The Brexit boost for British bio-science
BIn physics and chemistry, or painting and music, we have often failed to match the Germans, the French or the Italians. But in the bio-sciences, nobody can equal us. Here’s an astonishing list of firsts that happened on this damp island: William Harvey and the circulation of the blood. Robert Hooke and the cell. Edward Jenner and vaccines. Charles Darwin and natural selection. Alexander Fleming and antibiotics. Francis Crick and James Watson (and Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins) and the structure of DNA. Fred Sanger and DNA sequencing. Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards and the first test-tube baby. Alec Jeffreys and DNA fingerprinting. Ian Wilmut and Dolly the Sheep. The biggest single contribution to the sequencing of the human genome (the Wellcome Trust).
Annoyingly, the exciting new tool of genome editing is the one that got away. The best of the new tools, known as CRISPR, emerged from the work of a Spaniard, Francisco Mojica, who first spotted some odd sequences in a microbe’s genome that seemed to be part of a toolkit for defeating viruses. Then a few years ago French, American, Finnish, Dutch and Chinese scientists turned this insight into a device for neatly snipping out specific sequences of DNA from a genome in any species, opening up the prospect of neatly rewriting DNA to prevent disease or alter crops. Two American universities are squabbling over the patents (and Nobel prize hopes). Further improvements are coming thick and fast.
But we are well placed to catch up with superb labs straining at the leash to apply these new tools. The biggest immediate opportunity is in agriculture, and here leaving the European Union is absolutely key. There is no clearer case of a technology in which we will be held back if we do not break free from the EU approach. It would not be a race to the bottom in terms of safety and environmental standards, but the very opposite: a race to the top.
For example, if we allowed the genetically modified blight-resistant potatoes that have been developed at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norfolk to be grown in fields here in the UK, we would be able to greatly reduce the spraying of fungicides on potato fields, which at present happens up to 15 times a year, harming biodiversity and causing lots of emissions from tractors. That would be a big improvement, not a regression, in environmental terms. But at the moment commercialising the Sainsbury Lab potato is in practice impossible because of onerous EU rules.
Other countries are already dashing ahead with the new technology. Last year a review of the patenting of CRISPR products in agriculture found that, whereas America had taken out 872 patent families and China 858, the European Union had taken out only 194. The gap is growing.
with the quality of research in Europe. It is all about regulation. When genome editing first came along, the European Commission decided to delay for several years making up its mind about how to regulate the release of genome-edited organisms while it waited for the European Court of Justice to decide whether to treat this new technology as if it were like genetic modification (the process invented a generation ago for transferring genes between species) or a form of mutation breeding (the process invented two generations ago for randomly scrambling the genes of plants under gamma rays in the hopes of generating better varieties).
If it was like genetic modification, then it would be subject to draconian rules that amount to a de-facto ban. Nobody even tries to commercialise a GMO crop in Europe any more because you enter a maze of delay, obfuscation, uncertainty, expense and red tape from which you never emerge.
The result is that European agriculture is more dependent on chemical sprays than it would have otherwise been, as shown by research at Gottingen University: on average, GMOs have reduced the application of pesticides to crops wherever they have been grown by 37 per cent. So we have missed out on biological solutions and had to stick with chemical ones instead.
If on the other hand genome editing is like mutation breeding, then you can go ahead and plant a crop straight away here with no restrictions. This is, of course, mad, since mutation breeding is more likely (though still very unlikely) to produce an accidentally harmful result even than GMOs, but it’s an older technique and has been used for much of the food you eat, including organic food, and for some reason nobody at Greenpeace objects.
Genome editing is an even more precise and predictable technique than GMOs. It involves no transfer of foreign DNA
and the incision is made at a specific location in a genome, not at random. It is clearly the safest of all these three techniques, and so said the European Court’s advocate general in his advice to the court. But in July 2018 the ECJ, being a political entity, decided otherwise and told the commission what it wanted to hear, that it should treat genome-edited plants and animals as if they were GMOs.
throughout the laboratories of Europe. There would have been more in Britain if academics had not feared playing into the hands of Brexiteers while remaining was still a possibility. A Canadian biotech professor tweeted that this was a good day for Canada since it removed a competitor continent from the scene. The absurdity is illustrated by the fact that in some cases it is impossible to distinguish a genome-edited variety from a variety bred by hybridisation or
UK’s wonderful labs and the breakthroughs will be applied overseas, if at all.
