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Harold Wharton

Real Name

Harold Wharton

Aliases

Big Brother

Gender

Male

Citizenship

British

Affiliation

Ingsoc

Appearances

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

Status

Deceased

BB

General Sir Harold Wharton was a war hero of World War II, leader of the English Socialist Party (Ingsoc), and later Dictator of Airstrip One (England) from 1945 to 1951 under the name Big Brother.

History[]

Harold "Harry" Wharton was an orphan who was raised by a "beastly" colonel and became a student of Greyfriars School. He was Captain of the Lover Forth Remove and an avid cricketer, and was known for being a "black sheep." He was a classmate of Billy Bunter, whose sister Bessie Bunter later married to Wharton. Wharton, along with Robert "Bob" Cherry and John "Johnny Bull" Night, were members of the Famous Five, a tight-knit group of students who, along with Billy and certain other schoolmates, had many adventures and defeated many adversaries. At some point Wharton fell into association with communists due to his encounter with Herbert Skimpole of Saint James College

Wharton soon entered into military service during World War II, subsequently rising to the rank of General, and became a war hero. By 1945 Wharton had entered politics, and he soon rose to become the de facto head of Ingsoc, which eventually lead to him becoming dictator of the United Kingdom, during which time he was commonly known by the alias "Big Brother."

On November 27, 1951, Wharton was secretly assassinated in a plot orchestrated by Gerald O'Brien and Robert Cherry, the former becoming Wharton's successor. Wharton's death was covered up as a heart attack. O'Brien, however, was not able to retain his control over Ingsoc in which the party collapsed and Wharton's legacy was rendered obsolete.

Source material[]

Harold Wharton is Harry Wharton from Charles Hamilton's Greyfriars School series, and alias Big Brother is from George Orwell's 1984. The change of Big Brother's rule of England from 1984 to the 1950s is based on the conceit that the fictional works depict happenings in or around publication year (Orwell's titular year being a reversal of 1948, the intended year of publication). In 1984, Big Brother is possibly not real, though this is never fully clarified.

Orwell wrote about the dangerous imperialist tendencies he observed in the Greyfriars School series in his essay Boys' weeklies [1]

  1. https://orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys
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