A gaunt figure, cigarette in hand, bending forward with a combative look to engage any passerby in argument, will soon take up position among the fellow smokers lurking outside the new main entrance of the BBC headquarters in London.

On the wall near the new full-length bronze statue of George Orwell, being created by the sculptor Martin Jennings, his provocative declaration will be inscribed: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”



Four years after the BBC rejected the proposal to provide a site to commemorate one of its most contrarian former employees, it is welcoming him back and applying for planning permission from Westminster council.

Orwell died in 1950, but there is no public statue of one of the 20th century’s most famous British writers, whose works include Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, 1984 and journalism such as his famous essay on how to make the perfect cup of tea. Soon there will be two, as his old school, Eton, has not only put up a sizeable chunk of the five-figure cost of Jennings’s statue – seen above in an artist’s impression of the completed work – but is commissioning a copy of the head for the school.

Orwell resigned from the BBC in 1943. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

The BBC and the writer parted acrimoniously in 1943, when Orwell resigned after two wartime years as a talks producer in the Eastern Service, making propaganda broadcasts for India. In his resignation letter, under his real name, Eric Blair, he wrote: “For some time past I have been conscious that I was wasting my own time and the public money on doing work that produces no result … I feel that by going back to my normal work of writing and journalism I could be more useful than I am at present.”

He went on to name Room 101, the torture chamber in his dystopian 1984, after a particularly airless conference room at the BBC where he had evidently suffered.



The proposal to place him keeping close watch on the corporation from the doorstep was initially turned down by the BBC, reputedly because he was seen as too provocatively leftwing a figure. However the project was revived when Tony Hall took over as director general: the donors include several well-known BBC names including former BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten, and broadcasters John Humphrys, James Naughtie and Melvyn Bragg. The playwrights Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Michael Frayn, comedian Rowan Atkinson, and Orwell’s son Richard Blair have also backed the project.

Jennings said he believes the statue will find its perfect home. “I was delighted when I visited the site to find it littered with cigarette butts – that is absolutely the place for Orwell, who was rarely seen without a cigarette in hand, to the grave detriment of his health. He would undoubtedly have been out there in the cold with the smokers for most of his time.”



Commissioning the statue was the dream of the late Labour MP Ben Whitaker, who died in 2014. “Orwell was a schoolboy hero of his,” Jennings said, “as indeed he was of mine”.



Janet Whitaker said: “Ben didn’t exactly leave it to me as a deathbed request, but a few weeks before his death – which neither of us knew was so close – he suddenly said to me one day ‘you will see it through, won’t you?’, and I knew he meant Orwell.”



The unveiling ceremony for Martin Jennings’ statue of Sir John Betjeman at St Pancras. Photograph: Felix Clay/The Guardian

Jennings was chosen because the Whitakers had greatly admired his statue of the poet John Betjeman standing with his coat flapping around him in St Pancras station – installed in 2007 and now one of the best loved sculptures in London.



“Orwell was a dream commission,” Jennings said. “Such an awkward character, 6ft 4in, skeletally thin, never comfortable in his own skin. Would he have wanted a statue? I think one of the criterion for being worthy of having a statue should be that the person would have hated it.”

