Tom Driberg
Born 1905; died 12th. August, 1976, in London.
British journalist and Member of Parliament, 1942-1974
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Driberg .
tom_driberg_mystery_moral_rearmament.html
Knitting Circle Driberg Page .html
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdribergT.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/446305.s
New Driberg biog Page .html
this page has new biog of him and book review
from Tribune Magazine UK 1964
JP Thornton-duesbery wrote a famous MRA rebuttal to Dribergs book
He was from a middle class family but was very aware of poor living conditions of the local working class families in his village. His father, John James Street Driberg, spent his entire career in India, first in the Army and then in the Indian civil service where he became Chief of Police and Inspector of Jails for the Province of Assam. He died in 1919 when Tom Driberg was 14. His mother was Amy Mary who belonged to the Bell clan of Dumfriesshire. He had two brothers, Jack Herbert and James Douglas Driberg, who were 15 and 17 years older than him.
He was sent to the independent fee-paying boys' preparatory school at Crowborough, Sussex. He then went as a day-boy to a local school called the Grange. It was here at the age of eleven where he began sexual experimentation with other boys. He then went to Lancing where he came to know Evelyn Waugh. While at Lancing he started to take an interest in politics and to develop socialist leanings. During one of the holidays he joined the Brighton branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Two of the other boys at Lancing complained to the housemaster about Tom Driberg's unwelcome advances. He was punished and left Lancing a term early under a cloud.
For a few months he worked as a schoolmaster, teaching English at a preparatory school in Bournemouth.
He went to Christ Church, Oxford, and began to take part in the decadent lifestyle. Trips to the Spreadeagle in Thame run by John Fothergill were popular. The innkeeper was famous for the quality of his food and wines but also for his rudeness to customers he did not like. He wrote his reminiscences in An Innkeeper's Diary. Tom Driberg's closest (but chaste) friendship at Oxford was with W. H. Auden. Other acquaintances were Rupert Graves, Edith Sitwell and her brothers Osbert and Sacherverell, William Walton, Richard Wyndham, Peter Quennell, Cyril Connolly, A. J. A. Symons, Constant Lambert, and John Rayner. He also got to know the novelist Ada Leverson who had stayed loyal to Oscar Wilde, both before and after his imprisonment. During his time at Oxford Tom Driberg heard Gertrude Stein speak, and he wrote to Virginia Woolf suggesting that the Hogarth Press publish the lecture, which it did. He wrote for the Cherwell magazine, including film reviews, reports on antiquarian books, and rude jokes. Edith Sitwell urged him to write poetry and included one of his poems in a lecture. He squandered much of his allowance from his mother on extravagances. To supplement his income he spent a week as a pavement artist around London. He left Oxford in 1927 without completing his degree.
He wanted to become a journalist but could not see a way of achieving it. He moved to London and took a top-floor room in Frith Street. He signed on with Jay theatrical employment agency in Shaftesbury Avenue. One of the jobs he was given was to sit as an extra in the audience of Queen's Hall for a concert in the silent film The Constant Nymph, directed by Basil Dean. However, he soon had no money to pay rent, but was fortunate to find an all-night café in Church Street (later Romily Street) where he was given a job as a waiter from 6 pm to 6 am. He slept upstairs with the two other workers. Above them was a brothel. He found that he was having to deal with a motley bunch of customers and to some extent this cured him of his shyness. This was a happy period for him but when Edith Sitwell got to know of his circumstances she was horrified and arranged for Beverley Baxter, who was managing editor of the Daily Express to consider him for a job, and in January 1928 he was taken on as a reporter. Within a month he had a scoop when he discovered the arrival of the Moral Re-Armament movement. The story was run on for several days starting on the front page on 28th. February, 1928. He continued to take an interest in the movement and in the 1950s was invited to lecture on the subject at Oslo and Göteborg universities. His friend David Ferrer of Secker & Warberg also commissioned a book which came out in 1964 as The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament.
