Orwell was known as a prankster when he was a schoolboy

One of the interesting facts about George Orwell is that Orwell was known as a prankster when he was a schoolboy. "The remarkable thing about Orwell was that alone among the boys he was an intellectual and not a parrot for he thought for himself", Connolly said of him. At Eton, John Vaughan Wilkes, his former St Cyprian's headmaster's son, recalled "he was extremely argumentative about anything and criticizing the masters and criticizing the other boys. We enjoyed arguing with him. He would generally win the arguments, or think he had anyhow." English classicist and medievalist Roger Mynors agrees: "Endless arguments about all sorts of things, in which he was one of the great leaders. He was one of those boys who thought for himself."

Blair enjoyed playing practical jokes. Buddicom recalls him swinging like an orangutan from the luggage rack in a railway carriage to scare a female passenger out of the cabin. At Eton, he played tricks on his housemaster, John Crace, including placing a parody advertising in a college magazine indicating pederasty. His tutor, Gow, described him as "a very unattractive boy" who "made himself as big a nuisance as he could". Blair was later banned from the Southwold crammer for sending a dead rat as a birthday present to the town surveyor. In one of his As I Please articles, he mentions a protracted joke he told after responding to an advertisement for a woman who claimed to have a cure for obesity.