Odd clothes and unorthodox views – why MI5 spied on Orwell for a decade
Stephen Bates
The Guardian
September 4, 2007
The extent to which Special Branch police monitored George Orwell as a suspected communist has been revealed in papers disclosed for the first time today at the National Archives in Kew. The documents, which include details of surveillance between the 1920s and 60s, indicate not only the wide range of groups and individuals being watched by police but also officers’ spectacular ability to misjudge what they saw. The obtuseness of some exasperated their superiors. A Sergeant Ewing of Special Branch, monitoring Orwell’s attempt to recruit Indians to work for the BBC’s India service in January 1942, noted: “This man has advanced communist views … He dresses in a bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours.”
…
A file from 1941 contains 13 pages of reports on a strike by dockyard apprentices in Chatham which followed a complaint about the standard of canteen food. It includes a report by Sergeant Ivan Smith of the Kent police, who hid himself in the gents’ toilet at a working men’s club in Gillingham to listen to the speakers at a union meeting: “I was unable to hear the majority of the proceedings owing to my obscure position in the lavatory and to the fact that a boy was standing in the cloakroom door the whole time,” it says. “I heard someone say that the best thing would be to have all the big fellows for that job [on the picket line]. The reply was that all present at the meeting should take their share and no shirking. The meeting closed at 1630 hours but I was unable to leave until 1655 as some of the apprentices were in the hall until that time.”
[Sergeant Ivan Smith of the Kent police sounds to have been about as competent as the two blokes from NSW who appeared at both the Forbes (April, 2005) protests in Sydney and the G20 (November, 2006) protests in Melbourne… But that’s another story.]
