← Empire: World History
Loading summary
Transcript146 lines
- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
Spotify Portal Ad Voice
This episode is brought to you by Spotify Portal for Backstage. But you're wondering what's Portal? Well, it's an internal developer portal built to improve developer experience and boost productivity. All software componen components are centralized. Documentation is automated and easy to maintain new projects and components. Just a few clicks. With your best practices already built in, think less friction, more innovation. Ready to double your productivity? Try Spotify portal@backstage Spotify.com this episode is.
- [00:51]
Rumchata Ad Voice
Brought to you by Rumchata, a delicious.
- [00:53]
Anna Funder
Creamy blend of horchata with rum. It's best enjoyed over ice or in your coffee.
- [00:59]
Rumchata Ad Voice
Rumchata delivering vacation vibes any way or.
- [01:02]
Anna Funder
Anywhere you drink it.
- [01:04]
Rumchata Ad Voice
Find out more@rumchata.com drink responsibly Caribbean rum with real dairy cream, natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands, Pojoaquee, Wisconsin.
- [01:17]
Anna Funder
All rights reserved.
- [01:19]
William Dalrymple
Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just $8 only at McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery.
- [01:45]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to Empire with me.
- [01:47]
William Dalrymple
Anita Anand and me, William Durample.
- [01:50]
Anita Anand
We are so excited because we have feminist icon who's written the most brilliant book to talk about this the fourth episode in our Orwell series, Anna Funder is here and she has written the most sublime book. Can I just commend it all to you, Wyfton, Mrs. Orwell's invisible life. And it really does so much to turn everything you think you know about Orwell on its head, then put its hand down its throat, then turn it inside out and then waggle it around in the air. Anna Thunder, welcome.
- [02:21]
Anna Funder
Thank you so much.
- [02:21]
William Dalrymple
I've been keeping you two apart deliberately for months now. The two of you together would be an impossible. An impossible chemistry. Anyway, we will see it in the next 40 minutes.
- [02:31]
Anita Anand
It's gonna happen in the next 40 minutes is also gonna happen when Anna comes to London. We're gonna paint the town very bright pink. Okay, painting the town pink for another time. Let's start though with something where black would be a more appropriate color. And this is weird to start a podcast with somebody dying, but that's where we've got to in the chronology of the story, Anna. So we want to talk about the end of Orwell's life and let's talk about tb, because it was such a massive factor in the decline of a great writer.
- [03:02]
Anna Funder
Well, Orwell actually had terrible lungs all his life, even when he was a two year old. I went to the archives and opened up his mother's diary and his mother was this very lively woman who was bored to sobs, although she loved her children. And she filled her diary with entries that just said nothing in cursive, and the next day, nothing. And then there was baby's chest bad. And then there was baby's first word, quote, beastly, end quote. So I think all of that says a lot about, oh, well, he had very bad chest. He had TB basically all his adult life, as far as anyone can tell. And yes, beastly was a very prominent part of his vocabulary and arsenal.
- [03:48]
William Dalrymple
And for someone who had a bad chest, presumably moving to the West Highland island of Jura is not going to improve things. It gets. It rains sort of 363 days a year and is damp 365 days a year.
- [04:01]
Anna Funder
Do you know, I think there was. I don't know whether this is actually true, but it was said that it had a lovely microclimate and we're talking about immediate post war London, which is a hellscape. You know, you can barely find enough wood to heat your room and there are blackouts and it's miserable and the food is terrible.
- [04:21]
William Dalrymple
Bomb sites everywhere.
- [04:22]
Anna Funder
Bomb sites. Just awful for them both to move to Jura. And it sounded like a kind of paradise of, you know, a sea full of fish and lobsters and a place to plant your greens and very, very isolated, but also quite healthy. So he was hopeful when he went.
- [04:41]
Anita Anand
Yeah, but I mean, he didn't help himself because he's still chain smoking at this point. He's working himself to distraction. I mean, he's sort of, you know, trying to finish the final draft of 1984. He's working by night, he's got a paraffin lamp on. So, you know, whatever the health benefits of being in the clear sea air are in the evening, you know, it's all undone by the horrible smog coming off the lamps that he's working with.
- [05:07]
Anna Funder
Oh, I know I've been in that room where he wrote 1984 and I have to say, at the end of writing it, he had to type out a fair copy himself. Normally, Eileen would have done it, but she Wasn't available, obviously, and his editor and his friend Richard Rees and Fred Wahlberg tried really, really hard to get a woman to go to Jura from London to do that typing and to make a fair copy for him. But no one would go. I mean, to get there from London was a 48 hour trip.
- [05:38]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, even today it's quite a trip to get to Jura. I've been to Jura, but I've also been to the sanatorium at Weirdly in the Cotswolds where he was taken when he collapsed. It's on the edge of this lovely, you know, sort of perfect Cotswold territory, but it's also quite bleak. You can imagine that it wasn't going to be a very cheery spot to recover. But they didn't keep him there long, did they? They moved him to, was it University College Hospital in London.
- [06:02]
Anna Funder
So he actually, he typed out this manuscript in this tiny room with a dormer window at Bound Hill on Jura looking out over the sea. And he chain smoked, as you say, and the paraffin lamp was going and he refused all medical attention. So he's sort of coughing up his lungs but really killing himself to get this book done, to get 1984 done and would only let a doctor have a look at him once that was typed. So he sort of was suffering for his art in this most extreme of ways. And yes, then the Cotshalls and then a tiny room at UCL in London where his friends could visit him. So, you know, David Astor could visit and people were coming by and where.
- [06:42]
William Dalrymple
David Astor visited him in the unusual circumstances of actually marrying for the second time in hospital, in bed. And for those who aren't familiar with the name, David Astor was one of the great heirs of a fortune in post war Britain who lived, I think in Cliveden, which was a great sort of post war literary salon and political salon. And he owned the observer, which was the leading left leaning newspaper of the day.
- [07:07]
Anna Funder
Yes. So Sonia went to see him when he was in the Cotswold, Sonria Brownell and she was this gorgeous, vivacious, very clever woman who'd been an editor at Horizon magazine, gone off to France, had a fairly disastrous, in the end, intense affair with the philosopher Maurice Merleau Ponty and then come back and decided that she would go and visit Orwell. They'd had a kind of very, very brief liaison before, but she went to see him in the Cotswolds and then she started bringing him books, whiskey, newspapers and doing bits and pieces of him and he was besotted and asked her to marry him. Horizon was closing up and she said to a friend, well, Horizon's closing up. I think I'll marry Orwell. And she did. But they married literally on his deathbed at University College Hospital.
- [08:00]
William Dalrymple
There's a wonderful description of that marriage at the opening of DJ Taylor's Bug, which I know you have your differences with, but it's a wonderful description of these strange figures meeting in this bleak hospital.
