Stafford Cottman
An eighteen-year-old English volunteer, sent back from the trenches with suspected tuberculosis, who escaped the raid on the P.O.U.M. sanatorium and slept in the open with Orwell and John McNair until they could cross the frontier.
In Orwell's account, simply to get out. He is one of the people the book follows through the last week, and everything recorded about him in it is about staying out of the hands of the police long enough to reach the train.
The book
At a glance
- English volunteer, one of the last out of Barcelona
- Eighteen
- Suspected tuberculosis
- Chapters 13 and 14
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeStafford Cottman was eighteen, and by the time George Orwell was discharged he was one of the small group of English still in Barcelona and out of jail. He had been sent back from the trenches with suspected tuberculosis and was recovering at the Sanatorium Maurin, one of the convalescent houses the P.O.U.M. ran in the suburbs near Tibidabo, in a villa taken from its owners at the time of the revolution.
When the party was suppressed on 16 June 1937 the police raided the sanatorium and took whoever was in it, including men with amputated legs. Cottman was not caught, and neither was Williams; both went into hiding. Orwell met him with John McNair at the British Consulate the following morning, which is where the three of them learned that Bob Smillie was dead.
The days that followed are the strangest passage in the book. By night the three of them were fugitives sleeping in long grass on a derelict building lot; by day they were prosperous English visitors in the smart quarter, eating in expensive restaurants and being very English with the waiters, because looking bourgeois had become the safest disguise in a city where six months earlier looking proletarian had been. Cottman crossed the frontier with the Orwells and McNair and went on to Paris.
How the book draws them
- EighteenThe youngest of the English left in Barcelona, sent down the line from the trenches with suspected tuberculosis rather than a wound.
- The Sanatorium MaurinA P.O.U.M. convalescent home in a seized bourgeois villa near Tibidabo, holding men invalided out of the line and others permanently disabled. He was there with Williams and Arthur Clinton.
- The raidPolice raided the sanatorium when the party was outlawed and arrested the patients, dragging wounded militiamen out of their beds. Cottman was not among them and went into hiding.
- The ConsulateHe and McNair met the Orwells there at ten in the morning, and told them the first thing they had to say: Bob Smillie was dead, of what nobody knew for certain.
- Long grass and good restaurantsThree nights outdoors at the edge of a building lot, and days spent looking as respectable as a shave and a shoe-shine could make them. He crossed into France with the others and went on to Paris.