As a new online tool called the Global Gene Editing Regulation Tracker has shown, America, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Japan and much of the rest of the world are moving towards a nimbler and more rational regulatory approach: namely judging a crop not by the method used to produce it, but by the traits it possesses. If you can make a potato resistant to blight, what matters is whether the potato is safe, not whether it was made by conventional breeding, gamma-ray mutagenesis or genome editing.
In the EU, if you made this potato by gamma-ray mutation breeding, scrambling its DNA at random in a nuclear reactor, the regulations would say: “No problem. Go ahead and plant it.” If you made it by the far more precise method of genome editing, in which you know exactly what you have done and have
ing. What is not to like? (Incredibly, when I mentioned this case in a speech in the House of Lords, a Green Party peer objected that eradicating a disease that causes suffering in pigs might be a bad thing in case it allows a change in pig husbandry techniques. Even Marie Antoinette was never quite that callous.) But commercialising that animal in the UK is currently all but impossible until we change the rules.
Genome-editing technology could revolutionise conservation as well as agriculture. Looking far ahead into much more speculative science, the same scientists at the Roslin who made the virus-resistant pigs are now looking into how to control grey squirrels not by killing them, as we do now, but by using genome editing to spread infertility infectiously through the population, so that the population slowly declines while squirrels live happily into old age.
This technique, called gene drive, could transform the practice of conservation all around the world, especially the control of invasive alien species — the single greatest cause of extinction among birds and mammals today. We could eliminate the introduced mosquitos on Hawaii whose malaria is slowly exterminating the native honeycreeper birds. We could get rid of the non-native rats and goats on the Galapagos which are destroying the habitat of tortoises and birds.
We could get rid of the signal crayfish from America that have devastated many British rivers. For those who worry that gene drive might run riot, there is a simple answer: it can and will be designed in each case to last for a certain number of generations, not forever. And it will be wholly species-specific, so it cannot affect, say, the native red squirrel.
Sgenome editing may one day allow the de-extinction of the great auk and the passenger pigeon. To achieve this, we need to take four steps: to sequence the DNA of an extinct species, which we have done in the case of the great auk; to edit the genome of a closely related species in the lab, which is not yet possible but may not be far off as genome editing techniques improve by leaps and bounds; to turn a cell into an adult animal, which is difficult, but possible through primordial germ cell transfer, again pioneered at the Roslin Institute; and to train the adults for living in the wild, which is hard work but possible.
Genome editing is also going to have implications for human medicine. Here the European Union is less of a problem, and home-grown regulation is already in good shape: cautious and sensibly applied under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Britain has already licensed the first laboratory experiments, at the Crick Institute, on the use of genome editing in human embryos, but this is for research into infertility, not for making designer babies.
There is universal agreement that germ-line gene editing to produce human beings with new traits must remain off-limits and be considered in future only for the elimination of severe disease, not for the enhancement of normal talents. This view is shared around the world: the Chinese rogue scientist He Jiankui, who claims he used CRISPR to make two babies HIV-resistant from birth, was sentenced to three years in prison last December.
Still more futuristically, genome editing may one day allow the de-extinction of the great auk
are somewhat exaggerated. The same issue comes up about once a decade with every new breakthrough in biotechnology. It was raised about artificial insemination in the 1970s, about in-vitro fertilisation in the 1980s, about cloning in the 1990s and about gene sequencing in the 2000s. Indeed, it has been possible to choose or selectively implant sperm, eggs and embryos with particular genes for a long time now and yet demand remains stubbornly low.
Most people do not want to use IVF or sperm donation to have the babies of clever or athletic people, as they easily could, but to have their own babies: the technology has been used almost exclusively as a cure for infertility. Indeed, the more we find out about genomes, the harder it becomes to imagine anybody wanting to, let alone being able to, enhance specific traits in future children by fiddling with genes: there are just too many genes, each with only very small effects, interacting with each other in the creation of any particular behaviour or ability.
Imagine walking into a doctor’s clinic and being presented with a catalogue of expensive genetic changes that could be made to your future baby’s genes, each of which might have a tiny and uncertain effect. The truth is most people do not want to have especially clever or sporty offspring: they want children like themselves.