- [08:12]
Anna Funder
But Orwell himself, like a lot of dying people, I think I have not very much experience of this, but some. And, you know, they keep alive by hoping that they will be able to keep alive, even though rationally and reasonably. I mean, Orwell said, for instance, they can barely find enough flesh on me to stick an injection into. I'm basically a corpse. But at the same time, he kept a fishing rod handy in the corner of this tiny room, because the plan was that he would go to Switzerland, where the air was even better for someone with tuberculosis, even in the end stage, and he would fish. That plan was organized by Sonja because Orwell wanted it with an ex lover of hers, Lucian Freud, very young Lucian Freud, who was going to do, literally the heavy lifting of getting Orwell onto a plane that was being chartered to take him to Switzerland. So the fishing rod was a kind of symbol of hope, I think, against hope, literally in that room. He never made it to Switzerland.
- [09:13]
Anita Anand
So he never made it to Switzerland. His friends have accepted that he may not last very long. Is there a point where he does suddenly think, actually, I really don't. I'm never going to go fishing, I'm never going to use that rod? And does he start preparing for death? Because we know he had meetings with accountants and lawyers in almost the last week of his life. So something in him must have, whatever the outside waders and paraphernalia were in his room, known that this, you know, this. He wasn't going to get out of this?
- [09:43]
Anna Funder
Maybe, yes. When he was proposing to Sonja and he proposed to numbers of women before he proposed to Sonia, he did say, really, what I'm asking you to be is the executrix of a literary man. So he'd had one wife who looked after his affairs, co wrote Animal Farm, edited everything that he did.
- [10:04]
Anita Anand
Never got credit, but we'll come to that in a minute. Okay? And then there's a woman at the end.
- [10:08]
Anna Funder
Yeah, he's had one brilliant literary wife, and he wants another who won't be a wife of making books, but who'll be A wife of looking after his. His legacy. So, yes, there was this cognitive dissonance going on, which I find totally understandable and utterly heartbreaking.
- [10:26]
William Dalrymple
She did guard his legacy, though, didn't she? She was. She sort of fended off David Bowie, who wanted to make a 1984 musical, which must be one of the great sort of misses of modern artistic history.
- [10:39]
Anna Funder
I didn't know that. That's an amazing idea. You've just blown my mind. Just.
- [10:42]
Anita Anand
I mean, let's talk about actually, you know, the day that he died, because I think one of the last friends, and this is 1949, just to remind.
- [10:50]
Anna Funder
People where we are in this great.
- [10:52]
Anita Anand
Life, one of the last friends to see him alive was the anarchist poet Paul Potts. And I mean, that's a very sweet visit, isn't it? Sort of brings him tea, particular brand.
- [11:03]
William Dalrymple
Of tea that he loved.
- [11:04]
Anna Funder
Yes, he loved Indian tea. He didn't want that Chinese filthy stuff. And Paul Potts, who was always bro. You know, always scrounging for money in pubs, managed to find him some tea and buy it. But then he comes to the door of the hospital and he looks and he sees that Orwell is asleep and thinks, I'll just leave the tea. And he regretted it afterwards because Orwell died very shortly after a massive hemorrhage.
- [11:29]
Anita Anand
So is that. Is that something that happens with tb? Is that just some blood vessels just burst?
- [11:33]
Anna Funder
I'm no TB expert, but I think that you really just. He'd had several haemorrhages before and this was just a massive one that he couldn't survive.
- [11:42]
William Dalrymple
I mean, TB is a very unusual disease to have today. Was it unusual after the war? Were many people dying of tb, or was he particularly unlucky with his very delicate test to have got this terrible disease?
- [11:53]
Anna Funder
Well, actually, he was particularly unlucky in the timing of it because shortly after that, in the early 50s, antibiotic treatments came in that were effective against TB.
- [12:02]
Anita Anand
So after, you know, sort of a tragic, awful end for a man who was just so gigantic in so many ways, frail, you know, with not enough flesh to put a needle in, we should talk about his legacy. And one of the weirdest ironies, I think, that, you know, that he is known as this lifelong democratic socialist, and yet one of the first groups to move in on him and his legacy is the CIA.
- [12:27]
William Dalrymple
So the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, the OPC, secretly obtained the film rights to Animal Farm, and they produced a slightly bized version that was far more to the right than the original novel was.
- [12:41]
Anita Anand
Slightly to the right. They were just bloody nonsense. They made the pigs look like humans because they thought, actually, if people think that the capitalists are pigs, they won't like capitalism anymore. I was like that on that very basic level of nonsense meddling that they managed to sort of get hold of it. So you know that this massively anti communist message gets completely sort of mishmashed until you don't really know what it is. It's bad farming practices. You know, in essence, it's a really ridiculous situation.
- [13:13]
William Dalrymple
But it's become, thanks to the CIA, partly the classic anti communist text now that's used in schools in Britain and all over the world. It isn't just a British and American thing. People I remember when Mugabe was going down were comparing him to Napoleon the pig in Animal Farm. And ditto in Burma. When you travel in Burma, people think that Animal Farm is a Burmese book all about Burma. We've talked earlier, in one of the earlier episodes about how they literally read it as a Burmese political text to this day.
- [13:43]
Anita Anand
There's also just the enormous irony of the fact that in 1984 he talks about these supreme powers rewriting history to suit their own narrative. And that's precisely what the CIA tries to do to Animal Farm. I think it's just hilarious, to be honest. But let's get back to Anna and her brilliant book Wiefden.
- [13:59]
William Dalrymple
I mean, one of the themes of this miniseries has been the sense in which Orwell, almost alone of his generation, particularly alone of the sort of Etonian writers like sort of Robert Byron and all those Aldous Huxley and all those figures that came out of the British establishment in the 20s and 30s alone. Of those, Orwell is prescient and reads today as if he's talking to us. The others seem locked in a period of history. And whether we're talking about Orwell's views of empire or Orwell's views of fascism, or Orwell's views of communism, he is someone that speaks directly to us today. We don't need to sort of see him for much of his career as a man of his time. But this is emphatically not the case with Orwell's views of women. And Anna has written this wonderful book.
- [14:48]
Anita Anand
Can I just say, any of our members of our club can get discounts to this wonderful book. Just sign up to empirepoduk.com that's empirepoduk.com and you can get Anna's book at a discount. And it's worth twice as much as you'd pay for It. Let's talk about the story. I mean, William was saying, you know, that everybody sort of pored over Orwell's life and, you know, his motivations and what did he really mean. But that part of his life that was inhabited by really important women that is almost deleted now. I want to know when you first realized that this was a, you know, this was ground worth tilling.
