A Writer Wronged

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 2, 2004

Tim Carroll

George Orwell knew he wouldn't live to reap the financial rewards of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. His widow, Sonia, also missed out. Why then did the family accountant die such a wealthy man? Tim Carroll reports.

The last days of George Orwell have been chronicled in detail, the poignant finale of an extraordinary life played out in the bleak banality of a London hospital room. As he lay dying of tuberculosis, friends and admirers came to say their last goodbyes. It was the winter of 1949, and the royalties from Animal Farm were beginning to come in. Nineteen Eighty-Four had just been hailed as a masterpiece. Propped up in bed, Orwell lamented: "I've made all this money and now I'm going to die."

Orwell's deathbed marriage to Sonia Brownell, a voluptuous protege at the literary magazine Horizon, and 15 years his junior, was undoubtedly a comfort, though it prompted suspicion among friends. For her part, Brownell, who'd slept her way around London's intellectual haut monde, sat by his side wearing an extravagant ring of rubies and diamonds bought with one of his blank cheques.

One of the most heartbreaking scenes in those last days was the sight of a six-year-old child sitting on the bed. The boy, Richard, was Orwell's son, adopted with his first wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, who had died unexpectedly in 1945. So terrified was Orwell of passing on his TB that whenever the child attempted to come near, his father gently pushed him away.

In the most recent biography of Orwell, D.J. Taylor recounts his last hours in University College hospital. He records how Orwell's friend, the anarchist poet Paul Potts, turned up on Friday, January 20, 1950, but Orwell was asleep, so Potts slipped quietly away. In the small hours of Saturday morning, an artery burst in Orwell's lung and he, too, slipped quietly away. He was 46.

Taylor speculates that Potts or a nurse on her night rounds must have been the last person to see Orwell alive. But someone else visited Orwell that Friday evening. The visitor hardly knew the author, having met him only five months previously. Yet his spectre was to cast a shadow over Orwell's posthumous success. His name was Jack Harrison, and he was Orwell's accountant. He died himself some years ago, a very wealthy man.

Biographers have tiptoed around Harrison's role in the Orwell story. But recently Hilary Spurling's carefully worded memoir of Brownell seemed to imply that she had been the victim of a "major" fraud by Harrison. It is no secret that, shortly before her death in 1980, Brownell had launched a High Court action against Harrison. But she settled out of court, so it was presumed that her case rested on shaky foundations.

Appalled at Brownell's treatment, a member of one of the legal teams that worked on the case secretly made photocopies of the confidential documents and kept them under lock and key for two decades. Recently brought to light, they are the affidavits presented to the High Court by Harrison and Brownell, and the legal opinion provided by independent counsel that delivered a crushing blow to Harrison, along with a cache of dozens of letters written between the warring sides.

In his affidavit defending himself against the action, Harrison claims he and Orwell

"got on extremely well". It is hard to see what they had in common: Harrison, the dapper businessman with a penchant for Rolls-Royces, and Orwell, who had renounced his privileged past and whose only hankerings were for

a good pot of tea and Oxford marmalade.

It seems that Orwell contacted the firm of accountants of which Harrison was the senior partner as early as 1947, prompted by the success of Animal Farm, published in 1945. Orwell, for the first time in his life, was anticipating a huge tax bill. Harrison's firm advised that Orwell set up a company to receive his royalties and own his copyright, in return for a "service agreement" whereby he would draw a salary. It was the ownership of the copyright that proved contentious in years to come.

On September 12, 1947, George Orwell Productions Ltd (GOP Ltd) was established. Harrison had little to do with it, leaving the details to junior colleagues, and the "service agreement" was not put into effect. It was only in September 1949 that Harrison moved in to take firm control of the company, when it seems the author asked to see him in hospital.

In his affidavit, Harrison admits that he had "no direct recollection" of why Orwell wanted to see him. There was no witness to that first bedside meeting, which is unfortunate, as Harrison was to claim that Orwell asked him to become a director of the company and manage the firm.

Brownell first met Harrison shortly after, in the hospital room with Orwell, and over four further encounters, at one of which all three were confirmed as directors of GOP, Brownell and Orwell being listed as "Mr and Mrs Blair" (Orwell's real name was Eric Arthur Blair). At another, according to Harrison, the "service agreement" was executed, passing ownership of copyright to the company, though he was never able to produce a document to confirm this. Brownell was there, too, on the last occasion Harrison saw Orwell - the night he died. Again, she appears to have left early. And so there was no witness to the dialogue that ensued, in which, Harrison claimed, the writer offered him 25 per cent of the shares in GOP.

Within hours, the only person who could confirm this account had gone. Orwell left some #10,000 in his will, a substantial sum in 1950, when the average weekly wage was #10. The proceeds of Animal Farm would soon swell that figure fourfold, and his publisher, Fred Warburg, calculated that Nineteen Eighty-Four would earn him about the same - some #40,000, perhaps $A5 million to $8 million in today's money from those two books alone.

Famously, while Orwell was dying, Brownell was drinking with her former beau, the painter Lucian Freud. She has been portrayed as more of a merry widow than a grieving one: setting off for the French Riviera when her husband's body was barely cold, to pursue the real love of her life, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty; frittering Orwell's fortune on failed affairs and booze, dying a destitute and bitter drunk. It is only recently that friends, primarily the writer Hilary Spurling, have challenged that unappealing image of Brownell.

Spurling acknowledges that Brownell revelled in her "widow Orwell" act. But she insists that Brownell was grief-stricken at Orwell's death. Another witness to Brownell's grief, it now appears, was Jack Harrison. She was so distraught, his affidavit recalls, that he offered her any help she needed. Brownell gratefully accepted and left the running of GOP to him, agreeing to become his client, too.

