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The Road to Wigan Pier, which the Mirror has been retracing, turns out to be a tale of two Georges.

There is George Orwell, the famous writer in whose steps are we following.

And George Garrett, the ­almost unknown working-class writer, activist and merchant seaman.

“I was very greatly impressed by Garrett,” Orwell writes in his 1936 diary.

“He went to sea as a lad and was at sea about ten years, then worked as a docker.

"During the War he was torpedoed on a ship that sank in seven minutes… He also worked in an illicit brewery in Chicago during Prohibition...”

When Orwell reached Liverpool on his journey to Wigan Pier, Garrett, a stoker from Sailortown, was his guide. Eight decades on, we are greeted by Sean Garrett, his grandson.

(Image: ullstein bild)

Sean smiles when we talk about Orwell, who his grandad accused of writing “one long sneer” against the working classes.

“I find myself defending Road to Wigan Pier,” he says. “I can see Orwell had the right intentions.”

Sean, 58, works in a homeless shelter, so he sees modern-day poverty in Liverpool close up.

“After the poverty he lived in, men like my grandad helped build the welfare state,” he says. “Seeing all that thrown away now by Tory austerity, he’d be heartbroken.”

While Eton-educated Orwell could escape any time from his hard road, for Garrett writing was a luxury he had to fight for against the demands of work at sea or on the docks and the needs of his wife and seven children.

When they met, Garrett was unemployed or “on the Parish”.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

They were also physical opposites: Orwell long and thin with a smoker’s cough, Garrett with a stoker’s strength.

“I remember him as Popeye the sailor man,” his grandson says. “Huge biceps. A big strapping fella, very physical in a lovely way.”

The Georges did share other things – writing talent, stubborn honesty and a thirst for travel, outdoor life and experience.

They both wrote under pseudonyms – Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair, Garrett often wrote as Matt Low.

Both documented the struggle of the working classes in the 1930s.

But Orwell’s, a middle-class writer’s tour of poverty in the industrial North, became a classic.

Garrett’s book, Ten Years on the Parish went unfinished and languished in near obscurity until now.

Four years ago, Sean’s brother, Michael, turned over a suitcase of Garrett’s merchant navy papers and unpublished writing to the Writing on the Wall project at Toxteth Library.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

Through the George Garrett Archive project, a group of volunteers rebuilt a man and reputation from scraps of paper.

Now published for the first time, Ten Years on the Parish is so extraordinary it reads like a novel – starting when Garrett stows away aged 17 on a tramp steamer bound for Argentina.

“That’s his log book from the Merchant Navy,” Sean says, pulling out a booklet from the archive.

Seaman 805334’s First World War adventures from saloon boy to stoker are in neat fountain pen. “Captured 17th March 1916”. “1917, Torpedoed by the enemy”.

Garrett was sunk twice during the war and once interned, but escaped.

He later lived in New York as an illegal immigrant, sending home far higher wages than he would have earned in Liverpool and joining the Industrial Workers of the World labour union, known as the Wobblies.

When Garrett wasn’t at sea he was leading the fight for workers’ rights in Liverpool and helped found the Unity Theatre.

He was unusually progressive for an 1896-born stoker, a feminist and anti-racist who, as the son of a staunch Catholic and a Belfast Orangeman, had no time for sectarianism.

“He took part in the Walker Art Gallery Riot and was battered by the police,” Sean says, showing the £50 fine from the city of Liverpool.

“He led the National Hunger March on London as part of the Liverpool contingent in 1922.”

Garrett’s most famous speech at the docks, recorded for posterity by a secret policeman after race riots in 1919, could have come straight from today.

“Fellow workers, it is all very well criticising the alien … and telling you he is the cause of your unemployment. It is not so. The present rotten system is the cause…”

Garrett was desperately disappointed when he read Orwell’s book. “A book like that can do a lot of damage” he wrote to his publisher John Lehman.

Ten Years on the Parish lacks Wigan Pier’s forensic detail but is vividly readable.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

It tells of stowing away on the voyage to Buenos Aires, Liverpool children running from the “night man” who checked whether families were “improperly” sharing beds and the busybody parish officials lifting pan lids to see whether mothers were squandering money.

The misery of food vouchers, poor relief, unemployed men being forced to break stones contrast dramatically with the camaraderie of the Hunger March on London.

As the Liverpool writer Frank Cottrell Boyce says: “We read The Road to Wigan Pier to see how poverty looked to a sympathetic, intelligent, compassionate outsider.

"We read Garrett to find out how poverty felt. From the inside... Garrett’s desperation for money – and time – quivers through every sentence”.

Mike Morris, co-director of Writing On The Wall, says: “His tenement was desperately overcrowded. But when Garrett went to the library, people would collar him for help with writing and advocacy.

"He was like a one-man Citizen’s Advice Bureau.”

Historian Alan O’Toole says it is remarkable “not that George wrote so little” but “that he wrote so much”.

Garrett had a breakdown just as publishers came knocking for a sea novel.

(Image: Daily Mirror)

“He couldn’t have afforded to go to London to go and meet those publishers anyway,” Sean says. Instead, he left a legacy of short stories, plays and the more socially ­secure world built by his generation.

So, Sean is glad his grandad can’t see the country 80 years on.

“He’d be appalled and angry at the erosion of workers’ rights, racism in the wake of the Brexit vote, foodbanks, the depiction of the working class and the relentless pushing back of the welfare state,” he says.

“After everything his generation achieved, the upper classes pushed right back. Now people are back on the street, back in new slums.”

He says the people at the homeless shelter he works at are there “just because the rent has gone up or because of welfare changes”.

He has no doubt what George would be doing. “He wouldn’t be taking it standing still,” he says. “He would be using his skills to push back.”

Orwell died in 1950 of tuberculosis after finishing his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four and fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

Garrett was last seen in public giving a speech during the 1966 seamen’s strike, despite having throat cancer.

The other George then gave his bus fare to the collection for the striking men, walked home and died.

See www.georgegarrettarchive.co.uk. Ten Years on the Parish is published by Liverpool University Press