by Michael Shelden and Philip Johnston
Electronic Telegraph, 22 June 1998
The author who gave us Big Brother and the Thought Police was himself a government informant whose list of "crypto-communists" has been kept secret for almost half a century.
Now the list - and the dramatic story of its creation - are to be made public in a new edition of George Orwell's work published next week in 20 volumes.
The names included such literary and political figures as the poet Stephen Spender, the Labour MPs Richard Crossman and Tom Driberg, Charlie Chaplin, J B Priestley and George Bernard Shaw. The names of three dozen who are still alive have been withheld.
Arranged alphabetically in a small blue notebook, the manuscript version of Orwell's roster of Stalin's Western apologists and sympathisers contains more than 130 names of famous and obscure figures and includes often brutally frank comments about the weaknesses of individual characters.
It is one of the last things Orwell wrote before his death from tuberculosis in 1950 and its much-revised appearance is accurately rendered in the new collection edited by Prof Peter Davison, senior research fellow at De Montfort University.
In 1949 Orwell handed a list containing 35 of the names to his friend Celia Kirwan, who worked for an anti-communist propaganda unit attached to the Foreign Office. The identity of those names remains unclear.
The disclosure two years ago that Orwell, a socialist icon, had acted as an informant caused dismay on the political Left. Michael Foot, the former Labour leader, called it "amazing" and Jimmy Reid, the former union activist turned journalist said it was "a terrible shock".
But Orwell, as his novels Animal Farm and 1984 testify, was a passionate opponent of totalitarianism in all its forms. While he retained his socialist ideals, he was disdainful of those on the Left who supported the Soviet Union despite the evidence of Stalin's atrocities.
Much of what he has to say about individual entrants is marvellously eccentric and engagingly frank. The fashionable and wealthy bohemian Nancy Cunard is quickly dismissed: "Probably only sentimental sympathiser. Silly. Has money."
Crossman, later a Labour Cabinet minister, is damned with the words: "Too dishonest to be outright F.T. [fellow traveller]." The novelist and critic Arthur Calder-Marshall is simply labelled an "insincere person". The poet C Day Lewis is regarded as "probably not now completely reliable".
Orwell notes that Shaw cannot be trusted because he is "reliably pro-Russian on all major issues" and that the distinguished scientist Solly Zuckerman is "politically ignorant". The New Statesman editor, Kingsley Martin, is described as a "decayed liberal"; the playwright Sean O'Casey is "very stupid"; Priestley is "very anti-USA" and "makes huge sums of money in USSR".
In 1996 documents released to the Public Record Office at Kew, west London, disclosed how Orwell furnished the authorities with a list of potential Soviet sympathisers to help Britain confront the propaganda of the Soviet Union. Initially, the intention had been to harness his talents to write or rewrite anti-communist articles. But while Orwell was enthusiastic, he was too ill to help - although he did give Mrs Kirwan a list of authors who could be trusted.
A couple of days later he wrote: "I could also, if it is of any value, give you a list of journalists and writers who, in my opinion, are crypto-communists, fellow travellers, or inclined that way, and should not be trusted as propagandists." The list was passed to the Information Research Department at the Foreign Office, but was removed from the papers lodged at the Public Record Office.
Prof Davison speculates that names marked with an asterisk in Orwell's notebook may have been those he put on the IRD list.
Last night Celia Goodman, 81, formerly Celia Kirwan, said: "I honestly cannot remember the 35 names he wrote down for me. It was such a long time ago. She said: "Most of the names are of no surprise, but I suppose some will be. It is very interesting that they are being published now. It can't do any harm, can it?"
Mrs Goodman, a widow now living in Cambridge, said it angered her to read criticism of Orwell's actions. She said: "I think George was quite right to do it. What does make me cross is when headline writers state that George had betrayed his friends. These people were not his friends. And, of course, everybody thinks that these people were going to be shot at dawn. The only thing that was going to happen to them was they wouldn't be asked to write for the Information Research Department."
Mrs Goodman said: "I didn't know about J B Priestley. Good Lord, isn't it amazing? But if George said these people were what he said they were, I bet he knew. He wouldn't have said it otherwise. So I think people should attach significance to this list."
Orwell did not attach a great deal of sinister importance to the names he supplied. In a letter to Mrs Kirwan, enclosing the list, he said: "It isn't very sensational and I don't suppose it will tell your friends anything that they don't know. At the same time, it isn't a bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed."
Orwell said that, if it had been done earlier, it might have stopped some people "worming their way into important propaganda jobs where they were probably able to do us a lot of harm".
