Accident almost cost world a classic novel

WITH its dystopian vision of Big Brother surveillance, historical revisionism and public mind control, it remains one of the great novels of the English language.

But George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was almost never written after its author came close to drowning after a boating accident halfway through writing it, his adoptive son, Richard Blair, 69, has revealed.

Orwell’s brush with death came after his dinghy was wrecked in a weir in Jura, Scotland, tipping him and his young son, niece and nephew overboard.

The accident, in the summer of 1947, occurred midway through the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Published a year before his death in 1950, it introduced phrases such as “Big Brother”, “Room 101” and “doublespeak” to common parlance.

Blair has now recorded his family memories as part of an archive about the island Jura, where Orwell lived from June 1946.

Speaking of the neardrowning, he revealed that the family — including Orwell’s sister Avril, nephew Henry Dakin and niece Lucy Dakin — had been out on a small motor boat as part of a camping trip. “Father got the tide table wrong,” he said. “We got wrecked. We lost the outboard and got caught in the tide.”

None of the party had been wearing life jackets, said Mr Blair. “My father and I ended up upside down underneath the boat,” he remembered. “He pulled me out and dragged me ashore. It was a pretty stupid thing to happen. In the twinkling of an eye that could have gone totally wrong and we could have been swept away and drowned. And of course that would have been the end of my father because he was still really in the middle of writing Nineteen Eighty-Four — so that wouldn’t have happened.”

They were eventually rescued by lobster fishermen. The Corryvreckan Whirlpool, feared as a lethal trap for careless sailors, is the world’s third largest.

Orwell, who was born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903, had moved to a spartan four-bedroom farmhouse on Jura after his London flat was destroyed by a V1 flying bomb in the Second World War, and his wife Eileen died under anaesthesia during a routine operation in 1945.

Shortly after the boating accident, Orwell was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to hospital before returning to Jura to finish his manuscript in July 1948. He had to retype the manuscript, which had been rewritten by hand.

“He tried to get hold of a secretary and nobody would come up to Jura,” said Blair. —