Sir Joseph Cheam

Sir Joseph Cheam is a senior officer in the Army Service Corps during the First World War, and in civilian life the chairman of one of the big chain groceries. He appears twice in George Orwell's Coming Up for Air, briefly each time, and both meetings decide what happens to the man who tells the story. That is George Bowling, who is forty-five in 1938 and is looking back over his life.

The first meeting is in 1917. Bowling had been wounded in France late in 1916, spent the winter in a hospital camp and then went to an officers' training camp, and was commissioned. When the officer commanding the camp heard he knew something about the grocery trade, he told him to put his name in for the Army Service Corps, though Bowling did not admit he had actually worked behind a counter. A demand then came in for a young officer with grocery knowledge to act as some kind of secretary to Sir Joseph Cheam, and three days later Bowling was saluting in his office. He suspects to this day that they mixed his name up with somebody else's. Cheam was a lean, upright, rather handsome old man with grizzled hair, heavy grey eyebrows and a grave-looking nose. He looked, Bowling says, like the perfect professional soldier, and might have been the twin brother of the man in the De Reszke advertisement, for a cigarette brand of the day. Outside the Army he was famous all over the world for something called the Cheam Wage-Cut System.

The interview lasted a few minutes. Cheam looked up from his writing and asked whether Bowling was a gentleman. Bowling said he was not. "Good," said Cheam. "Then perhaps we'll get some work done." In about three more minutes he had established that his new secretary had no secretarial experience, no shorthand, no typing, and a background of twenty-eight shillings a week in a grocer's shop. He said Bowling would do. There were too many gentlemen in this damned Army, and he had been looking for somebody who could count beyond ten.

The job lasted one day. Cheam was responsible for supply dumps in the south-west of England for a body called the West Coast Defence Force, and he sent Bowling to Cornwall to find out whether the stores at a place called Twelve Mile Dump existed. They consisted of eleven tins of bully beef. A telegram then put Bowling in charge of them, and the Army forgot about him there until the beginning of 1919.

The second meeting comes a few years after the war, when Bowling is selling paper-clips and typewriter ribbons door to door and has talked his way into an office block in Fleet Street. Cheam came down the corridor in civilian clothes with two clerks trailing him, and recognised him. "Of course. The boy that said he wasn't a gentleman." He asked what Bowling could do. Bowling decided that the truth would serve better than any sales pitch and answered that he could do nothing, but that he wanted a job as a travelling salesman. Cheam thought about it for perhaps half a minute and suggested insurance, on the grounds that people have got to have insurance the same as they have got to eat. One of the clerks produced a scribbling-pad, Cheam took a gold pen out of his waistcoat pocket and wrote a note to somebody senior at the Flying Salamander, and walked on. They never saw each other again.

Bowling got the job and has held it ever since, close on eighteen years by the time he tells the story. He is clear-eyed about what happened. Cheam was worth at least half a million pounds, gave three minutes of his time to a man he had met once, and did it because of a single remark that had stuck in his memory. Bowling adds that the same day he probably gave twenty clerks the sack.