Memo from the BBC's Director of Empire Services

This memo, written in June 1941, examines Orwell's suitability for a role as a Talks Producer within the BBC's Eastern Service and recalls Orwell's interview for the job. Orwell's experiences in Burma and India are discussed, as well as his political opinions and his time fighting for the Republican cause in Spain, which Orwell feels 'may be held against him'.

Although his employment at the BBC was seen as essential war work, Orwell had made strenuous efforts to join the army but was consistently rejected by medical boards because of his ill health. The tuberculosis which was to claim his life had first appeared in 1938 when he collapsed from a lesion in one of his lungs.