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1857: Richard Blair is born in Milborne St. Andrew, Dorset, England, the youngest of ten children of a village vicar.
1875: Ida Limouzin, the daughter of a French father and English mother, is born in the London suburb of Penge but is raised in Moulmein, Burma.
For more on Ida see: Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India By Elizabeth Buettner OUP 2004 - see Google Books)
There might be more family background in The Unknown Orwell and Orwell: The Transformation By Peter Stansky, William Abrahams (Stanford Up 1994) (relevant pages missing from Google Books file)
Charles Blair's will of 1801 appointing Viscount St Vincent and Vere Fane as trustees is mentioned in MICHEL FAMILY OF WHATCOMBE D/RRC/D in Dorset Record Office (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/records.aspx?cat=031-drrc&cid=-1)
There are also several references to Charles Blair of Whatcombe in the Fane papers at Lincolnshire Archives
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a/records.aspx?cat=057-fane_1-1&cid=-1
----- Original Message -----
From: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">Angela AllisonTo: [log in to unmask] href="mailto:[log in to unmask]">[log in to unmask]Sent: Monday, July 07, 2008 12:07 PMSubject: George Orwell & SlaveryWho was it who said that, "Behind every English stately home is a slave plantation"?
since 1992 I've taught Orwell's novels for secondary school English and yet I've only just discovered, and quite by chance, that Orwell's background includes a slave plantation:
"Eric Arthur Blair (1903–1950), political writer and essayist, was born in Motihari, Bengal, India, on 25 June 1903, the only son of Richard Walmesley Blair (1857–1938), a sub-deputy opium agent in the government of Bengal, and his wife, Ida Mabel Limouzin (1875–1943). Richard Blair's great-grandfather Charles Blair (1743–1820), a Scot, had been a rich man, a plantation and slave owner in Jamaica who had married into the English aristocracy; the money had run out by Richard Blair's time, who all his career held poor posts, and was on the move constantly. He married Ida Limouzin late in his career. Her mother was English and her father French; she was born in Penge but had spent most of her life in Moulmein, Burma, where her father was a teak dealer and boat builder. Ida Blair took three-year-old Eric and his older sister, Marjorie, back to England just before the birth of her third and last child, Avril. Eric attended a small Anglican convent school in Henley-on-Thames until he gained a part scholarship to St Cyprian's, a fashionable preparatory school where Cyril Connolly was among his contemporaries. His fees were topped up by his mother's unmarried brother, who like his sister, had intellectual interests and ambitions for his nephew."
Source: http://www.oxforddnb.com
Angela Allison
Coventry, UK