- [15:23]
Anna Funder
I would absolutely tell you when I first realized. But first of all, I just want to talk about what Willi said. The thing about Orwell having a different view from his Etonian contemporaries is such an interesting way to cast this question because he was only really, by the skin of his teeth, an Etonian at all. His mother, who was half French and grew up in Burma, had intellectual interests, was very clever, lively, feminist, Fabian socialist. So Orwell had this extraordinary lively intellectual feminist mother and aunt. So her sister had been arrested with the Pankhursts for demonstrating for suffrage, was an esperantist, lived in sin, quote unquote, with a French anti Stalinist leftist. In Paris, was an actress used to correspond with Orwell, sending him stuff about the latest research into sex and gender roles. These were really interesting women. The family has no money. Basically, Ida, his mother, sends Orwell to a crammer and at 11 he gets into Eton. But they are really cash strapped. Orwell used to famously say he came from the lower upper middle class. That sounds like understatement. It sounds like a quite charming thing to say. I'm from the lower upper middle, but I went to the house which was the first house his parents actually owned. I believe in retirement in Southwold coastal community full of sort of mid level ex civil servants of empire. And the opening scene of the book Wiefdom is Eileen writing a letter to her best friend. I used the real letter she wrote to her best friend Nora from their time at Oxford together. And she says, I'm surprised that I'm having such a good time. The house is very small and furnished almost entirely with paintings of ancestors. So she manages to get in this very funny way, the sort of former glory of the family and the portraits of ancestors in this tiny house. I thought nothing of it, but a very kind man got me into that house when I was on a book tour and did a reading in South Wald. And it is a tiny house. It is a tiny house. So Orwell has two things that mark him out as different, perhaps from his generation. He has this terrific Etonian education, although he didn't really shine there, but he also has this Underdog outsider view, which is a leftist view. And that comes from feminist mother and aunt. A left wing underdog. And I don't think many other old Etonians had left wing feminist parents who gave them that particularly underdog Orwellian point of view. And he got that from women. Yeah.
- [18:06]
Anita Anand
I mean, I'm just really interested then with, you know, a suffragette leaning mother and that sort of strong sense of social justice that he has. Why does he write such weird stuff about women? Because I think six months into your project of writing this book, you find an essay written by Orwell. Can I quote a bit of it to you? And then just explain what was going on in that head at the time? There were two great facts about women which you could only learn by getting married, writes Orwell, and which flatly contradict the picture of themselves that women have managed to impose upon the world. One was their incorrigible dirtiness and untidiness. The other was their terrible, devouring sexuality. Within any marriage or regular love affairs, he suspected that it was always the women who were the sexually insistent partners. And you go on to say, you know, that he has a real hang up about women being these voracious kind of monsters who want more and more sex and the men sort of have to cope with this and navigate it. It's not the most flattering portrait of strong women.
- [19:10]
Anna Funder
Yes. No, it's not. I mean, there's a lot of evidence that Orwell was gay, that his real desire was for other men. He did do a lot of what the biographers, some of them euphemize, as pouncing on women before and during his marriage or during. Sometimes women he knew, sometimes women he paid for sex, sometimes women in parks or after parties or whatever. So there was a lot of sexual assault. I am looking at what the women said. So the women he pounced on said. And at that time, in the 20s, 30s, 40s, nobody was talking, using language of sexual assault. And I don't think women were often saying that they had been raped, but they were shocked, they were surprised, they were appalled. They ran away. One woman he jumped on in a park after a party, Hampstead Heath, he jumped on her and she fought him off by negotiating to meet him the next day. She was a young woman he had met once before who'd worked at the BBC. So she manages to get away, but it's a physical attack and she makes this promise and of course she doesn't turn up for a repeat performance in the park the next day, whereupon he writes her a Letter about the iniquity of breaking your promise to come back for another sexual assault. So this is a lot of evidence about his desire for men and there's a lot of evidence that we would say today's sexual assault.
- [20:31]
William Dalrymple
Could you go into the first a bit more? Because, I mean, obviously a lot of his contemporaries from that generation were gay. It wasn't at all unusual for public school educated boys of that generation to be very openly gay. And many of the writers of his era were openly gay. But he wasn't openly gay, was he?
- [20:49]
Anna Funder
I mean, I've looked at it quite closely because I was writing about it and I didn't want to get anything wrong or smear anybody in any way. He was enormously homophobic, which was also.
- [21:01]
William Dalrymple
Very common at that time.
- [21:03]
Anna Funder
Also very common. So you've got these contradictions. So he was in love with somebody, another boy at school, which I'm sure is very common. He wrote letters to Cyril Connolly, who was in his form saying please leave him to me and so on. And then, you know, there was sort of strip searching of 16 year old Spanish recruits. There was a young man called Denzel who was in the Dad's army during the war, who he nearly blew his teeth out with a mortar and then plied him with whiskey and took him off to the movies. And David Taylor actually says, and behind that lurks the shadow of the dark horse. So I have to say every time one of the biographers kind of goes into murky language, murky euphemistic language, it's often about something sexual. I don't know whether David knows whether Orwell's homosexual desires were ever fulfilled. I suspect they weren't. I think that he was extremely conflicted in a way that couldn't come to the surface of his consciousness. So one of his friends after Orwell died said a bit like what you're saying, Willie. I actually really never understood why he was so homophobic because when we were younger, those of us who loved the workers did it practically, meaning we would have just slept with them. So there was a tradition of kind of, well, really of sex tourism within Britain, kind of going into the East End or going up north or whatever. Orwell I don't think was doing that when he was in the Kipps and around the place. But I don't know.
- [22:30]
William Dalrymple
And there's a great deal of this also on the British left at this time in particular, if you think of all those Cambridge spies and so on, almost all were bisexual or gay.
- [22:39]
Anna Funder
But you know, the thing is I don't think this was a deliberate choice. I mean, I think that in his family, I don't think that his mother and aunts, who were his lodestar, intellectual and political lodestars, would have blinked if he were gay. There was no sign that. I mean, they were very kind of sexually open minded. So his best friend was Richard Rees, who was never married. So the left wing aristocrat, who had been an editor of Orwell's and was very wealthy, followed him into the Spanish Civil War, followed him up to Jura to finance that farm and to look after his health in the end of it. So he had this very close editor and friend, bachelor friend. But really, as a gay man, even though you might be much happier out at that time, if you had no money, you would never be able to afford the services, thinking practically that a wife would give you, particularly a brilliant wife like Eileen. So to. To live how he lived with a domestic servant and an Oxford educated, brilliant writer editor wife, would just not be possible as a gay man. So there's that as well, I think.