In the meantime, she devoted her energies to protecting Orwell's position in the pantheon of literary greats, helping set up an archive at University College London and co-editing the magisterial Collected Essays.

Orwell's will had made Brownell joint guardian of his adopted son, Richard, with George's sister, Avril. Brownell thought the child would be better off being raised by his aunt in Scotland, so they rarely saw one another. But Brownell made sure his allowances, college fees and much more besides were paid through GOP.

Brownell carried on with a hectic workload, as an editor, critic and writer in her own right, and a frenetic social life on both sides of the Channel, wooing the cognoscenti of the Left Bank just as she had their counterparts in London's Soho and Fitzrovia. In 1958 she married the wealthy landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers.

In the same year, Harrison belatedly told Brownell of Orwell's deathbed offer for him to take 25 per cent of GOP's shares. He said he didn't recall why he'd left it eight years to tell her. Brownell was too embarrassed to refuse. Also in 1958, without her knowledge, Harrison transferred 75 per cent of the voting stock to himself from Brownell, rendering her powerless over anything the company did. Harrison, in his affidavit, says Brownell asked him to do this because she was afraid her marriage would not last, and Pitt-Rivers might seek a share of GOP in a divorce settlement.

Brownell, in her affidavit, said she could not recall any such request. When they divorced in 1965, Pitt-Rivers bought her a house in London, hardly the actions of a grasping cad.

Brownell turned her airy South Kensington house into the nearest thing London had to a Parisian salon, mixing the literary icons of the old guard - Auden, the Connollys and Spenders - with emerging stars: Iris Murdoch, Francis Bacon and the young Hilary Spurling.

Had she glanced at the press shortly after her divorce, she might have come across a City scandal concerning Jack Harrison and an ailing company called Headquarters and General Supplies that he'd been drafted in to save.

At first the coverage was flattering, describing Harrison's habit of discovering bankrupt businesses and selling them off at a profit. A year after he was made chairman of Headquarters and General, Harrison was announcing profits of #257,000 and - to the elation of company shareholders - a 65 per cent dividend. But then it emerged that he'd sold his entire stockholding at the top of the market. Gnawing doubts turned to anger when creditors were told that the company had debts of #1.4 million. Harrison was accused of taking #200,000 out of the firm when he knew it faced bankruptcy.

By 1969, some eight million copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four had been sold in the US. By 1972 it had sold one million copies in its UK Penguin edition alone. Sales of Animal Farm were about the same. It came as a surprise, then, when Harrison told Brownell in 1977 that most of the income had been absorbed by Britain's exorbitant taxes. When he advised her to move to Paris for tax reasons, Brownell sold her beloved house and moved into a foul-smelling room in the undistinguished Rue d'Assas.

Months later, Brownell learned, to her horror, that she was no longer in control of the company.

But Harrison assured her that this didn't affect her financial stake, worth #100,000. "Less a quarter, Sonia - I wouldn't lie to you," he added, with an "odd grin", according to Hilary Spurling's 2002 memoir. There was something of a disparity between that and Brownell's allowance, then just #750 a month. But what really upset her was the prospect of Harrison having control over the making of the film of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Her lawyers wrote to Harrison demanding to see every document relating to GOP. Harrison urged Brownell to resolve the issue privately, but she was having none of it. As old balance sheets were unearthed, it became clear that matters were seriously amiss. Harrison had given others shares in the company, and had channelled huge consultancy fees into his own companies. GOP had made bad investments, losing as much as #100,000.

It became clear why Harrison wanted Brownell out of the way in Paris.

In 1979 Brownell brought a High Court action against Harrison and GOP, of which she was still a director. The hearing was fixed for January 1981. But her health was fading fast. In the spring of 1980 she returned to London very sick with cancer, and eventually settled in Hilary Spurling's flat.

In his affidavit, Harrison stuck by his claim that the money had been depleted by stockmarket losses and huge taxes. But he also claimed, justifiably, that much had been spent on Richard and Brownell's family.

But his version of events was riddled with inconsistencies. There were no records of the meeting in which Orwell allegedly asked him to become a director, nor of his deathbed request for Harrison to take 25 per cent of the company, nor of the agreement passing ownership of copyright from Orwell's estate to GOP. Brownell's affidavit reads like that of a woman tricked into signing away her inheritance.

Orwell's son has always taken the view that, if the parties settled out of court, then that was the end of the matter. He has never spoken about the case, but started to say that Brownell was "besotted" with Harrison, before correcting himself and saying:

"She wasn't as naive as she has been portrayed.

But she trusted him explicitly."

With Brownell so ill, her legal team doubted that she could withstand the rigours of cross-examination and advised her to settle. What followed was one of the greatest injustices of the affair: Brownell paid Harrison to retrieve the rights that almost everyone acknowledged had been hers all along. Brownell found the #200,000-plus needed for legal fees and to pay Harrison, possibly from the proceeds of selling her London house.

The lawsuit was settled on Tuesday, November 24, 1980. Brownell had achieved what she set out to achieve, and Orwell's literary rights were now back in her hands. Sadly, not for long: she died on December 11, aged 62. Harrison, by contrast, continued to live in happiness and prosperity.

In her will, Brownell left Orwell's rights to his son, Richard Blair. "She did the right thing by my father," he says. "I can fault Sonia for many things, but I can't fault her for that." Of Harrison, Blair says:

"He probably tried to exploit the rights in a way an accountant would, and he may very well have simply made a series of disastrous mistakes, as he claimed all along."

Was it just a case of art clashing with the artful?

"I have asked myself, did Harrison do what he did with the intent of committing a felony or simply make mistakes through naivety?" Blair says. "I have no doubt it was the former. I think he thought, 'This is too good an opportunity to miss.'"

© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald

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