However, in contrast to germ-line gene editing, somatic genome editing will play a large part in medicine. It is already happening, for example in a process known as CAR-T cell therapy, in which an immune cell is genome-edited so that it will attack a specific tumour, then multiplied and injected back into the body as a form of live drug. If we encourage genome editing in Britain we will be in a position to cure some cancers, enhance agricultural yield, improve the nutrient quality of food, protect crops from pests without using chemicals, eradicate animal diseases, enhance animal welfare, encourage biodiversity and maybe bring back the red squirrel. If we do not, then China, America, Japan and Argentina will still push ahead with this technology and will follow their own priorities, leaving us as supplicants to get the technology second-hand.
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why do legal types think we should be interested in their memoirs? The shocking behaviour of some long-forgotten judge is usually of little interest today. Stories about the characters they met at the bar often fail to amuse.
An exception is Under the Wig by William Clegg QC (Canbury Press). Until his retirement last year, Clegg was the go-to criminal defence barrister. He even solved a murder case, reasoning that the man who killed Rachel Nickell in 1992 was not his client Colin Stagg, who was acquitted, but another client, Robert Napper, who admitted Nickell’s manslaughter in 2008.
Clegg’s book is readable because of the clients he defended: Barry George, cleared in 2008 of murdering Jill Dando, and Anthony Sawoniuk, convicted in 1999 of murdering Jews in Nazi-occupied Belarus. Indeed, the book was ghost-written by yet another of his clients — John Troup, a former Sun journalist cleared of conspiracy.
Courtroom memoirs reveal fascinating details of high-profile cases, waspish views of politicians, as well as a QC who solved a notorious murder
retired judges often dedicate their memoirs to their grandchildren. A recent example is Leaving the Arena, by Sir David Keene (Bloomsbury Publishing). The former appeal court judge includes vignettes about how the prime minister came to stay at their French holiday home (Keene had been in the same chambers as Cherie Blair) and how to stay awake in court on a summer afternoon (smelling salts). But no beans are spilled.
Playing off the Roof and Other Stories by Simon Brown (Marble Hill) professes to be just a string of reminiscences from a man who for half a century has lived in the same house, been married to the same woman, driven the same sort of car, holidayed in the same chalet and played golf at the same club. “You must be bored out of your mind,” a younger player recently told him.
But Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood has a lively style, recalling visits to MI6 outstations when he was Intelligence Services Commissioner and recounting the excuse proffered by George Carman QC when he needed to sober up after a night spent drinking and gambling: “‘My Lord,’ said George, ‘I’m so sorry, I had understood your Lordship to have said yesterday that we would not be sitting until 11.15 today.’”
Brown presided over the trials of two defendants accused of targeting Jews: in each case, Jewish jurors were invited to stand down. Nobody in court knew that Brown’s parents were both Jewish and he saw no reason to tell them. “My religion has never been of the least interest to me,” he writes.
Lord Dyson, who overlapped with Brown in the Supreme
Court, is extremely interested in his Jewish forebears. The opening chapters of A Judge’s Journey by John Dyson (Hart Publishing) give us a detailed account of how his family came to the UK. But he also deals with contemporary issues — telling us just what he thinks of the “disastrous” Liz Truss, the lord chancellor who failed to support judges against newspaper claims that they were “enemies of the people”.
As Master of the Rolls, Dyson dismissed an appeal on behalf of Tony Nicklinson, a man who was paralysed for seven years after suffering a catastrophic stroke at the age of 51. Nicklinson wanted the courts to say it would be lawful for a doctor to kill him or to help him kill himself. Dyson refused. “My view as a private citizen is that assisted suicide should be permitted, subject to stringent safeguards. But that did not influence my conclusion that, as a matter of law, decriminalising assisted suicide was not a matter for the judges.”
dyson also reports some of the manoeuvrings that stopped Lady Hale becoming president of the Supreme Court in 2012, which would have given her an additional five years in the top job. But for the full story we must turn to the 2009-15 volume of Lord Hope’s Diaries (Avizandum Publishing). Hope, then the court’s deputy president, served on the selection committee that rejected Hale and appointed Lord Neuberger.
“He will be a real pleasure to work with,” Hope told his diary. “Brenda, on the other hand, seemed to be on the defensive for much of the time. The picture that she presents of the relationship between men and women is not one which most women share. This is a pity, as she is such an excellent lawyer and does so much that is good for the court … Her time will no doubt come, but not now.”
When Hope was nearing retirement age, Lord Mance applied to succeed him as deputy president. At interview, Hale “outshone him by a very distinct margin”, Hope writes. She was also better-known, even in 2013: “I am world-famous,” he records her as saying.