- [23:46]
Anita Anand
Well, we're gonna take a break here. We're gonna come back and talk more about Eileen, who is just such a fascinating character. But I just leave you with a couple of lines before we go to that break. And again, this is from that same essay that Orwell writes and which we think is about Eileen. And again, it's about sex. So we're talking about sex a lot, a lot more than I thought we would in this episode. But he talks again about sort of sexual intercourse and, you know, the fact that men are pushed, men are trying to escape from sexual intercourse, to only do it when they feel like it with other women. And the women are demanding it more and more, he says, and more and more consciously despising their husbands for lack of virility. Join us after the break where we find out how this fits in with Eileen, who really, I think, deserve better.
- [24:36]
David Ulischogger
Hello, I'm David Ulischogger.
- [24:38]
Rumchata Ad Voice
And I'm Sarah Churchwell.
- [24:39]
David Ulischogger
This week on Journey Through Time, we are exploring the story of the gunpowder plot of 1605. The story of how a small group of Catholics engaged in what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in all of British history.
- [24:52]
Rumchata Ad Voice
The plan was ruthless. Blow up Parliament, King James I and most of his family, all in a single blow.
- [24:59]
David Ulischogger
The series will tell the story of treason and traitors of a group of men led by the charismatic Robert Catesby, who believed that the only option left to them to win their rights as Catholics was the violent destruction of the Stuart state.
- [25:13]
Rumchata Ad Voice
We look at the story of Guy Fawkes, the nation's most famous traitor, from his recruitment to becoming the plot's fall guy, and also ultimately being tortured and killed.
- [25:23]
David Ulischogger
Finally, we find out why this plot is still remembered now, 400 years later. Listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts. And as a special treat for listeners, we've got an extract from that series at the end of this episode.
- [25:46]
William Dalrymple
This is an ad by our old mates Better Help Empires are remembered for what they won, but defined by what they endured. As winter days grow colder and shorter, many of us endure in quieter ways, retreating into our own citadels, isolating ourselves and letting connections fade. This month, BetterHelp invites us to change that to reach out, check in, call someone we haven't spoken to for a while, or simply remind a friend that you're there. It's striking how quickly the world feels lighter when we connect with others, when we talk through instead of carrying things alone. Therapy works in much the same way. BetterHelp has spent over 12 years helping people start that first conversation, matching millions to qualified therapists who can help them move forward. This month, don't wait to reach out. Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. Our listeners get 10% off their first month@betterhelp.com Empire that's betterhelp.com Empire this episode is brought to you by Attio, the CRM for the AI era, Empires require a strong foundation to flourish. The Romans based theirs around the power of Rome. The British relied on the strong hand of Parliament and the monarchy. Attio understands that every business needs its own stable foundation. Instead of trying to build your business on top of generic tools. Attio's AI driven CRM means that anyone can build a CRM that works for their unique needs and purpose. Attio is built to support your business from day one. Empires also require efficiency. Rome would be nothing without its roads. Britain would just be an island without its sea power. Attio can give you real time, customer insights and a platform that grows with you so you can finally stop wasting time trying to shape your business around somebody else's software and get on with what matters most your customers. With Attio, you can do the real work of building your own empire, whether it's that small business, a startup, or or an international corporation. Try Attio for free@attio.com empire this episode is brought to you by the American Revolution on pbs. It began with voices carried on the wind, arguments and taverns, whispers at kitchen tables, the trap of the boots on muddy fields. From sparks kindled in America grew an upheaval that shook an empire, gave birth to a nation, and altered the course of history. Ken Burns landmark PBS series the American Revolution casts the familiar in a new light, illuminating stories left in shadow. The American Revolution is more than history. It's an exploration of the United States at its founding, its people, values, families and its place in the world. The choices of past and present are woven into the same fabric. As the United states nears its 250th year, these stories remind us that the revolution is not history pressed between pages, but a force still shaping the world today. The American Revolution premieres on Sunday, November 16th on PBS and the PBS app.
- [29:28]
Anita Anand
Welcome back. So just before the break, we started talking about Eileen, who was the woman who does a lot of work, who actually sort of, you know, gave up her own career in order to support Orwell in his. And I think first of all, we should say what she did before and what she ends up doing after she gets with Orwell. Can you talk us through that, Anna?
- [29:51]
William Dalrymple
I should describe her, first of all. She's got this lovely open face. The picture which very cleverly in your front cover is moved almost off center so you can barely see her face when you see the actual picture. She's got this open face. She's got a rather a sort of boyish beautifulness about her with this little bob of hair. And she's of Irish background, isn't she? Eileen Maud o', Shaughnessy, but born in South Shields rather than Ireland.
- [30:15]
Anna Funder
Yes. She's often described as very, as beautiful. It's a very open face. She was somebody who didn't use any makeup, she only used rouge. And when one of her friends asked her, do you really have to put that on? She said, I only put it on really for other people, otherwise they'd worry about me because I look like I'm about to pass out. Yet she's very pale with very dark hair and blue or green eyes, quite pale, tallish and thin. One of her friends said she had a lot of lovely friends when she met Orwell. She met they met at a party in Hampstead, and it was a party at the flat of a woman who was a divorced South African woman who was studying for a master's in psychology, and so was Eileen. So she was a UCL college friend of Eileen's. And of Eileen's friend Lydia. So this milieu is of these women in the 30s, Eileen, having done read.
- [31:10]
William Dalrymple
English at Oxford and first generation of Oxford women, we should say she's one of the very first in there at a time when male undergraduates are often very disparaging about what they would call blue stockings in the literature of the time. And there's rather a fear of these brilliant women among the young men at Oxford. They avoided relationships with the women and often had relationships with each other, certainly the evening wars of this world.
- [31:34]
Anna Funder
Goodness, there's a lot of terror of clever women, isn't there?
- [31:37]
Anita Anand
Yeah, well, thank goodness that's all changed, Anna. And that's not a thing anymore.
- [31:42]
Anna Funder
So Eileen came from this apparently, quote, mad gay family. Her dad was a customs inspector. They had quite a bit of money, a lot more than Orwell's family. She had an elder brother who was completely brilliant, lung and thoracic surgeon who went to study in Berlin under the surgeon who'd had been Hitler's doctor and stuff. Her brother became an anti fascist. And Eileen, who was also brilliant and got herself a scholarship. She was head girl at her school, got herself a scholarship to Oxford. Oxford to read English. She was funny and was taught by Tolkien.
- [32:13]
Anita Anand
Tolkien. Tolkien was her. Tolkien was her professor. I mean, that's amazing.
