1:55

years.

2:01

Finally.

2:03

This like Lord Dryberg

2:05

himself is gonna be a big boy because there's

2:08

just so much fascinating stuff about his life and

2:10

I just couldn't decide what to leave out. But I

2:12

hope hopefully it'll be interesting because-

2:15

People know

2:16

Hugh has promised this

2:18

episode in I think now two

2:20

previous seasons and both

2:22

times a few days before recording

2:24

said, you know what, I just can't do it now. There's too

2:26

much help. So this

2:29

is hotly anticipated and I can't

2:31

wait to finally get my teeth into this one.

2:34

Yeah, me too. Because

2:36

these contradictions were accumulated

2:39

slowly across his life, I think it's fitting to start

2:41

with his obituaries in part because this will give us

2:43

a good idea of why he's included in the category of

2:45

bad gay. He has the dubious

2:47

distinction of being the first public figure that

2:49

the Times, the Times newspaper, that August

2:53

newspaper of record ever explicitly

2:55

described as homosexual. When

2:57

they described him in his obituary as quote, a

2:59

journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man,

3:02

a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist,

3:04

homosexual, a friend of Lord

3:06

Beaverbrook, an enemy of Lord Beaverbrook,

3:09

a politician of the left, a member of parliament,

3:11

a member of the Labour party national executive,

3:14

a stylist, an unreliable

3:16

man of undoubted distinction.

3:20

The telegraph- Except for the church of England

3:22

and the Lord Beavercourt stuff. Lord

3:24

Beaverbrook, yeah. Lord Beaverbrook,

3:26

fine. The telegraph also

3:28

didn't pull its punches saying he was quote, a

3:31

homosexual philanderer of a most pernicious

3:33

and indefatigable kind, wholly

3:36

shameless, without the smallest scruple

3:38

or a morse, utterly regardless of the feelings

3:40

of or consequences to his partners, determined

3:43

on the crudest and most frequent form

3:45

of carnal satisfaction to the exclusion

3:47

of any other consideration whatever,

3:49

a queers casanova, end

3:52

quote.

3:53

Sounds like some of my best friends. I was going to say,

3:55

you can see why he's a favor of mine already.

3:57

They

3:58

actually compared him to another of my-

3:59

a personal, maybe, I don't think Dryberg's a personal

4:02

hero, but they compared him to one of my personal heroes, Ian

4:04

Forster, who they also regarded as a pathetic

4:07

homosexual, quote, for whom homosexuality

4:09

was a lifelong burden and shame and

4:11

who agonized about its moral consequences.

4:14

In his... Of

4:17

course, nowadays, if anyone, you

4:19

know, in one university class for

4:21

one semester, someone decided to teach one

4:23

fewer Forster novel in favor of something else,

4:26

these same journalists or more likely these

4:29

same journalists inbred children would

4:32

describe that as a great attack against

4:34

the foundations of the British state

4:36

when, you know, their inbred

4:38

parents thought

4:39

of Forster as being a great attack against

4:41

the British nation. Exactly,

4:44

yeah. The point being that the British media

4:46

is made up of

4:48

one of the most profoundly boring

4:50

and stupid and reactionary classes of inbred

4:52

lunatics to have ever lived

4:55

and does a disgrace to the name of the free press.

4:58

Yeah. So it is excellent biography

5:00

of Dryberg, which I recommend and which I read

5:03

for this episode. In fact, I read

5:05

well before this episode, but I read it again for the episode.

5:08

Francis Wien points out that this manages

5:10

to get both Dryberg and Forster terribly

5:13

wrong, but it is interesting in its representation

5:15

of the good, sad, guilty homosexual

5:17

and the bad, open, shameless

5:19

homosexual, this

5:21

common set of stereotypes in the strange

5:23

decades that followed partial decriminalization

5:26

in 1967.

5:28

Tom of course would have loved all of this. After

5:31

all, at his own funeral, he demanded an anti

5:33

eulogy sort of thing in

5:35

which the seven deadly sins would be gone

5:37

through one by one and compared to his own behavior

5:39

or of his own behavior weighed up against

5:42

the sins. His

5:45

friends in many ways were even sharper and

5:47

more honest and hence quite a bit crueler

5:49

than his enemies in print.

5:51

So how did Tom get to this position

5:53

where he was seemingly so powerful despite being

5:56

so public in his sin? I

5:58

think it'd be impossible were it not for a number of social

6:00

and political revolutions through which he lived,

6:02

it all started in his youth. He

6:04

was born in 1905, but he grew up in a Victorian

6:07

world. His father was already 65 when he was

6:09

born and had retired to the catatonic

6:12

tedious town of Crobora, already

6:14

part of London's stockbroker belts after a long

6:16

career in the Indian Civil Service.

6:19

In Tom's words, quote, when

6:21

my parents came home from India as the 19th

6:23

century was dying, they knew nothing of

6:25

the new ideas that were stirring in the arts and in

6:27

politics. They bought with them the prejudices

6:30

formed in my father's youth, end quote.

