George Orwell's adopted son reveals how his dad cared for him while he wrote classic 1984

Eight decades after Richard's father researched Wigan Pier in the attic room of the town's old library, Richard has returned with the Orwell Society to retrace his steps

Richard Blair smiles remembering his father, who died when he was just six. 'I remember him changing my nappy and feeding me after my mother died,' he says. 'And I remember the clack of his typewriter.

'His voice was soft and husky and he was tall and gaunt at that point, as he was already suffering from tuberculosis.'

Richard's father was George Orwell, author of 1984, Animal Farm and The Road to Wigan Pier.

Very little survives of him as a family man, except Richard's memories and a few black and white photographs of the writer squinting into his cigarette smoke as he plays with his son.

Now a retired engineer, Richard, 72, offers a tender portrait of a warm, loving man.

'He was a wonderful father,' he says.'He was really hands on in a way that was really unusual for that era.'

It is 80 years since his father published the groundbreaking Road to Wigan Pier and, throughout 2017, the Daily Mirror is running our own Wigan Pier Project, retracing Orwell's steps through former industrial heartlands of the country.

Eight decades after his father researched Wigan Pier in the attic room of the town's old library, Richard has returned with the Orwell Society to the town made infamous by the story. His father's neat signature is in the library book in front of him: 'E.A. Blair, 72 Warrington Lane – 13th February 1936.'

'My father loved the people of Wigan,' Richard says. 'People sometimes misunderstand that. The conditions were appalling but that was the same all over the industrial North. Wigan became a metaphor for social problems, but that wasn't his intention.'

Eric Arthur Blair, who took the name George Orwell to avoid embarrassing his family by sleeping rough during research, died in January 1950 at just 46. He had adopted Richard six years earlier. 'My father really wanted a child, but he believed he wasn't able to have one,' he says.

Orwell's first wife Eileen's sister-in-law, Dr Gwen O'Shaughnessy, knew of a woman who was pregnant; her husband was away fighting in the Second World War. Orwell and Eileen adopted Richard at three weeks old. His new father burned the birth parents' names from the certificate with a cigarette.

Nine months later, Eileen died while being given anaesthetic for a hysterectomy.

It was 1945, and Orwell was on his way to Germany to report on the war for The Observer. He was in Paris when he got the news. 'He came straight home to organise the funeral,' Richard says. 'Friends suggested that my father should un-adopt me. He said, I've got my son now, I'm not going to give him over.'

Orwell and Richard lived on remote Hebridean island Jura for much of 1945 to 1950, at Barnhill, a farmhouse only reached by boat or several hours' walk. It had no electricity or telephone.

Orwell spent the days feverishly writing his masterwork, 1984, as his tuberculosis worsened. Richard was often left to look after himself, although he initially had a nanny, and later Orwell's younger sister Avril cared for him.

'He would write all day and you would hear him tap, tap, tapping on the typewriter,' Richard says.

Orwell tried to balance his fear of passing on TB to his son and his desperate desire not to be a distant father. Writer and son went on long fishing trips.

When Richard's cousins Henry, Jane and Lucy came to stay in August 1947, Orwell took the children on a camping trip in the dinghy. On the way back, he misjudged the tide and the boat was battered by the notorious swell at the Gulf of Corryvreckan.

Orwell was steering with the outboard when it was pulled off by the tide. Henry, just returned from national service, took the oars and managed to row the boat to a rocky island. But as he dragged the boat up on to the shore, it slipped backwards on the barnacles and capsized.

'My father and I both went under the tipped-over boat,' Richard says. 'Either of us could have been knocked out. But my father managed to get us to shore.' They were rescued by a lobster boat.

A decade earlier, Orwell had been shot in the throat while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. After nearly drowning, his health rapidly deteriorated. 'He smoked constantly,' Richard recalls. 'Black shag roll-ups. He'd use old newspapers if he didn't have cigarette papers.'

Orwell treated his infant son more like an adult. 'One day after lunch, I gathered lots of cigarette ends into his pipe under the table and I asked him for a light.

'A hand came down and he handed me his lighter. You can imagine what happened. Lunch reappeared.'

Another time, Richard was balanced dangerously on a chair watching his dad make a wooden toy when he fell. He still bears the scar on his temple. 'There's a groove in the bone.'

He last saw his father in the sanitorium in Cranham, Glos. Richard stayed nearby at an anarchist colony.

One treasured memory is from the last day they shared on Jura. 'It was his last journey back from Jura, the car had broken down as usual,' he says. 'The others walked back to Barnhill to get the jack. I was left with my father in the car, eating boiled sweets. He told me stories and made up poetry. I think he knew he might not be coming back again.'

Orwell died a few months later, after marrying writer Sonia Brownell on his deathbed at University College Hospital, London. Richard was in Jura with Avril, and heard of his death on the 8pm news. 'Avril became my legal guardian,' he says.

For the last few months, we have been shadowing the writer's elusive ghost. Here, at last, is one of the few people who knew him intimately.

The town is commemorating the 80th anniversary of The Road to Wigan Pier, the legacy of which still divides local opinion. Inside the museum, Orwell's boy remembers the deep love of a father for his only son.