Give or take the slippage occasioned by the vagaries of Hebridean Mean Time, it was 60 years ago this fortnight that, in a freezing, halfderelict attic room at the northern tip of Jura, George Orwell typed the closing sentence — “He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” — of the novel that has colonised the contemporary imagination like no other.

Never has there been a fiction that anticipated and condemned as definingly as Nineteen Eighty-Four a world in which political obedience replaces free will; that monolithic fever-dream of Big Brother, the Ministry of Truth, Hate Week and public hangings in Victory Square — all written, paradoxically, at a window with views straight from the front of the island’s tourist pamphlet.

Orwell died in 1950, picked off finally by the tuberculosis that had plagued him for years and that had been worsened beyond measure by the howling inhospitality of Jura’s climate; he felt at the time, he said, like “a sucked orange”, although he had also written to one acquaintance that “these islands are one of the most beautiful parts of the British Isles. Of course, it rains all the time, but if one takes that for granted, it doesn’t seem to matter.”

His sister, Avril, his nursemaid and helpmate on Jura, followed him to the grave in 1978. The few locals with whom Orwell had dealings, to learn how to generate his own electricity or to snare rabbits, were already getting close to their makers when Orwell landed across the Sound of Islay at Port Askaig after his 48-hour journey from a blitzed London.

The last living link with the composition of history’s most unlikely blockbuster, fashioned in the least plausible of settings, is Richard Horatio Blair, the son Orwell adopted as a baby in 1944. Blair is the inheritor of Orwell’s estate, a thriving concern benefiting from its subject’s immortal renown as the laureate of austere fretfulness; annually, the estate earns Blair a six-figure sum, he says, “though I wouldn’t like to specify whether it’s at the high or low end of that spectrum”.

The less tangible dividend of the association, however, has been Blair’s indelible and life-long connection to the place that inspired, sustained but exhausted his illustrious father. Orwell’s doctor once spoke disparagingly of “the dream of Jura”, his patient’s belief that finally he had found an idyll of self-sustainability and moral hardiness, a terrain equal to his suspicion of comfort and privilege.

The dream ended when Orwell was shipped off the island in 1949, to expire in London after a calamitous prescription of streptomycin. But his son continues to live the dream on Orwell’s behalf. Though based in Warwickshire and retired after a career in farm machinery, Blair retains a cottage funded by his father’s royalties at Ardfern, and visits Jura several times a year. The island, he says, has become his “spiritual home”.

Perhaps the most infamous tale of Orwell’s time on Jura concerns his disastrous attempt to pilot a small craft through the perilous Gulf of Corryvreckan, the world’s third-largest whirlpool, a tumultuous, boiling passage off the island of Scarba. Hopelessly ill-prepared, the writer and his son ended up drenched and shipwrecked on Eilean Mor: “I try not to think about that one too often,” Blair says, “because with a legend like my father, fact and fiction get mixed so readily. People sometimes add details. It’s better to keep a little distance between yourself and your memories.”

In recognition of this event in the Orwell mythology, though, Blair has stipulated in his will that, when the time comes, his ashes are to be scattered in the whirlpool. Because Corryvreckan so nearly claimed him in life, he says, it’s welcome to have him in death: “It will be my final farewell, having them cast into that Gulf,” says Blair. “I put my uncle Bill’s ashes there, my father’s brother-in-law, and I’m going to go the same way. I shall always be very proud of my father and our trip there, ill-fated as it was.”

It’s difficult to overstate the inaccessibility of Barnhill, the imposing five-bedroom crofthouse that Orwell leased from a local family, the Fletchers. His diaries of the stay reveal the impish delight he derived, when friends threatened to visit, from itemising the endless stages of travel involved. Once you’re at Craighouse, the island’s biggest settlement, you follow 25 miles of looping single-track roads, fearing collision at any moment with the many red deer who use the road as a footpath. But that’s the easy bit. The final seven miles are along a track of rock and rubble that rattles down the flank of a hill to sea level. Only 4x4s can survive it; Orwell’s doctor forbade him from riding his motorbike on the track lest the exertion bring on a haemorrhage in the lungs. Orwell ignored him.

Similarly, the Corryvreckan story is so well-remembered, one suspects, because it feels so emblematic of Orwell’s Jura project. It seems the bloody-minded last hurrah of the man who all but founded the awkward squad, a suicidal pilgrimage.

There are various strands of theory among Orwellites as to why he alighted on Jura. It’s one of the great question-marks of literary history. It was perhaps because he was invited by his old Etonian friend, David Astor, then editor of The Observer, whose grave lies next to Orwell’s in an Oxfordshire churchyard. Others speculate that the writer had been driven to despair by the squalor of post-war London. Fatherhood had been an ambition long denied to him by the medical shortcomings of his first wife, Eileen; having adopted Richard, Orwell may have been typically overzealous in his quest for a safe and wholesome environment for the boy, albeit one that was 30 miles from the nearest copy of The Beano; in its place, Orwell taught himself carpentry and made Richard a wooden toy.

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