George Orwell and Night Jack

I suspect George Orwell would have been a public service Blogger, someone who blogs about their experiences as a front-line public servant.

This is not just because of the often overlooked fact that he wrote under a pseudonym.

When Orwell served in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in the 1920s - yes, George Orwell's professional background was as a policeman - his contemporaries remember him going off to his room in the evening to write and read instead of going down the bar.

He did not publish anything whilst in service, but when he returned to England he converted his direct professional experiences into two of the most powerful essays in the English language: A Hanging , about what it meant to put a man to death, and Shooting An Elephant, explaining how it felt to be a police officer facing, and giving in to, an expectant mob.

"In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter."

Orwell also wrote, again from direct experience, of what it meant to be in a Spike (the dire overnight shelter for the vulnerable). He then of course moved to writing episodic accounts of his explorations of poverty and civil war.

Indeed, until 1937 - and excepting a couple of, er, not good novels - Orwell's output (and literary income!) was consistent with that a diligent and insightful Blogger, and I think he would delight in the public service Bloggers of today.

I am sure he would have been strongly supportive of the first Orwell Prize for Blogging going to his fellow policeman Night Jack, for writing elegantly and knowingly about the real difficulties of public service, rather than one of the more famous political Bloggers.


(Originally the introduction to my Analysis of the Night Jack Privacy case.)