[1] Following the attack launched at El Alamein on 23 October 1942, the Eighth Army cleared Egypt by 11 November 1942; Tobruk, in Libya, was retaken on 12 November. Allied forces landed in Morocco and Algeria on 8 November, and by 12 November were close to the western Tunisian border. Final victory in North Africa, however, was not to come until mid-May 1943.

[1] This is presumably a reference to the mysterious and unexplained ‘College’ to which Orwell refers from time to time.

[1] The Germans chained some 2,500 Allied prisoners (mainly Canadian) taken at Dieppe because they claimed that British Commandos had chained their German prisoners. The British War Office denied this. Canada then manacled 1.376 German prisoners. On 15 October, the Swiss Red Cross offered to mediate. See Orwell’s (unpublished) letter to the Times, 12 October 1942, in which he argues that by such retaliation we ‘descend…to the level of our enemies’ (CW, XIV, pp. 97-8). On 18 October, Hitler ordered German troops to shoot all captured Allied Commandos ‘to the last man.’

[According to D[avid] A[stor], Cripps is going to resign shortly – pretext, that the War Cabinet is a sham, Churchill being in reality the sole power in it.]

Long talk with Bradner, who is back after his 6 months tour in India. [1] His conclusions so depressing that I can hardly bring myself to write them down. Briefly – affairs are much worse in India than anyone here is allowed to realise, the situation is in fact retrievable but won’t be retrieved because the government is determined to make no real concessions, hell will break loose when and if there is a Japanese invasion, and our broadcasts are utterly useless because nobody listens to them. Bradner did say, however, that the Indians listen to BBC news, because they regard it as more truthful than that given out by Tokio or Berlin. He considers that we should broadcast news and music and nothing else. This is what I have been saying for some time past.

[1] Laurence Bradner (1903-?) author and lecturer in English literature in India for twelve years before the war, was employed by the BBC as Intelligence Officer, Eastern Service, 1941-44. In 1954 his study George Orwell was published. Pages 8-9 give a succinct insight to Orwell at the BBC:

“Everyone liked and respected him and he was the inspiration of that rudimentary Third Programme which was sent out to the Indian student. He soon sensed that the audience for the programme was not so large as was thought by the senior officials and, before I went to India early in 1942 to find out, he gave a great deal of time to discussing the problems with me. I found that our programmes were at a time of day when nobody was listening and that they could hardly be heard because the signal was so weak. Very few students had access to wireless sets…

I was always grateful to Orwell while we worked together in the B.B.C. He laughed very readily at the nonsense that went on, and made it tolerable. This did not interfere with his sense of responsibility, for he knew how important radio propaganda could be, if intelligently organised, and he worked very hard on his own talks, which were always good and usually brilliant. His voice was a great handicap. Thin and flat, it did not go over well on shortwave broadcasting”. [The quality of Orwell’s voice had been badly affected by his being shot through the throat when fighting in Spain.]

Bradner goes on to refer to the proposal to put into print the good talks that were not being heard, and it was he who suggested that Blair broadcast under the name Orwell (see CW, XIV, pp. 89 and 100-2). After the war, he was Director of Publications for the British Council.

Osbert Sitwell [1] was also there. [he was at one time connected with Mosley’s movement, but probably somewhat less inclined to go pro-German than L-H.] Both of them professed to be disgusted by our seizure of the Vichy colonies. Sitwell said that our motto was “When things look bad, retake Madagascar”. He said that in Cornwall in case of invasion the Home Guard have orders to shoot all artists. I said that in Cornwall this might be all for the best. Sitwell: “Some instinct would lead them to the good ones”.

[1] Sir Osbert Sitwell (1892-1969) was educated at Eton and served in the Grenadier Guards, 1912-19. In 1916 his poetry, with his sister Edith’s, was published as Twentieth-Century Harlequinade. He also wrote short stories (Triple Fugue, 1924; Open the Door, 1941), a number of novels, including Before the Bombardment (1926), The Man Who Lost Himself (1929), Those Were the Days (1938), A Place of One’s Own (1941), many essays and some critical studies (particularly on Dickens). He selected and arranged the text of William Watson’s Belshazzar’s Feast (1931). Orwell described his Left Hand, Right Hand!, The Scarlet Tree, and Great Morning! (1944-47) as ‘among the best autobiographies of our time’; see CW, XIX, pp 385-8.   

[1] The Left Book Club, founded by Victor Gollancz in 1936, still published a book a month on anti-Fascist or Socialist topics. Local group meetings had been revived in the middle of 1942, and some fifty branches were formed. The Road to Wigan Pier was published under its auspices.