Lawyers are aghast that Hope has broken so many confidences in the five volumes of his diaries. In preparing them for publication, he seems to have redacted very few names. Hope’s writings are a valuable historical resource but colleagues who thought that judges could be trusted not to publish confidential conversations must be relieved that legal memoirs rarely become bestsellers.
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TMrs Orwells: Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a psychology MA whom he married in 1936 and who perished on the operating table nine years later; and Sonia Brownell, maid of all work on Cyril Connolly’s literary magazine Horizon, wed by means of an Archbishop of Canterbury’s special licence in her husband’s hospital room three months before his death in January 1950 and who survived him for all of 30 years.
To these formal unions can be added a whole tribe of significant others: girlfriends, mistresses, brief flings and flickering torches held studiously aloft, a three-decades-long repository of ardent desires, fond hopes and, occasionally, unrealisable aspirations: Brenda Salkeld and Eleanor Jaques, his two lost Suffolk loves from the early 1930s (Brenda taught gym at a Southwold girls’ school, Eleanor was the local dentist’s daughter) to both of whom he proposed and each of whom pretty summarily turned him down; the three (at least) girls whom the traumatised widower auditioned for the role of Eileen’s replacement in the winter of 1945/6.
And so the list winds on: Sally McEwan, his Tribune secretary in the mid-1940s; a woman called “Edith Morgan”, to whom he may or may not have been briefly engaged; the writer and diarist Inez Holden (we think), who presided over the famous dinner party at which Orwell quarrelled with H.G. Wells and received a post-prandial note urging him to “read my early works, you shit”; Jacintha Buddicom, the teenage sweetheart with whom he went picking mushrooms in the hills above Henley; half-a-dozen more besides.
Married sex; extramarital sex; and, it has several times been suggested, bought sex. Did the young Eric Blair, as he was then known, consort with any of the prostitutes who were such a feature of the Burmese townships in which he served as an Imperial Police Officer between 1922 and 1927? If the evidence is, in the end, inconclusive it has to be said that Flory, the hero of Orwell’s novel Burmese Days (1934), has a native mistress, and that one of the execrable poems he brought back from the East is about a brothel-goer forced to haggle over the price.
What did Orwell think about women, in the intervals of pursuing, marrying and being turned down by them? Most of the conversational remarks that have survived are deeply and unrepentantly odd. “Not a bad old stick,” he ruefully observed, in the aftermath of Eileen’s passing. The first words spoken to Sonia after she accepted his proposal in the summer of 1949 are thought to have been: “You must learn to make dumplings.” Connolly, with whom he had attended both prep school and Eton before re-encountering him in the 1930s, once declared that his old friend was “steeped in the worst illusions of 1910”. Undoubtedly some of these illusions extended towards the opposite sex. When it came to women, Orwell was a traditionalist, a masculinist and a chancer, an eternal presser of his suit, keen to strike when opportunity allowed. The poet Ruth Pitter, first met in the late 1920s together with one of her friends, remembered Orwell telling her that his first thought had been “whether those girls would be difficult to get”. A letter to Brenda from 1931 notes that “even if we are only to be friends, you mustn’t mind my making love to you in a small way and occasionally asking you to go further, because it is my nature to do that”.
that some of this ardour had a sinister side. Jacintha, whom Orwell later accused of “abandoning” him to Burma, alleged that he tried to rape her. An odd little incident from the Southwold days has Orwell emerging from a ditch near the River Blyth in pursuit of a girl named Dorothy Rogers who was making her way home over the common only for him to be chased away, and apparently beaten up, by her vengeful fiancé; Dorothy, it turns out, is the name of the her
of his second novel. As for what may have been said in the course of these assignations, those on the receiving end remembered both obliquity and awkwardness. Connolly’s girlfriend Lys Lubbock believed that Orwell’s habit of dropping into the Horizon office to complain about its editor’s love of lunching with his grand friends at the Dorchester was his way of flirting with her. Anne Popham, to whom — greatly to her surprise — he proposed marriage a few months after Eileen’s death, recalled his making the altogether deathless inquiry: “Do you think you could look after me?”