- [32:17]
Anna Funder
Yes, yes, it is. So she loved animal fables. When she was first married to Orwell, they lived in a tiny hovel in a village called Wallington, 50 miles outside of London, with no plumbing and no electricity. So they were kind of both suffering for his art, really. She wrote in her first letter to Nora, she said, I'm really sorry it's taken me six months to write to you. I would have written sooner, but we have quarreled so continuously and really bitterly since the wedding that I thought I'd just write one letter to everyone once the murder or separation was accomplished. So she's hilarious. And these letters were discovered in about 2005, a cache of six of them to her best friend. And my interest in Eileen was really that. I found myself one summer kind of needing inspiration, and had always loved Orwell and always loved his work. I didn't read 1984 till after I'd written Stasiland. For some reason, I just really didn't want to. And then when I read it, it read like the GDR regime. So I read my way through his collected journalism essays and letters and watched him create his writing Persona through those four edited volumes edited by Sonja Browneauer with another. And then when I finished that I read the six biographies of him with great pleasure. You get these different views on the same person depending on the personality of the biographer. And then I was still researching around and found these letters that I, not me personally, they had been found, but they were six letters from Eileen to her best friend, starting with this one where she wants to kill him at six months married. And I realized that there was no sense of her as a person and what she'd done in the biographies. And it's actually not because these six letters were missing. It's because the men who wrote the biographies were not looking.
- [34:04]
Anita Anand
And also, Orwell didn't help either because he sort of omits her. But look, we've jumped a step because we started off saying they met at a party, we need to know whether it was love at first sight. And then William sort of leapt in with the description, we need to know what happened. Were there fireworks? How did it develop?
- [34:21]
Anna Funder
It was absolutely love at first sight for him. He was besotted and he thought this was the woman for him. She said the next day she'd never heard of him. He was a complete unknown. He and Richard Rees were leaning on the fireplace in their threadbare suits, skinny men looking, as Eileen's friend Lydia said, rather moth eaten. Lydia was Russian, thought they looked like some sort of moth eaten people out of Chekhov, and didn't want Eileen to have anything to do with him. Eileen the next day said to a friend, Rosamund, who was the hostess, said, actually, he would really like to see you. Should I organize a dinner? And Eileen was surprised and said, oh, my God, I was so drunk, rowdy, behaving my worst. So Eileen had had a good time. Orwell had fallen in love. Rosamund organized a dinner and it went from there. So he. Yeah, and then they married the next year.
- [35:15]
Anita Anand
And so, I mean, there's this bright, wonderful woman who, you know, has. Has the eyes of everybody in the room on her because she has got this sort of this Irish beauty, you know, the green blue sea and the dark hair and the translucent skin. How quickly does she start changing from her own woman, a very strong, educated, Tolkien taught woman, into somebody who thinks that actually this man is worth me diverting my energies, my talent, my intelligence, to serve him in a way to help him, to make him better.
- [35:48]
Anna Funder
That's a really brilliant question. And that is the question, I think, one of the big questions of Eileen's life. It's one of the big questions of my book wifedom. And it's a question for many women who Go into marriage or go into relationships. It's a question of how much of yourself can you maintain in a relationship, how much should you give in that relationship and negotiating those two sometimes conflicting things. And sometimes if you give too much, it can be too late to get yourself back because you give so much, you end up in a state where you no longer have the strength to get yourself back whole. So something like that is going on in this, in this marriage, but it's a complicated and interesting one. Three weeks after the party, she said to her friend Lydia, you know that that moth eaten guy at the party? Well, he asked me to marry him. And Lydia says, she writes this in her memoir, Lydia, so we know it. Oh, my God. No. Oh, God. What did you say? And Eileen says, well, you know, I said to myself, if I weren't married by the time I was 30, I'd marry the first person who comes along. So maybe I will. So she's kind of having a bet with herself, but I think she was being kind of humorous there. What I really think was going on was at Oxford, she would have liked to have stayed and become a don of some kind. It was pretty much impossible for women to do. And she didn't get a first. Eileen was the most, most self deprecating, to a dangerous degree person, combined with this extraordinary cleverness. And the only time in her life where she behaves in such a disappointed way, almost embittered, is when she didn't get a first at Oxford. And I suspect that something happened there that she thought was unfair. She had a great sense of justice. She organized two walkouts of workers at secretarial offices that she'd worked in, actually one during the war at a ministry. She had a great sense of decency. That was the decency that Orwell so wanted to have. And I think that he, you know, he modeled that decency on her. But yes, the issue of losing yourself in a marriage is a big one. And I don't know, I just have to give all the evidence and tell the story.
- [38:01]
Anita Anand
So this, this strong, brilliant, beautiful woman who also sort of proves her mettle in that cauldron of the Spanish Civil War. Just tell us what Eileen was doing at that time.
- [38:13]
Anna Funder
So Orwell goes to Spain to fight fascists. He wants to fight and kill fascists. Something that, you know, used to seem like it was history and doesn't anymore, but that's what he's doing. And he leaves her in this tiny cottage. And I think that she just thinks, no way am I staying here looking after the chickens. And she sells part of the family silver to fund his kids. But also she manages to get herself a job in the head office of the International Labor Party in Barcelona. So she goes as a French English typist and she's writing propaganda for Charles Orr, who's an American economist in that office. So she's working at the political headquarters and he's off in the trenches, bored out of his mind, trying to find a bullet to hit him, basically. So she goes there and so she saves his life when his. By a bullet. She saves his life by getting the visas to get them out of Spain. He's writing on bits of newspaper in these horrible trenches and the backs of envelopes and toilet paper and everything, and he's sending it back to her and she types it all up into what will become the basis for Homage to Catalonia, a book that I had read twice and loved without realizing that Eileen was in Spain, let alone had saved his life. And basically her political analysis informing that book, she must have typed that and realised in the typing of it that he was going to very deliberately tell the story to leave her out.
- [39:36]
Anita Anand
But why did he do that, Anna, as somebody who's thought about him, why do that? It's so churlish. It's churlish to the point of being actually quite cruel, isn't it?
- [39:46]
Anna Funder
It's very deliberate. So he has to tell the whole story of being shot through the throat without saying that within a day, basically, or day and a half, she was there and she organized all medical care, X rays, all the transport, put him in the sanatorium. There's that. And then there's the episode when Stalin. Stalin could see her perfectly clearly. There were Stalinist agents in her office who wanted to wine and dine her, romance her, get information from her. She was a target. She was terrified. When Richard Rees, Orwell's friend, turns up in Barcelona, he goes to see her at the office and says, let's go to lunch. And she says, I can't. And he says, oh, come on, you can just get away for an hour. And she says, takes him into the corridor because there were literally spies in her office spying for Stalin and says, it will be dangerous for you, Richard, to be seen with me. And he writes down, which all the biographers had access to. This is the first time I have witnessed somebody living under political terror. Political terror is Orwell's topic. She was the one who lived it and so she was informing his books with it. I think the big answer to your question, why Would he do that? Is it churlish? I think that. I mean, it's very deliberate. I see it more as something that is a cultural trope. All kinds of men are writing their stories as if women didn't make them possible. The fact that none of the biographers thought to look closely at this very famous episode, this very famous man, this very famous book, and deconstruct it to see what is being hidden. I mean, I've done that. That sounds complicated, but I've done it in a narrative way in Wivedom. And it's a shock to me that Orwell scholars, who are much more informed than I am, didn't do that. I mean, it's really exciting. It's Cherche la femme who saved his life and made this book possible, and yet she's nowhere. So I think that the biographers are also part of this trope where a great man must do everything on his own and he must not owe anything to a woman because that could possibly take away from his achievement. I don't think it does. I think the story is more. Much more interesting when you can see both sides.
