Friday, 14 June 2019

Orwell in Burma and Robert I Watson

This solves a riddle I was set in 1982 or thereabouts! There was this crazy American cyclist called Jim who was running the Youth Hostel at a tiny village called Genêts in Normandy, France. This village was a few Km from the monastery of Le Mont Saint-Michel, near Saint Malo, where Elizabeth Devereux-Rochester lived, and apparently died.  And all the time we were there the running joke was "Ou est Bobby Watson?" From  The coloured history of the Burmah Oil Company
After 1918 it became more widely known through its newly appointed managing director, Robert I Watson. Energetic and highly respected throughout the oil world, Watson helped to devise the market-sharing international agreements that supported oil prices during the Depression between the wars and rationalised distribution methods throughout much of the world.
For some reason I can't explain, I associate Elizabeth Devereux-Rochester with the story of The English Patient:


The connection was because of a beautiful, sad English nurse called Rosemary who was staying there with her sister, or a friend. I fell in love with her, but I was only fifteen and she was twenty two, and I couldn't even speak in her presence, ... I think this was played a lot on the radio at the time:


I would like to find out which route she used in the Pyrenees:
She led several downed pilots across the border to Switzerland until that route had to be closed. For this group she developed a new escape route across the Pyrénées.
What a great band!


And the connection with George Orwell is via Burma:
At the end of 1924, he was posted to Syriam, closer to Rangoon. Syriam had the refinery of the Burmah Oil Company, "the surrounding land a barren waste, all vegetation killed off by the fumes of sulphur dioxide pouring out day and night from the stacks of the refinery." 
See also  Mountbatten and Nehru in India in 1963.

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