George Orwell

by Gordon Bowker

This was a crucial event in Orwell’s life, more disturbing to him even than Kopp’s arrest. ‘Smillie’s death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness; and all they could find to do with him was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected animal … what angers one about a death like this is its utter pointlessness.’84 Kopp later claimed that, while in a slackly run prison, he had managed to get hold of Smillie’s file and saw it recorded that he had died from heavy kicks to the stomach.85 If anything tipped Orwell finally from a simple hostility to Stalinist Communism into a deep-dyed loathing of it, it was the death of Smillie. John Dos Passos who also had a friend killed in custody by the SIM in Spain, reacted by deserting the Communists and shifting decidedly to the right.86 Orwell never did abandon his socialism; if anything, his Spanish experience strengthened it. He said that having fought beside socialists in Spain he would no longer satirize them as had in The Road to Wigan Pier.