Mr Macgregor
Deputy Commissioner of Kyauktada and secretary of the club: a large, kindly, relentlessly facetious man who is fond of Orientals provided they are given no freedom.
To be liked without giving anything up. He takes as great pains to be a good fellow at the club as he does to keep up his dignity during office hours, and the strain of holding both shows in every scene he is in.
The book
At a glance
- Deputy Commissioner of Kyauktada and secretary of the European Club
- Rather past forty; forty-three by his own exercise routine
- The tortoise, given by the Burmans
- Blackwood's — 'those little articles of mine'
- The only motor car in Kyauktada besides the bullock carts
- From chapter 2 onward
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeMr Macgregor is a heavy man rather past forty, in gold-rimmed spectacles and a clean silk suit already sweating through at the armpits, with bulky shoulders and a trick of thrusting his head forward that reminds people of a turtle — the Burmans nickname him the tortoise. His good nature is quite genuine. It is also so wilful, so strenuously off-duty, that nobody is ever quite at ease in his presence. His conversation seems to have been modelled on some facetious schoolmaster or clergyman he knew in early life: any long word, any quotation, any proverb figures in his mind as a joke and is introduced with a bumbling 'er' or 'ah' to warn the room that one is coming.
He is the closest thing in the book to a decent administrator, and Orwell places the limit precisely. He objects when Ellis uses a racial slur, on the ground that it is inaccurate — the Burmese are Mongolians, the Indians Aryans or Dravidians — rather than that it is cruel. He detests bloodshed and martial law. He also shakes his head sympathetically at the name of the general who ordered the Amritsar massacre, and reminisces that in his young days a disrespectful butler was sent to the jail with a chit reading 'Please give the bearer fifteen lashes'. The narration puts it in a sentence: he had no prejudice against Orientals; indeed, he was deeply fond of them; provided they were given no freedom he thought them the most charming people alive.
The plot passes through his in-tray. The circular telling the club to co-opt an Asian member is not his idea — the Commissioner handed it to him — but he dislikes making excuses and so takes the unpopularity himself, posting the notice and then, when the room turns, offering to postpone the discussion to the next general meeting. He is also U Po Kyin's principal target. Five anonymous letters and a jailbreak later he has convinced himself that Dr Veraswami is the sort of man who might hold seditious opinions, which is all the ruin an Indian official needs.
He is not a coward. When the club is surrounded he opens the front door and presents himself at the top of the steps to ask the crowd what it means, takes a stone full in the face, and comes back inside with his spectacles smashed and his nose streaming, still telling Mrs Lackersteen that the danger is very small.
How the book draws them
- His faceLarge, heavy and bulky-shouldered, with a kindly, puggy face and gold-rimmed spectacles that slide down a sweating nose and get pushed back up. When trouble starts he settles them pugnaciously. The head is thrust forward out of the shoulders, which is what earned him the tortoise, and under strain a brick-red colour floods up from his neck into his face.
- The silk suitClean when he arrives at the club and already patched with sweat under the arms, the damp spreading across the back of the coat as the evening goes on. For the morning walk it is a khaki pagri-cloth shirt, drill shorts and a pigsticker topi, in which Flory privately finds his knees pudgy and dimpled. His voice booms enough to make the floorboards tingle.
- The morning exercisesNumbers 5 to 9 of Nordenflycht's 'Physical Jerks for the Sedentary', performed on a bamboo mat in shorts and singlet, watched every morning for five years by his bearer, who takes them for a sacrifice to some mysterious and exacting god.
- The anecdoteA story about a dacoity at Prome which can be produced in almost any context, and which has already appeared in one of his little articles in Blackwood's. It is a tradition at the club to interrupt his stories. Elizabeth listens, and he decides he has seldom met so intelligent a girl.
- The noticeHe posts the proposal to consider an Asian member, finds 'B. F.' pencilled against his signature, thinks Ellis's manner very disrespectful, and turns the whole thing off with a joke rather than admit the order came from the Commissioner.
- Fifteen lashesHis contribution to Mrs Lackersteen's lament about servants: in his young days a disrespectful butler was sent along to the jail with a chit asking for fifteen lashes. He follows it with eheu fugaces and a sigh for the vanished days.
- The rules he keepsAlone of the Europeans in Kyauktada he does not drink before sunset, and takes plain lemonade at the club while signing the chit for everyone else's whisky. He also takes a brisk two-mile walk every morning when he can spare the time.
- How he judges the doctorToo just a nature to condemn even an Oriental out of hand, he sits up to midnight over a pile of confidential papers and seven anonymous letters, working out not whether the doctor has done anything but whether he is the kind of man who would hold seditious opinions.
- On the stepsHe opens the door on two thousand people and demands to know what this means, in twenty years has never heard such insolence, and swears his first oath in many years before a stone takes him in the face and breaks his spectacles.
- The funeralHe reads the burial service in a ripe reverent voice and leads the party out of the cemetery holding his grey topi — the Eastern equivalent of a top hat — against his stomach.