The Road to 1984
How the world’s most famous dystopian novel took shape in a remote Scottish paradise that couldn’t have been more different.
IN JANUARY 2017, 33 years after it was set and 68 years after it was published, sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four spiked by 9500 percent. The White House Press Secretary had claimed the crowds at US President Trump’s inauguration had been the biggest ever seen. When challenged with evidence showing that was false, Trump’s Senior Counselor, Kellyanne Conway, said they were using ‘alternative facts’, a phrase instantly dubbed as ‘Orwellian Newspeak’.
Orwell’s dystopian novel about the totalitarian superstate of Oceania has never been out of print and its relevance, worryingly, never seems to wane. Even if you’ve not read it, you’ll have heard phrases from it – Big Brother is watching you, the Thought Police, Room 101, Doublethink (and Orwell also coined the phrase ‘cold war’).
Set in a version of London – no longer in a country called Great Britain but in the province of Airstrip One – the grimy streets, watched over by the ‘glittering white concrete’ pyramid of the Ministry of Truth, are menacingly oppressive. But where Orwell wrote the book could not be more different, in a house miles from everywhere, surrounded by sea and wild skies on the Scottish island of Jura. ▶
When Eric Arthur Blair moved to this Hebridean isle in 1946, he described it as ‘an extremely un-getatable place’ and that hasn’t changed. First you have to reach the Kintyre Peninsula on Scotland’s west coast to catch a ferry to Islay, then another ferry to the southern tip of Jura. Next it’s 28 miles up the east coast on the island’s only road, until the singletrack asphalt ends in Glen Lealt and a four-mile walk along a track to his house at Barnhill begins.
All of it is fun though: sailing down West Loch Tarbert and out across the water, as the peaks of Jura crinkle ever bigger, the slick change for the second short crossing, then the increasingly spinetingling sense of emptiness as you drive up the long island, where the biggest settlement is the tiny village of Craighouse. Jura spans 142 square miles; its current population doesn’t even hit 200.
Orwell tackled the track on an old motorcycle that was forever breaking down – or he walked. Writing to friends planning to visit he advised ‘a raincoat and some stout boots’ and suggested they (mostly) travelled light: ‘don’t bring more luggage than, say, a rucksack and a haversack, but on the other hand do bring a little flour if you can.’ Living 25 miles from the nearest shop, plus post-war rationing, meant some things were in short supply.
‘It’s really quite a pleasant walk if one takes it slowly,’ he wrote. And that’s what I do. The track spools ahead across a tawny, tussocky moor, broken here and there by eruptions of knobbly rock. It’s like a wilder version of the ‘Golden Country’ of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a rural idyll that Winston Smith dreams about and later sees on a walk: ‘an old, closebitten pasture, with a footpath wandering across it and a molehill here and there.’ His trip is a fleeting respite from the suffocating surveillance of London’s two-way telescreens (which constantly broadcast and record), but even in the countryside, the
“Walking can be just a means of getting from A to B, but with him it was like a voyage with Jules Verne beneath the ocean. … A walk was a mixture of energy, fact.” adventure and matter of
Gaelic myth tells that the divine hag Cailleach Bheur washes her tartan in the whirlpool each autumn, before spreading the spotless white blanket over the land for winter.
governing party of Ingsoc has rigged microphones in the trees. That would be hard out here where woodland survives only in fragments: the rest gnawed down by the red deer that outnumber people by 25 to 1, and which may have given Jura its name, from the Old Norse Dyrøy, meaning deer island.
The track makes for easy going through a ‘beautiful place, quite empty and wild’, as Orwell wrote. I soon realise how easy when I venture off path to the trig point on little Cnoc a Chùirn Mhòir, across ankle-twisting tussocks with no level space big enough to take a boot. Or even a bare foot.
Orwell would have known: he once had to walk shoeless across the moors from the Corryvreckan whirlpool. Just north of Jura lies the Isle of Scarba, forcing incoming tides into a narrow channel, where a deep hole and underwater pinnacle stir things further to create the third largest whirlpool in the world. In full washing-machine churn its roar can be heard 10 miles away, and it’s nigh on unnavigable, as Orwell discovered: ‘ran into the whirlpool & were all nearly drowned. Engine sucked off by the sea & went to the bottom. Just managed to keep the boat steady with the oars, & after going through the whirlpool twice, ran into smooth water & found ourselves only about 100 yards from Eilean Mór.’ The boat capsized as they clambered onto the rock, losing everything including their boots. A passing boat rescued them a few hours later, dropping them on Jura for the walk home.
For the first three months on Jura, Orwell did no writing. In 1944, he and his wife Eileen had adopted a baby boy called Richard; in 1945 Eileen died unexpectedly during an operation while Orwell
RICHARD PETERS, PUPIL OF GEORGE ORWELL’S, IN ORWELL REMEMBERED
was away in Paris. Jura was his chance to get away from it all, and from the ‘hackwork’ of journalism that left him feeling like a ‘sucked orange’, and the attention that his recently published bestseller, the allegorical tale Animal Farm, had brought. But as his first summer on the island drew on, he wrote to a friend saying ‘I have at last started my novel about the future’. Its working title was The Last Man in Europe; we know it as Nineteen Eighty-Four.
