movement, but probably somewhat less inclined to go pro-German than L-H.] Both of them professed to be disgusted by our seizure of the Vichy colonies. Sitwell said that our motto was “When things look bad, retake Madagascar”. He said that in Cornwall in case of invasion the Home Guard have orders to shoot all artists. I said that in Cornwall this might be all for the best. Sitwell: “Some instinct would lead them to the good ones”.

9.22.42: Most of the ammunition for our Sten guns is Italian, or rather made in Germany for Italy. I fancy this must be the first weapon the British army has had whose bore was measured in millimetres instead of inches. They were going to make a new cheap automatic weapon, and having the vast stocks of ammunition captured in Abyssinia handy, manufactured the guns to fit the cartridges instead of the other way about. The advantage is that the ammunition of almost any continental submachine gun will fit it. It will be interesting to see whether the Germans or Japanese come out with a .303 weapon to fit captured British ammunition.

9.28.42: Open-air church parade in Regents Park yesterday. How touching the scene ought to be – the battalion in hollow square, band of the Coldstream Guards, the men standing bareheaded (beautiful autumn day, faint mist and not a leaf stirring, dogs gambolling round) and singing the hymns as best they could. But unfortunately there was a sermon with the jingoistic muck which is usual on these occasions and which makes me go pro-German for as long as I listen to it. Also a special prayer “for the people of Stalingrad” – the Judas kiss. [A detail that gets me down on these occasions is the clergyman’s white surplice, which looks all wrong against a background of military uniforms. Struck by the professionalism of the band, especially the bandmaster (an officer in the black peaked cap of the Guards). As each prayer drew to its close, a stirring in the band, the trombones come out of their leather suitcases, the bandmaster’s baton comes up, and they are ready to snap into the Amen just as the priest reaches “through Jesus Christ our Lord”.]

10.5.42: New viceroy of India to be appointed shortly. No clue as to who he will be. Some say General Auchinleck – who, it is said, gets on well with leftwing Indians.

Long talk with Brander, who is back after his 6 months tour in India.101 His conclusions so depressing that I can hardly bring myself to write them down. Briefly – affairs are much worse in India than anyone here is allowed to realise, the situation is in fact retrievable but won’t be retrieved because the government is determined to make no real concessions, hell will break loose when and if there is a Japanese invasion, and our broadcasts are utterly useless because nobody listens to them. Brander did say, however, that the Indians listen to BBC news, because they regard it as more truthful than that given out by Tokio or Berlin. He considers that we should broadcast news and music and nothing else. This is what I have been saying for some time past.

“Everyone liked and respected him and he was the inspiration of that rudimentary Third Programme which was sent out to the Indian student. He soon sensed that the audience for the programme was not so large as was thought by the senior officials and, before I went to India early in 1942 to find out, he gave a great deal of time to discussing the problems with me. I found that our programmes were at a time of day when nobody was listening and that they could hardly be heard because the signal was so weak. Very few students had access to wireless sets. . . .

I was always grateful to Orwell while we worked together in the B.B.C. He laughed very readily at the nonsense that went on, and made it tolerable. This did not interfere with his sense of responsibility, for he knew how important radio propaganda could be, if intelligently organized, and he worked very hard on his own talks, which were always good and usually brilliant. His voice was a great handicap. Thin and flat, it did not go over well on short-wave broadcasting”. [The quality of Orwell’s voice had been badly affected by his being shot through the throat when fighting in Spain.]

Brander goes on to refer to the proposal to put into print the good talks that were not being heard, and it was he who suggested that Blair broadcast under the name Orwell (see CW, XIV, pp. 89 and 100–2). After the war, he was Director of Publications for the British Council.

10.10.42: Today in honour of the anniversary of the Chinese Revolution the Chinese flag was hoisted over Broadcasting House. Unfortunately it was upside down.

[According to D[avid] A[stor], Cripps is going to resign shortly – pretext, that the War Cabinet is a sham, Churchill being in reality the sole power in it.]

10.11.42: The authorities in Canada have now chained up a number of German prisoners equal to the number of British prisoners chained up in Germany. What the devil are we coming to?102

10.15.42: A little bit of India transplanted to England. For some weeks our Marathi newsletters were translated and broadcast by a little man named Kothari, completely spherical but quite intelligent and, so far as I could judge, genuinely anti-Fascist. Suddenly one of the mysterious bodies which control recruitment for the BBC (in this case I think MI5)103 got onto the fact that Kothari was or had been a Communist, active in the students’ movement, and had been in jail, so the order came to get rid of him. A youth named Jatha, working at India House and politically OK, was engaged in his place. Translators in this language are not easy to find and Indians who speak it as their native tongue seem to tend to forget it while in England. After a few weeks my assistant, Miss Chitale, came to me with great secrecy and confided that the newsletters were still in fact being written by Kothari. Jatha, though still able to read the language, was no longer equal to writing it and Kothari was ghosting for him. No doubt the fee was being split between them. We can’t find another competent translator, so Kothari is to continue and we officially know nothing about it. Wherever Indians are to be found, this kind of thing will be happening.

10.17.42: Heard a “Jew joke” on the stage at the Players’ theatre last night – a mild one, and told by a Jew, but still slightly anti-Jew in tendency.104 More Second Front rumours. The date this time is given as October 20th, an unlikely date, being a Tuesday. It seems pretty clear that something is going to happen in West or North-west Africa however.

11.15.42: Church bells rung this morning – in celebration for the victory in Egypt.105 The first time that I have heard them in over two years.

This concludes Orwell’s War-time Diaries.