- [41:55]
William Dalrymple
Anna, tell us about her literary additions to his Herb. Because from the very beginning, from Wigan Peer, which is being written just as the early days of their marriage, she is not only typing stuff out, but she is editing and contributing to his literary work. That's one of the great revelations of your. But not only is she humanly in the story, much more than the other biographers have allowed her up to date, but she's actually a major literary presence, which is a very important literary contribution that you've made by unmasking this.
- [42:29]
Anna Funder
Yes. So just after they were married in 1936, several people who knew him well, including Richard Rees and Fred Warburg, who were editors and publishers of his, said it was remarkable how much his writing improved after he got married. But they too wouldn't name her. It was as if perhaps his happiness in general, perhaps regular sex. You know, there's all these sort of theories. It was obviously because she had started. He was reluctant at first, but she was very keen to edit his stuff. Eventually she ended up writing what she called emendations on the back of everything that he did. She was widely thought by her friends to have improved his work by reining in the paranoia, reining in the sadism, reining in the hyperbole. All tobacconists are fascists.
- [43:17]
William Dalrymple
Fascists. I love that one.
- [43:19]
Anna Funder
These sort of provocations that could make your writing a bit less serious.
- [43:24]
Anita Anand
Can we just zone In On Animal Farm, which is, you know, a book that I think most people listening to this will have either been forced to read at school or, you know, like me, really enjoyed reading at school. Eileen's fingerprints are all over that and you just wouldn't know it, would you? So tell me what she did. Tell me how, you know, that is a clear bit of evidence of her impact on his work.
- [43:47]
Anna Funder
Animal Farm was written during the war. Orwell, since their time in Spain, really had been terrified as Stalinist, was going to come and kill him. A real terror, but a very unlikely thing to happen because he had been a pretty low level militiaman. But he thought that someone might knock on the door in Britain and have been sent by Stalin to kill him. In fact, when that did happen, one time he grabbed a gun in the cottage, jumped behind the door and said to Eileen, open the door. Anyway, he decides during the war he wants to write an essay critical of Stalin. Eileen always worked to support them financially during their whole relationship. One of the jobs that she did that in was in the Office of Censorship in the Department of Information, or vice versa, Department of Censorship in the Office of Information. So she had been in the Department of Censorship, Censorship during the war, working there.
- [44:39]
Anita Anand
Which is room 101, isn't that the protein room 101, right in Senate House.
- [44:43]
Anna Funder
She worked in Senate House, which he then later took as the model for the Ministry of Truth, I. E. Lies. So she knew what could be published and what couldn't be published. And she said to him, no one is going to publish an essay critical of Stalin right now because he is helping us win the war. But I don't know what the next bit of the conversation was, but the upshot of that conversation was that they turned to. To writing an animal fable of the kind she had studied under Tolkien, the kind that she had wanted to write because she watched very closely the chickens when they were just married and they're living in the cottage. They all had personalities and she wanted to write about them. So they write this book, Animal Farm. It takes them three months. She goes off to work at a different ministry, the Ministry of Food at this time, and then she shops for them to find whatever she can find for dinner. She comes home and cooks for whoever's been burnt out and then they hop into bed together because they can't afford to heat the flat. And they work on the book together every night. So whatever he's done during the day, they work over and they work out what he's going to do. The next day. And we know this because every day she went into the ministry and she told her friend Lettuce Cooper about it. And Lettuce Cooper was a novelist who wrote about this. And so. And all her friends at the ministry knew these installments and Eileen was having a ball. When it's finally finished, Orwell gives it to Fred Warburg, his publisher, who's his friend, who's known him for a long time. And Warburg is absolutely stunned. He says he cannot understand how somebody who's written books with a stand in grumpy character who is himself before has suddenly taken wings and become a poet. He cannot understand it. And he knows Eileen well and he still can't see it. And neither can Richard Reese, who says, we had no idea he was capable of such a thing. And the fact was, that book, which Orwell considered to be his best book, he loved it was the only thing he ever produced that was remotely like that. Everything else is completely different and no one has looked.
- [46:39]
Anita Anand
So do we, do we think that she actually wrote great chunks of it, or do we think that she pushed him to write in the style that she was bringing to the table? I mean, how much do we think this came from the mind and heart of Eileen Ney o'? Shaughnessy?
- [46:57]
Anna Funder
So when you read Eileen's letters, this whimsy, the murder or separation letter or the letters about other people, she's someone who can see other people as characters and always has been able to tell stories about them. She's whimsical, she's hilarious, she's astute about people. Orwell is not whimsical. He has no idea about other people. He has never written another character. He's certainly never written another female character who's convincing. When you read her letters and you read Animal Farm, the voice is the same. So I'm sure this could be fed into some computer now to work it out. So I don't know how that practically worked. I don't. I mean, they're sitting in bed together, they're writing this thing. I don't know, but it was joyful for both of them.
- [47:33]
William Dalrymple
And Anna, another of Your revelations is 1984 that not only was she helping him write this, but she'd already written a book much earlier in her life or a story called End of the century 1984.
- [47:48]
Anna Funder
I know. Do you know, Willi, I feel that is a much more minor thing. It looks extraordinary. She wrote a poem.
- [47:55]
William Dalrymple
It looks extraordinary, yes.
- [47:56]
Anna Funder
She wrote a poem called End of the Century 1984. Before she met Orwell was to commemorate something to do with her high school. And it is imagining a dystopian future of telepathy and mind control. She dies before Animal Farm is published, very tragically. And he's writing 1984. He doesn't know what he's going to call it till the end. He thinks he might call it the Last Man In Europe and so on, and he calls it 1984. There is no evidence why he did that or how much they had talked about that before she died, or whether the poem inspired it, or whether 1984 is his homage to her. I don't see that as anything like the kind of really significant contribution such as the co writing of Animal Farm.
- [48:41]
Anita Anand
You sort of mentioned that Eileen died and this might be an homage to her memory, calling it 1984, but we haven't really said how she died. I mean, it's all sort of, you know, what happened. Was it very sudden? Was there warning? How did he feel about it?
