75 Years On: Where in the world is George Orwell buried?

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, one of Britain’s greatest novelists, Eric Arthur Blair, died at the age of 47. He was born on 25 June 1903, in Motihari, India. Blair, or should we say George Orwell, died some 45 years before the year he made famous, 1984¹. But even if he had lived until the eighties, he would have been disappointed to learn that Big Brother had been delayed for another 40 years.

He just got the year wrong

The level of surveillance envisaged by Orwell didn’t come until relatively recently. He just got the year wrong. He should have called it Twenty-Twenty Five. But there is no doubt that Big Brother is now alive and snooping on us in 2025.

You can’t go anywhere without being snapped by some camera or other, especially here in the United Kingdom where surveillance (often for good reasons, it must be said) is almost universal. And, of course, anything you say or write publicly is exposed to scrutiny by the authorities.

It’s easy to offend, even unwittingly, and much police time is wasted on rooting out opinions which used to be called free speech. In Britain, we have no written constitution, and no First Amendment to protect freedom of speech.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was indeed a dystopian nightmare of thought crime. But Orwell would have recognised many of the tell-tale symptoms which are now becoming obvious seventy-five years after his death. The advance of surveillance and artificial intelligence can only make matters worse.

Opponent of totalitarianism

According to Wikipedia, Orwell was a “novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work was characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism and support of democratic socialism”.

The Road to Wigan Pier and Animal Farm are Orwell’s best-known works of fiction, in the popular imagining, after Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet, his lexicon went much further. A Clergyman’s Daughter, Burmese Days, Coming up for Air, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Shooting the Elephant and The Lion and the Unicorn featured in his top-ten works of fiction.

It was during the publication of his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London, that he decided to adopt a pen name to avoid embarrassing his family by his period of impoverishment revealed in the book. He chose the name George Orwell to show his love of English tradition and landscape.

On the farm?

But where, you wonder, do the remains of Eric Arthur Blair languish. In a town or city — London, Paris or, even, beneath Wigan Pier?² On a farm? In Catalonia? None of those. He lies modestly in a most surprising spot. Despite his professed atheism, Orwell had asked to be buried “according to the rites of the Church of England, in the nearest convenient cemetery”.

Inconveniently, Orwell died in London, where there are no suitable country churchyards. The author’s publisher, the newspaper magnate David Astor, found him a plot in the south-eastern corner of the Sutton Courtenay churchyard, where he had lived since 1945. He decided it met Orwell’s criteria and reflected his love of tradition and the English countryside.

Sutton Courtenay

Sutton Courtenay is a sleepy but ancient village in South Oxfordshire, on the edge of the Chilterns. When I last visited in 2022, Sutton was all that I remembered and all I expected. Ancient, quiet and inviting. A rather Midsomer Murdery place, in fact. The village dates back to well before the Norman Conquest of 1066 and is stacked with medieval buildings of considerable note.

Next to The George pub (a mere 400 years old) and across from the Norman Hall of 1192, lies the 12th Century church of All Saints. It’s a handsome old pile featuring eclectic architecture, including the unusual brick-built south porch, which dates to Tudor times. The annexe has survived for over 500 years, but who thought a brick outpost to a stone Gothic church would be appropriate in the first place?

Yet if you can drag yourself away from the Gothic splendour of the interior, taking a last glimpse of that 900-year-old font, it’s outside in the churchyard where the main interest lies.

Here lies buried…

For such a small community, Sutton Courtenay hosts several national figures, including a wartime prime minister and our old friend Eric Arthur Blair.

The PM was the Liberal H.H.(Herbert) Asquith, who took Britain into the First World War and who was ousted in 1916 by his fellow Liberal, David Lloyd George.

Asquith’s rather unpretentious grave at All Saints testifies to his abiding love of this village. As a Prime Minister of renown, he had earned a place in Westminster Abbey but chose to stay close to the place he had made home.

Bill Bryson visited the graveyard, in his book Notes from a Small Island, said: “How remarkable it is that in a single village churchyard you find the graves of two men of global stature.”

If you have an afternoon to spare, a visit to Sutton Courtenay is a very rewarding experience.

Photographs used in the article (except for the final image) are from the Leica M11 and a very unusual “traditionally rendering” lens, the 28mm Leica Summaron-M f/5.6, mostly at a fixed focus of 2m and a forgiving f/11 aperture. The lens is a zone-focuser’s delight, a tiny jewel for street photography.

Leica 28mm Summaron: First take from the new-old slowcoach

The article is adapted from an earlier story describing a drive through the Chilterns: “Sometimes nice things just happen”.

1. I remember sitting down to watch the 1954 television adaption of 1984, just four years after the death of the author. It was a big deal at the time, and viewers were worried about the prospects over the next thirty years. In reality, they could have relaxed. Big Brother was seventy years in the future ↩︎
2. Macfilos Editor Mike Evans was born two miles from Wigan Pier, but some years after Orwell’s visit ↩︎

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