A later letter canvassed some of the advantages of being a writer’s widow. If most of Orwell’s lady-friends came from his own social milieu — the genteel middle class — then age was no barrier. Mrs Mabel Fierz, who to some extent mentored his early 1930s arrival into the literary world, was old enough to be his mother; Dora Georges, to whom he presented a poem entitled “Ode to a Dark Lady” in the late 1920s (which Ms Georges regrettably failed to keep), was not yet 16.
Adid the women think of Orwell? Undoubtedly, most of them enjoyed his company, found him attractive — Lys Lubbock thought him better-looking than photographs made him appear — while acknowledging an unworldly, self-absorbed side that could transform most of the normal processes of life into a perpetual obstacle course. His mother, Ida Blair, and his sisters, Marjorie and Avril, are supposed to have occupied the hours before his wedding to Eileen in
June 1936 by taking the bride-to-be to one side and remarking on the enormity of what she was taking on.
Married life offered plenty of examples of the level of detachment that Orwell was capable of maintaining in the course of his daily existence. Eileen once went out for the night leaving her husband’s shepherd’s pie cooking in the oven and a dish of jellied eels for the cat and came back to find that Orwell had eaten the jellied eels as the pie lay quietly incinerating. If this was only exasperating, then there were times when it gestured at a kind of emotional severance.
Eileen believed that the difference between Orwell and her adored brother Laurence, who died in the retreat from France in 1940, was that if summoned Laurence would come from the ends of the earth to her side; “George would not do that.”
Orwell’s silences and his deep-dyed domestic conservatism were often construed as simple patronage. Janetta Woolley, then the wife of his old Spanish Civil War comrade Hugh Slater, com
to be taken about by Orwell, to sit talking to him, to be bought drinks by him, to share his leisure and become an adjunct to the peculiar mental world he inhabited? “Basil” in The Holiday shares his part-model’s well-attested habit of lapsing into obsessional monologues (“he said that he happened to see an article in an American woman’s magazine about scanty panties, he said women who thought about scanty panties never had a comfortable fire burning in the fire-place, or a baby in the house, or a dog, or a cat or a parrot …”)
As for possible destinations, one of the signature marks of Orwell’s novels is their interest in plein air frolics. Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) inveigles his girlfriend Rosemary out into the Thames Valley verdure with the express intention of seducing her.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four Julia and Winston’s first dalliance takes place in the countryside, beyond the reach of the Thought Police’s telescreens and microphones. But Orwell’s letters to real people are just the same. A recently discovered cache of correspondence with Brenda and Eleanor is full of invitations to nature rambles across Southwold Common or summer saunters along the Blyth. If Orwell proposed a bird-nesting jaunt, you tied a mousetrap to your garters. “Have you ever had a woman in a park?” Orwell once cross-questioned his friend Anthony Powell. Powell, nonplussed, shook his head. “I have,” Oroine
well assured him. “You see, there was nowhere else to go.”
With the exception of Animal Farm (1945), each of Orwell’s six novels is essentially a projection of the inner world of the man who wrote them, a bleak little palisaded universe whose central character is being eavesdropped on and spied upon, who rebels against the forces that oppress him (her in the case of Dorothy, A Clergyman’s Daughter’s downtrodden female lead) and is eventually forced to reach some kind of accommodation with the conquering horde. How do the women get on here? What effect do they have on the writing of them? Do they appear in them?
In her newly-published Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (Unbound, £25), Sylvia Topp makes a plausible case for Eileen as Orwell’s muse, discussing his work with him as it proceeded, typing drafts of his novels (Coming Up For Air was written in the winter of 1938-9 in Morocco as Orwell recovered from his first serious haemorrhage, with Eileen in the role of amanuensis) and generally involving herself in his development as a writer. Animal Farm, according to Topp’s diligent research, is full of Eileen’s influence, Eileen’s humour and the hint of Eileen making her presence felt in her husband’s creative life.
Neither, too, should we forget a three-part futuristic satire entitled “End of the Century: 1984” that appeared in her old school magazine in the early 1930s and which Orwell would almost certainly have seen.
with whom he may have had a brief affair in the winter of 1945/6 and who seems to have become a significant presence in his life in the spring of 1947, just as he came back to Jura and settled down to completing a first draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four? One of the longer letters in Peter
Davison’s magisterial edition of the Complete Works is a threepage effusion sent from Jura in April 1947, inviting Sonia to visit and containing minutely itemised instructions on how to reach the island from the Scottish mainland (“Travel by bus to West Tarbert . . . Take hired car to Lealt”, etc).
