Although otherwise unconnected, the author known as Orwell and the Dublin road of the same name have at least one other thing in common: they both used to be called something else.
Born Eric Blair, the writer borrowed his pseudonym from an English river, which flows through Suffolk. It was a random choice. He had also considered "P.S. Burton", an alias used during his time posing as a tramp, the account of which, as Down and Out in Paris and London, became his literary debut and forced a name change to avoid embarrassing his parents.
He wasn’t especially familiar with the River Orwell but he liked the sound of it, as he did “George” (he had always hated Eric). Names were important, he thought. In a judgment that might have resonated in Rathgar, he once said: “If I have the choice of going through two streets, other things being equal I always go by the one with the nicer name.”
The Orwell of Dublin 6, meanwhile, much in the news these days, had acquired its name almost 60 years before the writer, back in 1864. Until then, it was “Windmill Road”, after the mill used to pump water from a quarry where the Rathgar Tennis Club is now.
Sergei and the Wolf – Frank McNally on the tragic timing of Sergei Prokofiev
Orwellian Road – Frank McNally on Ukrainian echoes in Animal Farm
Man in the Middle – Frank McNally on John Francis Condon, self-appointed star of the Lindbergh kidnap investigation
Great Saint Robbery – Frank McNally on the dubious Scottish historian Thomas Dempster
But according to a recent history of the area, On the Banks of the Dodder by Ged Walsh, the Orwell in this case was probably borrowed from Scotland instead of England. Also, rather than rivers, it may have been inspired by religion, and the diverging streams of 19th-century Protestantism.
An Anglican Church of Zion had already lent its name to one of the smaller roads in Rathgar by then and there had been talk of the main road to Churchtown being Zionised too.
But one of Rathgar's most influential residents was a Scotsman called David Drummond, a Presbyterian. Walsh surmises that he and like-minded others borrowed the name from Orwell Kirk, an old church in Perthshire with a history of dissent.
Along with religious oneupmanship, the name offered the added benefit of roots in a Scots Gaelic term meaning “green or fertile retreat”.
This last quality soon became the keynote for estate agents. An 1867 property ad in the Freeman’s Journal rhapsodised about the “rising fashionable Orwell Road district . . . famed for salubrity of air and beauty of scenery.”
The area’s exclusivity extended to having an entrance barrier. Long before the ones that made headlines there this week, Orwell Road itself had gates. They were removed in 1886, according to Walsh, but the pillars remained into the 20th century.
As for the salubrity of air, that was later threatened for a time by the abandoned, water-filled quarry and Dublin Corporation’s eventual decision to allow the pit be filled in with refuse. A rise in the rodent population inevitably followed, leading to another renaming – mercifully short-lived – when the suburb was lampooned as “Ratgar”.
This week’s drama at the Russian embassy had a tragic precedent involving the quarry. In 1962, a lorry that had reversed to the edge to dump its load in slipped over and plunged into the water. The 27-year-old driver drowned.
For a time in the late 1940s, Rathgar had a different kind of rat problem too. "Ratlines" (or in German Rattlinien) were a name given to routes by which many Nazis escaped justice after the war, en route to havens in South America and elsewhere.
In 1947, one of those lines led through Orwell Road, although the extent to which any locals or the government knew about it is questionable. There were pseudonyms involved there too. The rat in question went by the cover name of Alois Anich, as which he had acquired a false passport in Switzerland, allowing him to fly first to Ireland and later the US.
It was in California that he was eventually outed as the real-life Andrija Artukovic, a Croatian former lawyer, government minister, member of the fascist Ustaše, and "Butcher of the Balkans", responsible for the mass murder of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and uncooperative Croats.
During his 12 months in Rathgar, mostly at No 6 Zion Road, just off Orwell, he was a daily Mass-goer, entered his two daughters in a local convent school, and acquired a son, born in a Terenure nursing home in June 1948.
A month later, the family left for America, where Artukovic spent almost 40 years before being extradited back to what was then Yugoslavia. He was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. But because of his advanced years and ill health, the execution never happened.
He died instead of natural causes, while still in custody, aged 88.