As I top a crest in the track, Barnhill appears below. The spacious, white-washed house sits all alone in a dip, sheltered from the sea by a low ridge. ▶
‘The house faces south & we have a lovely view over the Sound of Jura,’ Orwell wrote, ‘with little islands dotted here & there.’ His sister Avril joined him, and Richard, and visitors were sometimes plentiful enough to warrant a tent in the garden. Its remote location means it’s still powered by generator, with a gas-powered fridge, but it’s far more comfortable than when Orwell arrived (and it’s now available for holiday rental – see panel).
Much of Orwell’s time was spent improving the house and garden, all carefully recorded in his Domestic Diaries. They’re a charmingly humdrum jumble of weather observations, gardening notes, nature observations and to-do lists – ‘Thinned beetroots… Saw two sheld-duck in the nearer bay... Dry, sunny & windy...Order monkey wrench’ – and make a startling contrast to the world he was creating in the pages of his manuscript.
He wrote of walks too – further north up the track to Kinuachdrachd (keep along a fainter path for a couple more miles from there and you’ll get views of the Gulf of Corryvreckan), or north-west across the island to the neighbouring beaches of Glentrosdale and Gleann nam Muc which he called the W-Bay, or due west to Glengarrisdale: ‘Fine all day. Walked to Glengarrisdale & back. Exactly 3 hours each way but probably increased if not choosing the best ground. Distance as crow flies about 10 miles, but by the route one has to take, about 14 (i.e. in all).’ This last bay was a particular favourite, with its empty shepherd’s cottage (now a bothy): ‘It is a beautiful coast, green water and white sand, and a few miles inland lochs full of trout which never get fished because they’re too far from anywhere.’
You can trace his adventurous footsteps, aided now by very faint Land Rover tracks, or you can try a shorter way to cross the island. A lot shorter in fact, as Loch Tarbert bites into the middle of Jura to give the island a narrow wasp-waist. It’s less than one mile on a track from the small sandy beach at Tarbert Bay in the east to the shore of a glassy Loch Tarbert in the west, taking you coast-to-spectacular-coast in under half an hour.
Or there’s Evans’ Walk further south, named for author and one-legged horseman Henry Evans, who built the path to ride across the island in the 19th century. It’s now frayed by bog and bracken at either end, but the central miles over the island’s spine by Loch na Fùdarlaich are clear, and the raised beach at Glenbatrick Bay out west is appealingly lonely.
And the path skirts the Paps of Jura, a trio of conical peaks that dominate the isle’s skyline. Up close the long scree slopes have a patina like aging silver, memorably described by Roger Deakin (see panel p79) as ‘striped with streaks of white quartzite as though gigantic prehistoric birds have roosted and shat on them for millions of years.’ Climbing all three is a tough day on trackless, shifting stones; the highest, Beinn an Òir (2575ft), on its own is a bit less daunting.
From my perch above Barnhill, I turn to retrace my steps along the track. In October 1946, Orwell left Jura for London and a winter that turned Britain so icy – or doublepluscold to use Newspeak – that livestock froze in the fields. He returned
The official language of Oceania, designed by Ingsoc to reduce vocabulary to a limited number of acceptable words and make 'heretical thought... literally unthinkable'.
to the island the following spring, but things were more difficult. He admitted in letters to ‘struggling with this novel’ and as the summer wore on, he wrote often of his ‘wretched health… – my chest as usual.’ By December, tuberculosis had put him in hospital near Glasgow where he stayed for seven long months, before returning to Jura in July 1948.
‘Everything is flourishing here except me,’ he wrote. ‘The weather has been marvellous, wonderful, still warm days with the sea an extraordinary luminous green & the bracken almost red.’ Even walking a few hundred yards was now difficult. All his energy went into what he called ‘this bloody book’ and unable to get a stenographer out to Jura, he typed up his scribbled manuscript himself: 4000 words a day as he coughed, and smoked, in bed at Barnhill.
In November 1948 he submitted the manuscript, describing it as ‘a ghastly mess now, a good idea ruined’, and in January 1949 he left Jura for a sanatorium in the Cotswolds. It would be the last time he ever saw his ‘island in the Hebrides’; he died in London on 21 January 1950, aged 46.
He did live to see Nineteen Eighty-Four published in June 1949, to critical praise. ‘I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing,’ wrote VS Pritchett, ‘and yet, such are the originality, the suspense... it is impossible to put the book down.’ But one friend ended all contact saying, ‘it was a frightful, miserable, defeatist book and I couldn’t think why he’d written it’. In a statement dictated from his bed in the Cotswolds, Orwell explained: ‘The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one. Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.’