- [48:55]
Anna Funder
I'm always a little bit. Well, I have been in the past. The book has been out two years now and I've been reluctant to talk about that because for my own very selfish reason. It is the plot shock of the book, but yes. So he was ill with TB. She was very unwell. They adopted a baby in 1944 called Richard Orwell. Didn't really want. He didn't turn up for the adoption hearing. As the war was finishing, he wanted to go and do some reporting from Europe. So she has this new baby and he goes off to Europe to do some reporting of kind of very minor consequence really, for the observer and leaves her. And she's very ill. She has uterine cancer at this point. She'd had a long history of endometriosis. She'd had bleeds and faints where she'd fallen unconscious and that he knew of. She had spent the best part of her life, from the age of 30, ministering to his health, saving his life in every way possible, making everything possible. And when she needed care, it didn't occur to him it was his responsibility, I don't think. I think it just didn't. And I think. And he buggers off and she organizes an operation, a hysterectomy. He's been very, very controlling about money, even though she's been the one who's been earning it. And she writes in these agonizing letters, organizing his life and hers and writing wills, organising the baby's life, organising her medical care to Europe. He spent a month in the Hotel Scribe in Paris, drinking, meeting Hemingway, having a very good time. He didn't write back to her very. In a very timely way. Anyway, she chose in the end to have an operation that was cheaper than one that would have been safer. And she seems to have done that because she says to him, I know you don't want me to have this operation at all. I know you're very worried about money. She defends herself. She says, I have to tell you that when I was organizing all your medical care, a lot of that was done by my brother. So you got that for free. And, you know, this procedure would have cost 40 guineas, but we didn't pay for it. But anyway, I'm going to do this cheaply. And it was a disaster.
- [51:06]
William Dalrymple
And she dies alone, or is he back when she.
- [51:09]
Anna Funder
No, she's alone. She's alone. She's 39, and she dies on the operating table. She's very well connected medically. Her brother had been this Harley street specialist, and one of them said, you are. So. She weighed 45 kilos and she's a tall woman. You are so anemic that you have to have a series of blood transfusions and go to hospital and get fatter before we can operate on you. And she says, I'm going to have the cheaper option up here in the north. And she does, and she dies on the table.
- [51:39]
Anita Anand
Oh, gosh.
- [51:40]
William Dalrymple
Allergy to the anesthesia, is it?
- [51:42]
David Ulischogger
What's the.
- [51:45]
Anna Funder
The anesthetist was a woman. And basically the coroner wanted it to be no one's fault. The surgeon who performed the operation didn't even turn up at the coronal inquiry. And Orwell, when he got back, didn't go and see the surgeon, didn't go to the coronial inquiry and made no inquiries. He was distraught, but it didn't seem like the sort of thing that he felt that he needed justice for.
- [52:08]
Anita Anand
Yeah, distraught, okay. Distraught in a. In a really dysfunctional way. Not there when she needed him, tight with money, when she really needed that. And then I also read that bit of an essay about women's sexuality and how, you know, they're always pressing men for sex. They're always demanding sex men have to, you know, run away from. And I said at the time, he's talking about Eileen. I mean, was he talking about Eileen? Does he look back on Eileen's contribution? What does he leave as her legacy? Or does he leave nothing at all?
- [52:42]
Anna Funder
He leaves nothing at all. He moved on very, very quickly, unusually for the time he wanted to keep the baby, Richard. He wanted to keep looking after him, so he hired a very nice young woman who was divorcing a Cambridge don. She was a 27 year old with a child of her own who was in boarding school. And she came as a sort of housekeeper to him. And so we have her testimony, really. She's spoken on radio and spoke to people about what he was like in those days. And he, she said, I never noticed any grief in him, but he did seem sad and lonely. He offered her all Eileen's clothes. He started proposing to other women he barely knew. Very interesting women. All his girlfriends have always been pretty much, except for the young prostitutes in Burma, usually literary women, interesting women. He started proposing to many other interesting women.
- [53:37]
William Dalrymple
You could read this as evidence of his loneliness or you could read this as evidence of his callousness, couldn't you? You could look at it two different ways.
- [53:44]
Anna Funder
That's true. It is callous, certainly to the, to the women. I mean, good friends of his said a woman who lived till she was 101, called Brenda Salkeld, who was a clergyman's Daughter. He wrote a novel before he met Eileen, called Clergyman's Daughter. He was in love with her. She refused to have anything to do with him. He said to her, if we got married, you would have to stop seeing your brother. And she said, don't be ridiculous. I'm devoted to my brother. So he had this isolationist impulse from the beginning.
- [54:13]
Anita Anand
We call it coercive control these days. You can get done for it in a court of law.
- [54:17]
Anna Funder
Yes, exactly. And she also said to him, brenda and a couple of girlfriends. This is women who saw him up close and knew him well and liked him, said, you really shouldn't write about people. You haven't got a clue. So I just think he was one of those people who didn't really see other people.
- [54:35]
Anita Anand
I just don't know how to feel about all of this because I have loved Orwell, I have absolutely loved his work. I have been profoundly moved by it. I've been educated by it. It's. It's taken me into chapters of history that I then became obsessed with. And then to hear this, you know, sort of this very deficient stroke, possibly downright cruel and sadistic man. I don't know how to feel about him now. And I wonder whether you, having discovered all of this and put all of this together, do you still like Orwell?
- [55:05]
Anna Funder
Do you know, I think it's more shocking when you first encounter it. I have a huge admiration for what he did. He worked so hard and I love his writing and I really can separate it from his so called pouncing and sexual assault, putting a knife through a live adder. You know, there are all kinds of bizarre things that he. Gauche, awkward, cruel, sadistic things that he did. But we're looking at the man who wrote about room 101 and having rats in a cage on your face. This is a sadistic, grim, paranoid, prescient, important thing to have in literature. We should not expect a hail fellow, well met, well adjusted, sexually content, everyman, decent, upright, upstanding fellow to produce a work like that. It is our reader's fantasy that is disappointing. We need Orwell to be the man he was to have written the work he did. And we need her to have been the woman she was to have co written Animal Farm. And I don't think knowing any of that takes anything away. I think it's a great addition to our knowledge.
- [56:20]
William Dalrymple
If you look at the other writers of his generation, most of them are also pretty hopeless with women and not particularly nice to their wives. Do you think he was any worse than any of the rest of them? I mean, look at, if you look at Evelyn Waugh for example, kind of monster in many ways at home, Orwell looks benign compared to him. But what's so extraordinary about Orwell is that he isn't the man of his generation when he's writing about imperialism. He isn't the man of his generation when he's writing about fascism. He is years ahead about the way he writes about totalitarianism and communism. Is this sort of attitude not exactly the sort of patriarchal attitudes we should expect of a writer from the 1920s and 1930s in a tweed suit.
