Orwell's List - Notebook

Notebook

Orwell based his list on a strictly private notebook he had maintained since the mid-1940s of possible "cryptos", "F.T." (his abbreviation for fellow travellers), outright members of the CP, agents and sentimental sympathizers. The notebook, now at the Orwell Archive at University College London, contains 135 names in all, including US writers and politicians. Ten names had been crossed out, either because the person had died or because Orwell had decided that they were neither crypto-communists nor fellow travellers. The people named were a mélange: "some famous, some obscure, some he knew personally and others he did not." Orwell commented in New Leader in 1947:

The important thing to do with these people — and it is extremely difficult, since one has only inferential evidence — is to sort them out and determine which of them is honest and which is not. There is, for instance, a whole group of M. P.s in the British Parliament (Pritt, Zilliacus, etc.) who are commonly nicknamed 'the cryptos'. They have undoubtedly done a great deal of mischief, especially in confusing public opinion about the nature of the puppet regimes in Eastern Europe; but one ought not hurriedly to assume that they all hold the same opinions. Probably some of them are actuated by nothing worse than stupidity.

The notebook contained columns with names, comments and various markings. Typical comments were Stephen Spender “Sentimental sympathiser... Tendency towards homosexuality”, Richard Crossman “Too dishonest to be outright F. T.”, Kingsley Martin "Decayed liberal. Very dishonest" and Paul Robeson "very anti-white. Wallace supporter". Journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft considered Orwell’s remarks "perceptive and sometimes even generous", going on to say that "DN Pritt is described as an 'almost certainly underground' Communist but also a "Good MP (i.e. locally). Very able and courageous'". Among the names, Orwell selected 38 which he forwarded to Kirwan.

Richard Rees discussed the names with Orwell, later commenting that it was "a sort of game we played — discussing who was a paid agent of what and estimating to what lengths of treachery our favourite bêtes noires would be prepared to go." Orwell asked Rees to fetch the notebook from Jura in early 1949, thanking him in a letter of April 17.

One of Orwell's biographers, Bernard Crick, thought there were 86 names in the list and that some of the names were written in the hand of Koestler, who also co-operated with the IRD in producing anti-Communist propaganda.

Orwell was an ex-colonial policeman in Burma and according to Garton Ash, he liked making lists: 'In a "London Letter" to Partisan Review in 1942 he wrote, "I think I could make out at least a preliminary list of the people who would go over" to the Nazi side if the Germans occupied England."'