Such is Orwell’s anxiety to communicate with the woman at the desk in London that he seems to have set pen to paper even before his luggage was properly unpacked (“I am handwriting this because my typewriter is downstairs”). There are thanks for purchases made on his behalf (“I’ve just remembered that I never paid you for that brandy you got for me.”) Clearly the man who signs off “with much love” having remarked that he “does so want to have you here” is desperate to have her by his side.
All this naturally encourages a suspicion that Sonia has something to do with Julia, who spends her working hours in a government department engaged on the task of mass-producing pornography for impressionable proles and her leisure time encouraging Winston to break every proscription in the Party rule book. In her biography of Sonia, The Girl From the Fiction Department (2002), Hilary Spurling maintains that Orwell returned to Jura in 1947 with the aim of “re-creating” Sonia as Julia and a determination to “take her as his model”.
To support this claim, there is the fact that Julia is approximately Sonia’s age (26 against 28), with a self-confident vocal style that approaches the bossiness Sonia was thought to bring to her editorial duties at Horizon. Julia’s declaration that “I do voluntary work three evenings a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I’ve spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of the banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything” sounds very like some of Sonia’s quoted remarks.
Ounlike her supposed model, Julia is resolutely unintellectual and falls asleep while Winston regales her with selections from Oceania’s legendary banned book, Emmanuel Goldstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Sonia, you feel, would have managed to stay awake for this juicy ideological treat. Meanwhile, there are other pieces of detail that call this identification into question.
A letter to Eleanor from September 1932 which recalls “that day in the wood along past Blythburgh Lodge … I shall always remember that, & your nice white body in the dark moss” is remarkably close to the account of Julia tearing off her clothes so that her body “gleamed white in the sun”.
As for Julia’s “swift, athletic movements”, it is worth remembering that Brenda held down a day job as a sports teacher and that in one of the few surviving photographs of her she is wearing a gym-slip. If there are traces of Sonia in Nineteen EightyFour, then there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Julia is more likely to be a composite portrait of half-a-dozen women met in Southwold, Hampstead and other places beyond.
But back to the question — one that can never be ignored for very long in Orwell’s work — of social class. At first glance his
novels seem to be crammed with awful women — termagants, gossips, joy-quenchers, shabby-genteel tyrants — but a closer inspection reveals them to be almost exclusively drawn from the petit-bourgeoisie. If Mrs Semprill, A Clergyman’s Daughter’s ghastly sneak, Gordon Comstock’s vigilant landlady Mrs Wisbeach and the glacial Mrs Lackersteen in Burmese Days, have anything to unite them it is their relish of social position.
Every so often, though, there comes a moment in which a working-class woman steals forward into the limelight. One of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s most memorable, and least pessimistic scenes, finds Winston staring out of the window of the love nest he shares with Julia above Mr Charrington’s antiques shop and watching the prole woman singing as she hangs out the laundry. Inspired with a feeling of “mystical reverence” that is somehow mixed up with the pale, cloudless sky that stretches away over her head, Winston reflects that:
It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same — everywhere, all over the world, hundreds and thousands and millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same — people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.
In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), too, a working-class woman offers a pivot on which the narrative turns. Here, heading out of Wigan by train, Orwell passes a row of slum houses and catches sight of a young woman kneeling on the stones poking a stick up a blocked waste-pipe. Orwell has “time to see everything about her” — sacking apron, clogs, cold-reddened forearms. The girls looks up as the train passes: “She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen.”
this is not a precise recapitulation of what actually happened — Orwell’s diaries reveal that he was walking up “a horrible squalid side-alley” when the sighting took place rather than watching from a train-window — but the rest of the description is almost word-for-word. Some years ago, I sat on a literary festival platform with a feminist historian who proceeded to denounce The Road to Wigan Pier for concentrating on coal-miners while ignoring the gender oppression that, to her eye, was the real scandal of the pre-war industrial north.
But all this ignores the genuine imaginative sympathy that Orwell brought to the plight of the Wigan women — there are other descriptions of coal-gatherers, “dumpy, shawled women with their sacking aprons and their heavy black clogs, kneeling in the cindery mud and the bitter wind” — in his efforts to “connect”. In the end, Eileen and Sonia, Brenda and Eleanor, Sally and Inez, Dorothy Rodgers walking home across Southwold Common and the sacking aproned-drudge of the Wigan backstreets are sisters under the skin.
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