- [57:05]
Anna Funder
So his vision of colonialism for instance, and then later as you say communism and fascism, that vision as I mentioned, is very much informed by his mother's feminism and socialism. We have to bear that in mind. It's not as if he was some genius that was totally self made. He was utterly educated by these left wing Fabian suffragette women to look at things from the point of view of the oppressed. But he could not look at things from the point of view of women. So he could do it with regard to race in Burma and say the empire is a system of despotism with theft as its aim.
- [57:41]
William Dalrymple
Way before everybody else of his generation.
- [57:43]
Anna Funder
Way before everybody else. But you could also say that patriarchy is a system of wage theft and sexual exploitation as its aim. But that was something impossible for a man of his generation. Even with a feminist aunt and mother. So I think that's where. That's where we get in. As with all the other writers of his generation, I haven't done a comparative study, but what I am interested in is the fact that they were all able to pretend to be and to be seen as decent fellows in public at the same time as doing this horrendous stuff in private. And women's shame, which is a patriarchal concept, kept what was being done to them private. And I think that is a core element of patriarchy. And if you look today at Trumpism, so fascism is a very extreme form of patriarchy, comes out of patriarchy and you look at what it's doing to women, we need to be very aware of how these things work. So it's not that he was particularly bad or not as bad as the other men, it's that they were all entitled to this behaviour in a system which is like racism, only it's patriarchy.
- [58:50]
Anita Anand
I've loved this, absolutely love this. Thank you so, so much. Anna Fundet, as I say her book, if you would like to order it, we have discount on Our club, the empirepoduk.com I really hope you've enjoyed this mini series. Next up we're gonna be talking about another of our imperial writers and Joseph Conrad is his name.
- [59:07]
Anna Funder
This may or may not be of any interest. It might just be a background thing. But Orwell loved Conrad, just admired him and absolutely loved his work. And when he was in UCL hospital, Sonia brought to him a copy of a biography that Conrad's wife had written about Conrad. And the next time Sonia turned up in the room, he threw this book across the room and hissed, never do that to me. And she took that so seriously. I think she was, as you mentioned before, very serious about protecting his legacy from biographers and terrible filmmakers and so on. And I wonder if that was the start of it.
- [59:48]
Anita Anand
It's been so wonderful having you on, Anna. I can't tell you how much you've given. Well, me personally, but I'm sure everybody listens to this to think about. And Joseph Conrad is with the wonderful Maya Jasanoff, another extraordinary woman writer. Woo hoo too on the trot. Why don't you tell us about something else that people can enjoy, William, as a bonus episode if they join the club.
- [60:09]
William Dalrymple
A wonderful bonus episode on John BUCHAN of the 39 steps, another writer who is obsessed with Empire and who who's writing about it, reflects very interestingly on imperialism. We've got back our wonderful friend of the show Murray Pettic from Scotland to talk about him. So that's. If you join up to the Empire Club, you can get access to that.
- [60:33]
Anita Anand
So till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand, and.
- [60:37]
William Dalrymple
Goodbye from me, William Dalrymple. Hi there.
- [60:45]
David Ulischogger
It's David or the shogga from Journey Through Time. And here's that extract from our Gunpowder Plot series that I mentioned earlier. The person who's not rejoicing is Guy Fawkes in the tower. King James himself came to the tower to question Fawkes. That's quite an astonishing fact that Fawkes and the king looked into each other's eyes at that moment.
- [61:09]
Rumchata Ad Voice
And of course, interrogations at this time. I mean, we say interrogations as if they're just being questioned, but interrogations are brutal, violent events.
- [61:16]
David Ulischogger
Yeah. And it's gonna get much, much more violent. Fawkes stands up to the king in a way that actually even impresses the king. He's open that they plan to to blow up Parliament. He said that the aim had been to blow King James and the other Scots back to their Scottish mountains. He says that to the king.
- [61:32]
Rumchata Ad Voice
It takes guts, but it's also not the most diplomatic thing to say to the person you've just tried to murder and your fate is in his hands.
- [61:39]
David Ulischogger
Yeah, well, I think Fawkes knows what's going to happen. I mean, the king was impressed by his obstinacy, that he would not reveal the names of his co conspirators, that he was willing to insult the king to his face. And you have to say about Guy Fawkes, a man who'd been a soldier for 10 years, my God, he had guts. I mean, he is a bad man. He is a religious fanatic. He's not somebody I admire, but my God, he was brave. You know, you can be brave and wrong. You can be brave and involved in things that are evil at the same time. And he was, he was all of those things. But this willingness to stand up to the king, this before the torture.
- [62:18]
Rumchata Ad Voice
If you want to hear more about gunpowder, treason and plot, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.
- [62:30]
William Dalrymple
Hello, history fans, it's Richard Osman and Marina Hyde here from the Restless Entertainment podcast.
- [62:34]
Anita Anand
Now, if your group chat's buzzing with celebrity traders, fan theories, Alan Carr Gifts and Claudia Winkelman outfit inspiration, then out.
- [62:42]
Anna Funder
Our podcast is the place for you.
- [62:43]
William Dalrymple
Every week we've been reacting to new episodes of the biggest show of the year immediately after they air.
- [62:49]
Anita Anand
And this Thursday's final will be no different. Join us for a live stream debrief at 10:15pm from the ultimate set of traitors fans us just search.
- [62:58]
Anna Funder
The rest is Entertainment on YouTube or.
- [63:00]
Anita Anand
Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [63:01]
William Dalrymple
Big dogs only.
- [63:04]
David Ulischogger
Hello, I'm David Ulischogger.
- [63:06]
Rumchata Ad Voice
And I'm Sarah Churchwell.
- [63:07]
David Ulischogger
This week on Journey Through Time, we are exploring the story of the gunpowder plot of 1605, the story of how a small group of Catholics engaged in what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in all of British history.
- [63:20]
Rumchata Ad Voice
The plan was ruthless blow up Parliament, King James I and most of his family all in a single blow.
- [63:27]
David Ulischogger
The series will tell the story of treason and traitors of a group of men led by the charismatic Robert Catesby, who believed that the only option left to them to win their rights as Catholics was the violent destruction of the Stuart state.
- [63:41]
Rumchata Ad Voice
We look at the story of Guy Fawkes, the nation's most famous traitor, from his recruitment to becoming the plot's fall guy and ultimately being tortured and killed.
- [63:51]
David Ulischogger
Finally, we find out why this plot is still remembered now, 400 years later. Listen to Journey Through Time Wherever you get your podcasts.