After a few months Tom Driberg was transferred to help Peter Sewell write his column of social gossip Talk of London. After Peter Sewell retired Tom Driberg took over. In May 1933 the proprietor Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) decided that the column should be replaced by something in the style used by Time magazine in the USA. The new column was headed These Names Make News. Then Lord Beaverbrook decided that it should be signed pseudonymously as William Hickey after the late eighteenth century diarist. Tom Driberg wrote the column until 1943, but also did much travelling to cover major news stories.
In the autumn of 1935 he gave two unemployed miners a place with him in his bed, but when his hands began to wander the men went to report him at the local police station. On 12th. November 1935 Tom Driberg ended up in court at the Old Bailey on a charge of indecent assault, but he was found not guilty. His boss, Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), ensured that there was no press coverage, although Tom Driberg had to go to see the editor of The News of the World. There may have been some reciprocal arrangement as Lady Astor had pleaded with Lord Beaverbrook to keep the homosexual charges against her son Bobbie Shaw out of the papers. The only whisper about Tom Driberg's case was when the trade paper World's Press News included the comment "That was a curious case that Fleet Street was talking about last week. Not all names make news."
In 1940 Tom Driberg was invited to lunch by Lady Astor, MP at Cliveden. One of the other guests was T. E. Lawrence.. Tom Driberg was shown T. E. Lawrence's manuscript of The Mint about his time in the RAF.
In about 1941 Tom Driberg was expelled from the Communist Party, although he was never told why. However, this turned out to be useful when he was campaigning to become an MP. In 1942 he was elected as an independent MP for Maldon in Essex. Three years later he held the seat as a Labour MP, and in 1950 he was elected as the Labour MP for Barking.
He left the Express in June 1943 after being sacked by the editor who thought that his parliamentary activities conflicted with his journalism. He was then given a job by Bill Richardson, the editor of Reynold News, a left-wing Sunday newspaper belonging to the Co-operative movement. He wrote a column under his own name which was more political. The paper became the Sunday Citizen in 1962, but in 1966 Tom Driberg was sacked because the paper could no longer afford his salary. The paper closed in 1967. He subsequently worked freelance and contributed to the "London Diary' of the New Statesman, and wrote book reviews for the monthly Books and Bookman.
He had a lucky escape when caught with a Norwegian sailor in an air raid shelter in Edinburgh. Fortunately the policeman was an avid reader of the William Hickey column and let him off. In fact the policeman and Tom Driberg became friends and exchanged letters. Tom Driberg related the story to his friends Harold Nicolson and Bob Boothby. It seems that Compton Mackenzie also heard about the story and used it as inspiration for his novel Thin Ice about the life of a homosexual politician.
In 1949 the Labour Party conference elected him to the National Executive Committee, and he was re-elected every year from 1950 to 1972.
In January 1954 he visited Rupert Croft-Cooke who was in Brixton prison after a conviction for gross indecency.
In 1956 Tom Driberg was temporarily out of Parliament and was working more or less full-time as a journalist. He travelled to Moscow to see the spy Guy Burgess to get the story of his disappearance from London with Donald Maclean. The story appeared in Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background.
Tom Driberg was chair of the Labour Party in 1957-58
In 1965 he was appointed as a Privy Counsellor.
He had been an MP for thirty years when he retired in February 1974.
In the early 1970s he anonymously compiled the crossword puzzles for Private Eye.
In 1975 he was made a life peer and became Lord Bradwell.
He frequently appeared on television:
Sunday Afternoon, 1956-8.
In Search of the Truth, 1962.
And also on radio:
Any Questions?, BBC Radio 4.
A Portrait of Brian Howard, 1968.
It became well known among his friends and in Westminster and Fleet Street that Tom Driberg was writing his autobiography and there were fears and anticipation of what he might reveal. As it turned out when he died of a heart attack in a London taxi his writing had only reached some threads of his life and career into the 1950s, and so many interesting stories have been lost. Nevertheless, the part of his autobiography that was published after his death, with its explicit descriptions of his sexual encounters, caused much disgust.
