Almost 90 years since he tramped his way through Barnsley, a film about George Orwell’s infamous visit to the town has been created by filmmaker Dave Cherry and media students at Barnsley College.

Orwell had a two-week stay in Barnsley in March 1936 while gathering information for his book The Road to Wigan Pier. The book, published the following year, highlighted the destitution and dosshouses of working class northern towns in the 1930s.

Barnsley was Orwell’s final stop on his journey through the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire. He stayed with a miner, Albert Gray, in a three-bed terrace on Agnes Terrace off Day Street near Locke Park.

Dave Cherry, also a former miner, has always been interested in Orwell’s stay in his hometown. He was asked by the media department at Barnsley College to help narrate and direct the film.

Using excerpts from Orwell’s diary, on which he based the book, the film focuses on his itinerary while in Barnsley, what he thought of the town and its people, conditions faced by coal miners, and working class housing at the time.

Dave has sourced around 30 colourised photographs from ‘the Yorkshire Photographer’ Stuart Sykes of Barnsley in the 1930s. The film is a then-and-now montage, looking at the transformation of the town over the last 90 years.

Poet Ian McMillan has provided the voice overs from Orwell’s diary.

After a stay in Leeds, Orwell arrived in Barnsley on 11^th March 1936. His first impressions were that it was ‘distinctly less poverty-stricken, at any rate in appearance. Much better shops and more appearance of business being done’ than in Wigan.

His homestay host, Albert Gray, lived with his wife Minnie and two young daughters, Irene and Doreen. They also had lodgers, a widowed joiner and his 11-year-old son, and a professional singer.

He was surprised by the size and condition of the house. “The house is very clean and decent and my room the best I have had in lodgings up here. Flanelette sheets this time. Electric light in all rooms save one.”

Gray, then 50, was a miner at Darton Colliery who’d worked down the pit since being a small boy. He was employed on piece work removing the coal onto trucks after it is cut. In his diary, he recalled Mr Gray arriving home covered in black coal dust and washing methodically before eating in a basin of hot water – miners’ houses with bathrooms were practically unknown and only a few colliery companies had pithead baths then.

During his time in Barnsley, Orwell visited many collieries including Grimethorpe, Barnsley Main, North Gawber, and Wentworth Silkstone aka Levvy Tag, the old stomping ground of Dave Cherry.

Orwell was fascinated by the term day hole or drift mine, but also appalled at the conditions underground. “The place where these men, and those loading the broken coal onto the tubs, were working, was like hell.”

“The pit props, owing to the damp, had a strange fungi exactly like cotton wool growing on them. If you touched them they went all to nothing, leaving a nasty smell.”

He was also outraged by the state of the town’s housing, particularly in the old Barebones area of Mapplewell.

Plaster cracking, no shelves in oven, gas leaking, dryrot in upstairs floor so you could see into downstairs rooms, rotten window frames, infested with bugs, only old overcoats as bedclothes, stone sinks worn flat, back yards and outside toilets shared by ten houses, children with TB – the disease Orwell would later die of in 1950.

He was aghast that the council had spent over £150,000 on a new town hall when 70,000 houses didn’t have an inside bath and a further 2,000 houses needed building.

Despite being a former Etonian, Orwell was an anarchist and socialist who rebelled against the Imperial rule. While in Barnsley, he went to a 700-strong rally at the public hall to hear British Union of Fascists leader, Oswald Mosely.

“His speech was the usual claptrap… the (mainly) working-class audience was easily bamboozled. Several men who tried at the beginning to interject questions were thrown out, one of them – who as far as I could see was only trying to get a question answered – with quite unnecessary violence, several Blackshirts throwing themselves upon him and raining blows on him.”

Later that year, Orwell went to Spain to fight against Franco’s fascists with the Republican milito in the Spanish Civil War – the prelude to WWII.

As well as the film, a blue plaque was unveiled on Agnes Terrace in April, thanks to Barnsley Civic Trust and the Orwell Society.

You can watch the film here.