Who 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
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