Macdougall
A Glasgow electrician sacked from the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company for drunkenness, now scraping a living out of a garage in Mandalay. He is the single European member of the second-rate club Dr Veraswami joins after he is demoted and transferred there, and the only white man left for the doctor to talk to. He is interested in whisky and magnetos and nothing else, and the doctor tries almost every night to engage him in what he still calls cultured conversation.
The book
At a glance
- The one European member of the club Dr Veraswami joins
- Electrician, now running a garage
- The Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, which sacked him for drunkenness
- Chapter 25
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMacdougall is a Scottish electrician living in Burma, and he appears only in the last chapter of the novel, in a paragraph that is really about somebody else. He never speaks and he is never in a scene.
Dr Veraswami, the Indian doctor who is one of the two central characters, has spent the whole book insisting to his English friend John Flory that Englishmen are naturally superior, that the British Empire is a gift to Burma, and that the European Club is the summit of civilised life. Flory has spent the whole book telling him that the men in that Club are dull, stupid and cruel, and the doctor has refused to believe a word of it.
By the end of the book the doctor's circumstances have changed and he has joined a second-rate club used mainly by Indian lawyers. The club has exactly one European member, and it is proud of him: a Glasgow electrician named Macdougall, who was sacked from the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company for drunkenness and now scrapes a living out of a garage. George Orwell calls him a dull lout interested in nothing but whisky and magnetos.
The doctor, Orwell writes, will never believe that a white man can be a fool. So almost every night he tries to draw Macdougall into what he still calls cultured conversation, and the results are very unsatisfying.
How the book draws them
- Where he is fromGlasgow, and an electrician by trade. Orwell's verdict on him is a dull lout.
- Why he lost his jobHe was sacked from the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, the shipping firm that ran the river steamers in Burma, for drunkenness.
- What he does nowMakes a precarious living out of a garage.
- What he talks aboutWhisky and magnetos, and Orwell says nothing else interests him. A magneto is the part of an engine that makes the spark for the cylinders.
- The nightly attemptDr Veraswami tries almost every evening to have a cultured conversation with him, because he cannot bring himself to believe that any Englishman is stupid. It does not go well.