Declassified files at the National Archives show that the Information Research Department (IRD) in the Foreign Office bought strip cartoon rights of the book in 1950, intending to use it as part of the cut-and-thrust of the then Cold War.
india Updated: Aug 20, 2020 01:34 IST
‘Animal Farm’, George Orwell’s acclaimed political satire, has been widely read across the globe, but less known is how a UK department set up to counter Soviet propaganda turned it into cartoon strips and planted them in newspapers in India and elsewhere in the early 1950s.
Published on August 17, 1945, the book reflects events linked to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. It describes a gang of animals who take over their farm, overthrowing the cruel Farmer Jones, only to end up in an even more brutal state of slavery under the new regime.
Declassified files at the National Archives show that the Information Research Department (IRD) in the Foreign Office bought strip cartoon rights of the book in 1950, intending to use it as part of the cut-and-thrust of the then Cold War.
“(This) work has been translated into many languages, and has proved to be not only a best seller, but also a most effective propaganda weapon, because of its skilful combination of simplicity, subtlety and humour”, says a December 1950 circular of IRD.
The files include detailed correspondence between Lt. Col. Leslie Sheridan of the IRD, Don Freeman, an artist who provided the ‘roughs’ of the drawings, and the cartoonist Norman Pett, who produced the final versions of the cartoons.
Mark Dunton, records specialist at National Archives, writes that by April 1951, with the cartoon strips completed, the IRD contacted its network of information officers across the world, from Asmara (Eritrea) to Tokyo, encouraging them to do all they could to secure publication in a newspaper in their territory.
“This endeavour met with a good measure of success, judging from reports in FO 1110/392 (file)”, he writes.
A report in the file quotes one Joan Sanders as stating that a prominent newspaper (not Hindustan Times) published from New Delhi “are publishing three strips weekly. Excellent reproduction”, based on a telegram from New Delhi of April 28, 1951.
The IRD’s plan, according to the files, was to tell the ‘Animal Farm’ story “in approximately 78 cartoons, each cartoon containing three or four panels. Thus, if the feature were run by a daily paper, it would take about 13 weeks to tell the whole story”.
Arrangements were also made for local adaptations and translations in various countries.
The Foreign Office informed the British embassy in Cairo in August 1951: “We could have the cartoons drawn in London and sent to you in the hope that you could get a local artist to convert oak trees into palm trees, bowler hats into fezzes, skirts into sarongs, etc”.
The files report that the cartoon strips were well received in Asmara ‘giving food for thought and discussion to the local population’, and it had led to increased sales of the ‘El Heraldo’ newspaper in Caracas.
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