In 1987, in the play Lost Tune from Rangoon, by Hugh Jenkins, Tom Driberg was played by Simon Cuff in a story about the struggle for independence in Burma.
Listed at number 461 in the top 500 lesbian and gay heroes in The Pink Paper, 7th. November, 1997, issue 506, page 15.
"Labour MP with a penchant for cottaging, rent boys and spying (on his own party for MI5), who managed to escape exposure on all counts. The policemen used to escort him from the loos of the Albert Embankment if there was an important vote going on in Parliament."
Writing
Colonnade, 1949, published London: Pilot Press.
The Best of Both Worlds.
Beaverbrook: A Study in Power and Frustration, 1956, published London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Guy Burgess: A Portrait with Background.
The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament: A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement, 1964, published by Secker & Warburg.
Swaff: The Life and Times of Hannen Swaffer.
Ruling Passions, 1977, an autobiography published posthumously by Jonathan Cape with a postscript by Michael Foot, MP.
Diary
23rd. April, 1952: "As I discovered again at Wormwood Scrubs this evening, a prison audience is one of the best to talk to - responsive, quick-witted, asking questions a good deal more intelligent than those asked at many meetings. A special form of accident-proneness afflicts prison lecturers: like bread falling on the carpet butter downwards, they constantly find their tongues forming phrases or alluding to subjects which might be considered tactless. Thus discussing the Budget, I found myself inadvertently referring to subsidies as 'a relatively simple method of redistributing wealth'. There was a slight frisson in the audience. I hesitated, decided to risk it, and added parenthetically: 'No doubt other methods will occur to some of you . . . ' I am glad to say they roared with laughter."
Bibliography
Matthew Parris, (1995), "Great Parliamentary Scandals", "Tom Driberg - 1942-76: One That Got Away", pages 122-127.
"Tom Driberg was an early but enthusiastic apostle of the doctrine that there is no such thing as a heterosexual male, but some are a bit obstinate."
Jeffrey Weeks, (1977), 'Coming Out', page 160.
"Tom Driberg (later, briefly, Baron Bradwell) was a left-wing Labour M.P. and a close friend of Guy Burgess, whom he visited in Moscow. But he was also a former employee (as 'William Hickey', the Daily Express gossip columnist) of Lord Beaverbrook, the strongest character among press lords. According to A. J. P. Taylor, ' . . . on another occasion, Tom was convicted at Bow Street, Lord Beaverbrook ensured that no mention of the case appeared in any newspaper. Thereafter everyone took Tom's homosexuality for granted.' Not a murmur this time, from James Douglas or John Gordon, the Sunday Express's men of all prejudices. Other homosexuals convicted in the 1950s - Rupert Croft-Cooke, Lord Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers, Peter Wildeblood and countless obscure names - were less fortunate."
Francis Wheen, (1990), "Tom Driberg: His Life and Indiscretions", London: Chatto & Windus, 452 pages.
Public faces, private places, by Chris Smith in Gay Times, May, 1990, issue 140, pages 32-3. "Chris Smith MP draws some analogies between the pressures on Labour politician Tom Driberg and public figures today." Francis Wheen's biography is reviewed. "Tom Driberg emerges from this book as a much fuller character than he does from Ruling Passions. Clearly determined to live life to the full, he refused to allow his life or his habits to be circumscribed - by rules, by conventions, or by the continual absence of money. He was a man of deep and sometimes absurd contradictions: a communist and bon vivant, an Anglican christian with a penchant for cottaging, a Left-wing Labour MP living in an Adam mansion in Essex. Yet it was this rich tapestry of a varied life that made everything about him ultimately forgiveable."
Press cuttings
The Forgotten Men by Brian Lavers in Now UK, April, 2000, No. 17, pages 16-17. "Driberg was a cheeky, lovable young man who could employ outrageous charm; a man that many wanted to dislike, yet found they were unable to do so. A man that could seduce, and could use seduction as a weapon."
