GOST Books, 2025, £50 – and available at Photo London 14th-17th May, where it will be stocked at the GOST Books stand. Craig Easton will be present on May 14th at 2PM to sign copies(please check website for further details or any changes – images below are from the book).
In 1946, George Orwell (1903-50) wrote an entertaining piece for the Evening Standard, setting out his eleven rules for making the perfect cup of tea. Rule 6, for example, states that ‘one should take the teapot to the kettle and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours.’ Bristol-based photographer Craig Easton includes the essay, along with extracts from Orwell’s diaries and letters, in his handsome account of the ‘extremely-un-get-atable-place’ that was Barnhill – a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura in the Hebrides, where Orwell spent much of 1946-49. Any visitors were typically required to walk eight miles from the boat! So, why include ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’? The atmospheric images are silver gelatin prints from negatives made by Easton’s large format 10×8 field camera – and toned by the addition of strong tea during development.
That ‘tea toning’ is typical of how carefully the components of this this beautiful book are thought through. Independent of Orwell, Jura is famously named as the ‘Island of Deer’ (from the Old Norse ‘Dyrøy’), as some 6,500 red deer live there alongside a mere 200 people. It is often characterised as treeless, as the deer have long prevented sapling growth in what was always a challenging environment of severe Atlantic winds and acidic peat. Easton’s landscapes are dramatically stark, yet don’t play to those conventions: more trees than deer appear in the book – together with Barnhill itself, and evocative interior shots including, naturally, a teapot.
Jura was where Orwell, struggling with the TB that would soon kill him, wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. ‘I can’t thank you enough for the tea’, Orwell wrote to Mamaine Koestler in January 1947, while rationing was still in place, ‘We always seem to drink more than we can legally get, and are always slightly inclined to go round cadging it.’ Easton also photographs some of Orwell’s draft pages, showing what a tough job it must have been to turn those into fair copy – a job that fell to his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, for most of his earlier writings. She died in 1945, though, leading to a gap in such service as the gravely ill Orwell married Sonia Brownell only three months before his own death.
As it happens, I recently read Anna Funder’s ‘Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life’, which gives an unflattering but persuasive – if necessarily somewhat speculative – account of George as a sexual predator and callous husband who failed to credit Eileen’s practical and financial support and creative collaboration. She was, for example, more active than him in the Spanish Civil War, but ‘Homage to Catalonia’ casts her in a purely passive role, and she isn’t named in the book, in which Funder points out that Orwell mentions ‘my wife’ 37 times, but doesn’t name her. Eileen helped shape his successful writing style, collaboratively inspired Animal Farm, and even wrote a poem in 1934 – just before she met Orwell – about a dystopian future, titled ‘End of the Century, 1984’.
Funder’s account, then, provides a salutary perspective on Orwell the man. Should that affect our view of his work? Whether or not, it doesn’t reduce the merit of ‘An Extremely Un-get-atable Place’ as a lyrical exploration and re-imagining of Orwell’s time on Jura.
Paul Carey-Kent selects a ‘Gallery of the Month’, a ‘Show of the Month’, a ‘Work of the Month’ and a ‘Book of the Month’ for his weekly column in FAD. A collection of previous gallery columns, ‘Paul’s Galleries To Go’, is available from FAD‘s SHOP.
