George Orwell in Eastbourne

The boy who became Orwell

The writer the world knows as George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair, and it was as young Eric Blair that he arrived in Eastbourne in September 1911, aged just eight. His family was, in his own later words, “lower-upper-middle class” — respectable but far from wealthy — and he came to the town’s most fashionable prep school on a reduced-fee scholarship, arranged through a family connection. He was never told about the financial arrangement, but he sensed it keenly, and the feeling of being a poorer boy among rich ones would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Did you know? “George Orwell” was a pen name. Eric Blair adopted it in 1933, taking the surname from the River Orwell in Suffolk, one of his favourite places.

St Cyprian’s School

St Cyprian’s was an expensive, exclusive preparatory school for boys, founded in 1899 by a young married couple, Lewis Vaughan Wilkes and his wife Cicely. It began in a large house on Carlisle Road before moving in 1906 to purpose-built premises with extensive playing fields behind Summerdown Road, in the Meads district beneath the Downs. Its job was to drill boys hard enough to win scholarships to the great public schools like Eton and Harrow, and it ran on the Edwardian ethos of “Muscular Christianity” and character-building. Mrs Wilkes effectively ran the school and dominated its pupils; the boys nicknamed her “Flip” and her husband “Sambo”.

“Such, Such Were the Joys”

Orwell loathed St Cyprian’s, and decades later he settled the score in writing. His long autobiographical essay Such, Such Were the Joys — its title borrowed, with heavy irony, from a William Blake poem — paints the school as a cold, snobbish, frightening place obsessed with money and social rank, where a scholarship boy was made to feel his inferiority at every turn. It is a searing study of childhood, power and class.

It was also, as Orwell well knew, far too libellous to publish in his lifetime — his own publisher’s lawyers later judged that dozens of passages were defamatory. He worked on it through the 1940s but it remained unpublished until 1952, two years after his death, when it appeared in the United States with the school and its owners disguised under false names. A British edition followed only in 1967, after Mrs Wilkes had died, and the full text with everyone’s real names was not printed until 2000.

A remarkable class

For a small seaside prep school, St Cyprian’s produced an extraordinary roll-call of talent — and Orwell was there for the most glittering years of it. Among his classmates were the future writer and critic Cyril Connolly, who would later found the influential magazine Horizon and publish some of Orwell’s finest essays, and the photographer and designer Cecil Beaton. The naturalist Gavin Maxwell and the golf writer Henry Longhurst passed through too.

In the school’s 1916 prizes, Orwell headed the list with Classics while Connolly took the English prize and Beaton the drawing prize. Connolly left the sharpest portrait of his friend, recalling that Orwell, alone among the boys, truly thought for himself, and later writing: “Orwell proved to me that there existed an alternative to character, Intelligence.” That same year Orwell won a scholarship to Eton, and his Eastbourne schooldays came to an end.

Did it really happen like that?

Orwell’s bleak account is not the only version of St Cyprian’s, and many who were there disputed it. His childhood friend Jacintha Buddicom insisted in her own memoir that Eric had been “a specially happy child” who greatly exaggerated his misery. Cecil Beaton called the essay “hilariously funny — but exaggerated”. Cyril Connolly, whose own gentler book had partly prompted Orwell to write, later apologised for caricaturing the Wilkeses, describing Mrs Wilkes as a warm-hearted and inspiring teacher. Most of Orwell’s biographers regard the essay as powerful but only partly true — a portrait coloured as much by the grown man’s politics as by the boy’s experience.

Eastbourne in Orwell’s writing

The town and the Downs around it left their mark on his fiction. Those compulsory “character-building” walks took the boys out across the South Downs and down to bathe among the boulders at Beachy Head — landscapes that stayed with him. Most strikingly, the setting of Animal Farm is pure East Sussex: the rebellion takes place at “Manor Farm”, thought to be based on Chalk Farm on the edge of the Downs, in a fictional version of the village of Willingdon just north of Eastbourne, whose real pub, the Red Lion, even lends its name to the book. Some readers go further, suggesting the all-seeing, all-powerful Mrs Wilkes was among the distant inspirations for Big Brother himself.

What’s left today

St Cyprian’s itself is gone. In May 1939, in its fortieth year, the school building was gutted by fire — a tragedy in which a housemaid lost her life — and the school relocated to West Sussex, never to recover its former standing before fading away. Its playing fields were sold to Eastbourne College. In April 1997, Eastbourne Civic Society marked the connection with a blue plaque at the house in Summerdown Road associated with the school, a quiet reminder that one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers spent his childhood here. For more on the town that shaped him, explore our complete history of Eastbourne.

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