6:32

Already you can see the foster

6:34

comparisons.

6:36

His mother was 40 and he'd only had

6:38

two sons, Jack and Jim, who

6:40

were 17 and 15 years older than Tom.

6:43

Jack was perhaps even more eccentric

6:45

than Tom himself, becoming a colonial

6:47

official and an anthropologist in Sudan.

6:50

He would go on to be inducted into a local

6:52

tribe and then he then went on to sort

6:54

of fake an atrocity against that tribe that

6:57

his superiors had demanded he'd carried out in reprisal

6:59

for one of the tribe's raids,

7:02

following which he was sacked.

7:05

Jim, on the other hand, was a surgeon who had served

7:07

on the front line of the First World War before

7:09

he became a successful Harley Street consultant.

7:13

But unfortunately, he couldn't sort of outrun his

7:15

demons from the war and he became a gambler and an

7:17

alcoholic. He lost his wife in his practice

7:20

and he ended up migrating to the Andes, where

7:22

he provided healthcare to indigenous people for most

7:24

of his career.

7:26

All the boys. One decent

7:28

one. Yeah,

7:32

in his way. The

7:34

boys were both sent to Lansing and Tom

7:36

was then sent to join them after his primary education

7:38

at the Grange, a prep school near

7:40

his parents house, where the school

7:43

boys shorts pockets would be sewn up

7:45

to stop them playing with themselves. By

7:48

this point, his father was going senile, his

7:50

mother was overbearing and he was extremely

7:52

lonely. And at school at

7:54

the Grange, she was inevitably bullied, not

7:57

just due to his parents age or his socialized social.

7:59

isolation, but because the First

8:02

World War was starting and he had a German surname.

8:05

He followed in his brother's footsteps and he went to Lansing

8:07

College as well, which is a public school in Sussex.

8:11

It was there where he discovered the three passions

8:13

of his life, socialism,

8:15

cruising, and Christ.

8:17

Now I really do see why you're

8:19

obsessed with this guy. Yeah,

8:22

they're three solid interests.

8:25

As a teenager, he would spend his school

8:27

holidays hanging out around public toilets in

8:29

Brighton, or especially around one

8:32

subterranean toilet in Crobora, which had,

8:34

he wrote, quote, one safeguard,

8:36

which was both a safeguard against snoopers and

8:38

a spur to tumescence. There

8:41

was quite a long flight of steps down to it so

8:43

that one could hear a newcomer and guess

8:45

what he was like before seeing him. If

8:47

he was quick and light of step and turned out to be a Randy

8:50

soldier or a Rosy errand boy, best of

8:52

all, if he was ready and willing, but sometimes

8:54

even if he was

8:55

not, the impatient sperm would

8:57

not be contained and the coming was a good

8:59

deal hotter and faster than that of the Magi.

9:02

Yeah,

9:03

he had a tenor

9:06

phrase. After

9:08

he'd come, he would hurry to the local church, preferably

9:10

High Anglican.

9:12

It's a complicated subject, so I won't go too

9:14

far into the theology or history of High Anglicanism,

9:17

but High Church Anglicanism or

9:19

High Anglicanism, which is similar to,

9:21

not exactly the same of, but similar

9:23

to or related to Anglo

9:26

Catholicism.

9:27

But High Church Anglicanism is a

9:29

strain within the Anglican church that remains,

9:31

I guess, closer to Catholicism in its beliefs

9:34

and liturgy, in its understanding of

9:36

the Eucharist and so on. Again,

9:39

it's a complicated history,

9:41

but some parts of the High Church Anglicanism

9:44

that were essentially Anglo Catholic, the

9:46

words in the 19th century become part

9:48

of the religious left in England. They

9:51

were sometimes referred to as the sacramental socialists.

9:54

They're sometimes also referred

9:56

to by the nickname Bells and Smells due

9:59

to their continuation of the

9:59

rituals like Incense and the Angeles.

10:03

My own dill departed grandmother herself,

10:05

like Tom, was both a lover of ceremony

10:07

and late of Crobra. She

10:10

received a hang of a funeral and it is really, really

10:12

impressive. And Tom was to get

10:14

quite a lot of comfort from this ritual and the sort

10:16

of theatre of it throughout his life.

10:19

But at Lansing, however, Tom's

10:21

life was miserable.

10:23

The bullying got worse after he made moves on

10:25

two other boys who reported him to their masters. And

10:28

so he was segregated from the other students while he finished

10:30

his final year.

10:32

He twice attempted suicide.

10:34

He was actually a contemporary and a friend

10:36

of Evil in War,

10:38

another future subject for bad gays, I hope. But

10:41

unlike Evil in War, he was not popular. And especially

10:43

unlike War, he was becoming increasingly

10:45

left wing.