"Homosexual men were greatly despised by the public at large, yet the London gay 'scene' of the 1930s was a very exclusive club that comprised the rich and the famous, and to be in the club was to socialise and party with the rich and famous. Driberg quickly became a main player within this group: his friends included Coward and Novello, writers Hugh Walpole, Auden and Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh as well as gay politicians and journalists who remained closeted for their wider public.
sept 18 2012 yahoo aa history lovers (where I am banned and censored)
john I am the author of the page bill last sent you
about the book in question.
I am also the editor of the aa history website
www.aabibliography.com
I am banned from the yahoo aa history lovers by glenn c
see main page of site
there was a pro moral rearmament book written in response to
dribergs book (I have yet to obtain copy I would like pdf copy)
it is by thornton duesberry whose father was big in the church of england. Julian P Duesberry
The Open Secret of MRA (An Examination of Mr. Driberg's 'Critical Examination' of Moral Re-Armament-(see Dribert book listed below) by J. P. Thornton-Duesbery, M. A. (Master of St. Peter's College, Oxford), copyright 1964,142 pages. The author tells what MRA is, how it works, who finances it, and what it is out to do in the world.
he also wrote a sharing pamphlet which is very hard to find
Sharing by JP Thornton-Duesberry Oxford Group Pamphlet $110 -$150
I write this kind of jokingly but
in the mra book you have driberg almost called (outed) buchman as a homosexual several times. strange a queen outing a queen (buchman was very effeminiate in manners but I have never seen proof he was gay)
from the ken ragge book critical of aa
In the latter part of the 30s, it became important to AA to disassociate itself, at least in the public eye, from the Oxford Group because of the growing distrust and contempt the American public held for the Group. In August 1936, Frank Buchman was quoted by a major New York newspaper:
I thank heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism.... Of course, I don't condone everything the Nazis do. Anti-Semitism? Bad, naturally. I suppose Hitler sees a Karl Marx in every Jew. But think what it would mean if Hitler surrendered to the control of God.... The world needs a dictatorship of the living spirit of God.... Human problems aren't economic. They're moral, and they can't be solved by immoral measures. They could be solved within a God-controlled democracy, or perhaps I should say a theocracy, and they could be solved through a God-control-led Fascist dictatorship.(56)*
* In The Open Secret of MRA, a defense of Buchman and Buchmanism, the complete text of the New York World-Telegram article is included. It is interesting to note the differences in the original from 1936 and AA's abbreviated version published in 1984 on pages 170-171 of Pass It On. AA quoted in a fashion that put Buchman in a much better light than even the Buchmanites had attempted to. Most of what is quoted here was left out of the AA version. Perhaps most interesting is that, in the AA version, "the control of" is dropped out of mid-sentence, changing "surrender to the control of God" to "surrender to God." Apparently Oxford Group language was still considered too hot to print in AA literature, even when quoting Oxford Group's leader, fifty years later.
These and other charges of Nazi sympathies,* didn't sit well with the American people. Frank Buchman and his organization's guidance were in serious question.
* The Buchmanites claimed complete innocence. After the war, they announced the matter settled with what they said was a copy of a document found by the Allies after the fall of Nazi Germany. Time magazine, with all its resources at its disposal, made a search for and, apparently, never could find any such document in the Allied records. Tom Driberg, in his The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament, quotes a story that was found in the Nazi secret police records that an ex-AA member might find amusing. A Swedish woman who had been angrily denouncing the Nazis, after attending an Oxford Group meeting, felt guilty and proceeded to "make amends," writing a letter of apology to the Nazi leader. Buchman's statements served notice on the American people how misguided and dangerous it can be to believe one's own thoughts are the Word of God.
Though they pale against the charges of Nazi sympathies, other criticisms were leveled against the Oxford Group. Most involved arrogance due to Oxford Group's belief that they alone were sane and getting direct messages from God and that others, even members of Christian churches, were lost sheep. These charges included blindness to thinking, undercutting churches, hypocrisy, self-congratulatory sanctimoniousness and an inability to tolerate criticism.
end kenn ragge quote
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