Information Research Department - Orwell's List

Orwell's List

Among the many lists of journalists and trade unionists, etc., kept by the department, one that came to light to much polemic more than fifty years after it was compiled was a list drawn up by novelist George Orwell, an early anti-Stalinist.

On May 2, 1949, Celia Kirwan, a close friend of Orwell's who worked for the IRD, received a list compiled by Orwell containing thirty-eight names of journalists and writers who, in his opinion, "are crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as propagandists." The list, divided into three columns headed "Name" "Job" and "Remarks" included Charlie Chaplin; J. B. Priestley; the actor Michael Redgrave; the historian E. H. Carr; the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin; the New York Times's Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty; the former Trotskyist writer Isaac Deutscher; Labour MP Tom Driberg and the novelist Naomi Mitchison, as well as other lesser-known writers and journalists.

On the list was the name of Peter Smollett, who Orwell claimed "...gives strong impression of being some kind of Russian agent. Very slimy person." Smollett had been the head of the Soviet section in the British Ministry of Information, while in fact being a Soviet agent who had been recruited by Kim Philby.