Orwell's Voice

An extract from 'Orwell: The New Life' by D. J. Taylor, published 25 May (Constable)

Despite his thirty months at the BBC, despite countless radio broadcasts and panel discussions, no recording of Orwell’s voice has ever been found. This is not for want of trying. A legend persists that a BBC researcher once dredged an acetate in which he was thought to have appeared out of the vault, only to lose sight of it in the Corporation’s trackless archives. In its absence, we can only get an idea of what he sounded like and the words he used – diction, delivery, phrasing, timbre – from the testimonies of his friends.

The Spanish surgeon who treated the bullet wound in his throat in 1937 warned him that the power of speech would never return. This turned out to be unduly pessimistic. His voice came back, but it had lost its impact. In a crowded room, or against background noise, Orwell had trouble making himself heard; his attempts at conversation got lost in the wider fog. A friend from the 1940s remembered him at a packed luncheon table trying once or twice to raise the necessary decibels and then abandoning the attempt to pass the rest of the meal in silence.

One thing all Orwell’s friends agreed on was that his accent was upper-class. In an age when locution was quite as important as the clothes one wore, Orwell’s vocal register immediately enveloped its owner in a pair of spiritual plus-fours. ‘Markedly Old Etonian,’ thought his young friend Michael Meyer, by which he meant simultaneously high-pitched and drawling. No doubt Orwell was aware of his elevated tone. The upwardly mobile George Bowling, joining a west London tennis club in Coming Up for Air, listens to its middle-class suburban members calling out the score in voices that are ‘a passable imitation of the upper crust’. Orwell’s was the real thing, if sometimes ripe for modification when circumstances demanded. There were occasional forays into the top-down style known as ‘Duke of Windsor cockney’ and a BBC colleague once heard him assuring an Asian contributor that skin tone played no part in their relationship: ‘The fack that you’re black and I’m white has nudding woddever to do wiv it.’

How much of this was done for effect? On tramping trips he tried to stick with cockney impersonations, but the down-and-outs and the Kentish hop-pickers noticed only that he talked ‘different’. Amidst a Babel tower of contemporary regional accents, not everyone located his vocal distinctiveness in class. Yet however drawled or languid Orwell’s voice, there was something peculiar about it, and the peculiarity seems to have preceded the sniper’s bullet. A teenage girl met in Suffolk years before the Spanish journey was struck by his ‘jerky sentences’. David Astor noted a distinctive, staccato way of talking, ‘husky rather than indistinct’, and short on emphasis, but, given that his first wife apparently adopted some of its mannerisms, clearly imitable by those in close proximity to it. Lucian Freud had the curious impression of a voice struggling to overcome some kind of obstruction, ‘literally monotone’. Powell, perhaps predictably, saw it as a question of upbringing, a way of speaking brought back to him when talking to former forestry officials from India and Africa, an intonation possibly even copied from Richard Blair. V. S. Pritchett, too, reckoned that the ‘almost spiritless Cockney drawl’ had a rusty edge to it that ‘suggested trouble and had been used to authority’.

Such voices are suited to the deadpan. Orwell’s humour – ironic and understated – seems to have been intimately connected to the way in which he delivered his lines. Astor asked him once in the Animal Farm days what the Marxists thought of him. Orwell itemised some choice pieces of invective. ‘A Fascist hyena . . . A Fascist octopus.’ There was a pause. ‘They’re very fond of animals.’ For the record, the BBC researcher thought he sounded like the actor Alan Rickman.

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