ateabutnoe.com

Hello?…. Is this thing on??

It’s clear that I’ve been in a bit of a blog blackout for a while. The reason for that is simple: I’ve been knackered. Mostly to knackered too do anything interesting and then if I have, certainly too knackered to write about it afterwards. Most of this year I’ve found work mentally very tiring leaving me pretty flaked out in the evenings. And then the rest of my energy has been going towards organising a 40th birthday party, selling my house and moving to Canada. Target date for that is July so time is hastening on.

A few weeks ago I went back to Oxford to look at some of the stuff I have in storage. I was aware I have quite a lot of documents and pictures in a big suitcase from my mother’s side of the family and I wanted to see what was there. Having retrieved said suitcase from the storage unit I went round to my Aunt Anne’s to see what we would see. It’s quite a treasure trove - especially of watercolours and drawings done by my great-grandfather on his grand tour to Egypt and the middle east in the 1890s (I think). The most interesting file however belonged to my grandfather. He had been a latin teacher and housemaster at Eton during WW1 and the 20s/30s. On opening the file the very first thing I picked up was a handwritten poem called “The Three Beggars”. In another large hand at the top was written E.A.Blair. Eric Arthur Blair I wondered?? George Orwell??

I asked my aunt if she was aware of any connection between by grandfather and Orwell but she wasn’t. When I got home however I got on the google and made some interesting discoveries. It turns out Orwell was a Kings Scholar at Eton. As a Kings Scholar he would have been under the care of the Master in College of the time. And who was the Master in College at that time: J.F.Crace my grandfather! Not only that I found a website called Orwell Today which showed a photograph of a book entitled The Unknown Orwell. The front cover of that book was a school photo which identified which of the white faced and bow-tied young men was Orwell. I recognised the photo used as I found an original copy in my grandfather’s file. There’s young George and there is Mr Crace in the front row:

Click here to see which one is George. You can guess who grandfather is on your own…

I found quite a few other similar photos. If you fancy wasting some time and helping me out, maybe you could compare our one known sighting with the faces in the other pics to see if he is in those too. He ought to be. I’ve put them all on my flickr site.