In 1933, Eric Blair published his first book, "Down and Out In Paris and London", but the name on the cover was not Blair, but George Orwell, a pseudonym.

There was no name more royal than the name of the king, George, and Orwell, a river in Suffolk, connected him to the English landscape.

But the landscape through which George Orwell would travel was not that of hedgerows and haystacks, but gutters and gasworks.

In the years of the slump, Orwell and Churchill were on opposite sides of the barricades.

Orwell had declared war on the empire, Churchill was obsessed with defending it to the last.

Our myth was that the British Empire was founded on the playing fields of Eton.

But Orwell had been on the playing fields of Eton and he knew better. He knew that the British Empire was founded on fields of coal.

The Germans and the Americans could fool around with chemicals and electricals, but our bedrock was coke and nutty slag.

But then, in the Thirties, that bedrock caved in. Export demand collapsed, mines were shut, whole towns coughed and died.

This is what British history, the grandiose epic of the empire had finally come to, from the Jarrow of the Venerable Bede to the Jarrow of the hunger marchers.