10:47

He regard the Labour Party in particular as

10:49

like what he would call the middle stump church,

10:51

meaning like a regular Anglican church middle class,

10:54

with neither the benefits of tradition or radicalism.

10:57

As such as a teenager, he

10:59

joined the Brighton branch of the Communist Party

11:01

of Great Britain, which had only just been founded.

11:04

But he followed War to Oxford,

11:06

where a new generation of aesthetes and literary

11:09

types, a generation for whom

11:11

homosexuality was not to boo, but part

11:13

of the social fabric, much more

11:15

suited his tastes. And he became interested

11:18

in poetry.

11:19

Dryberg was a modernist, unsurprisingly, and

11:21

he lent a young friend his copy of T.S.

11:23

Eliot's The Wasteland.

11:25

That young friend was actually W.H. Auden. So

11:28

he does have a footnote in modernist history.

11:31

And not as a poet himself, unfortunately,

11:33

he began to write poetry, and

11:36

also to make this sort of forays into journalism

11:38

for various communist newspapers.

11:40

Most of his time was spent on what

11:43

we shall

11:44

call here extracurricular activities. These,

11:48

these included attending mass, obviously, and

11:51

also being arrested after a very brief spell

11:53

as a communist militants during the general strike,

11:56

he was unusually for Oxford on

11:58

the right side during a general strike.

11:59

On the centenary

12:02

of Beethoven's death, he organized a

12:04

homage to Beethoven,

12:06

which, yeah, this is the sort of event

12:08

he advertises homage to Beethoven. But

12:10

once the hall was full of the sort of middle-class,

12:13

middle-aged Oxford music lovers, expecting

12:16

this sort of

12:17

leisurely recital of Beethoven, he

12:19

instead appeared on stage and proceeded to use a megaphone

12:22

to recite his own poem.

12:24

His name was homage to Beethoven, over

12:27

a specially composed modernist accompaniment.

12:30

I'll give you a taste of it so you can get a sort of

12:32

feel for his poetic

12:34

acumen. A pound

12:36

a day makes country women's

12:38

holiday, gay day holiday and holidays

12:41

mean member, but once fell the laughter

12:43

from Parthenon dead, for Dick goes

12:45

tomorrow to visit December. Remember,

12:47

remember, the wrinkled pinhead sky

12:50

must come, the shady tomb, the

12:52

shady tomb, December.

12:55

Help, my language,

12:57

she is very sick. It's

13:00

like Gertrude Stein

13:02

with a severe head cold. Yeah,

13:07

I think this sort of prank is par

13:10

for a course for the sort of Oxford's

13:13

bullshit that makes up so much of British culture. But

13:15

he was attracting attention from

13:18

it outside of Oxford, including

13:20

from the poet Edith Sitwell, from

13:22

whom he had become something of a protege.

13:25

Edith Sitwell was a sort of important

13:27

figure in English modernism. And also

13:30

from none other than the great beast himself,

13:32

the occultist and very

13:34

bad bisexual, Aleister Crowley.

13:36

Oh, wow. Yeah, who we should

13:39

do at some point. Oh,

13:41

yeah. It's a big one. I

13:44

have Crowley on my long list, but

13:46

it's on the list of things that are going to wait until after

13:48

my dissertation for reasons

13:50

that will be revealed.

13:52

Well, at this point, Crowley was

13:54

at the height of his fearful fame.

13:57

And he invited Tom for dinner and ever interesting.

13:59

of course in Scandal, Tom Went. And

14:02

it seems from both his biography and his autobiography

14:05

that Crowley probably thought

14:07

that Tom Dryberg was rich, which

14:09

he quite pointedly wasn't rich, and

14:12

that he could tap him for some money. But they actually ended

14:14

up becoming something like friends and they met occasionally

14:16

over the years. Although

14:18

the great beast could never actually persuade Tom to drop

14:21

the bells and smells.

14:23

There's a really good story in his biography actually about

14:25

him going for dinner with him later in his life at the home of

14:27

the wife of the Liberal

14:30

Party's Chief Whip, a woman

14:32

whose name was Marguerite Frieda-Harris. She

14:35

was an admirer of Crowley's, like

14:37

a sort of fan. Oh yeah, that's Lady Frieda-Harris

14:40

who painted the Thoth deck, the Thoth tarot deck.

14:42

Absolutely, yeah. She was an artist. She designed

14:45

his Thoth tarot deck. And she did

14:47

her own painting under the pseudonym. And we

14:49

need our little brilliant name alarm

14:52

to go off here. Jesus Chutney.

14:55

Jesus Chutney? Yeah,

14:59

that was her pseudonym for her painting. So originally

15:02

I think the Thoth tarot deck was painted by

15:04

Jesus Chutney. So

15:06

anyway, he's having dinner

15:09

with the great beast and Jesus

15:11

Chutney, drinking moet

15:13

and shand on champagne. And Crowley

15:16

starts this fortune telling

15:18

ritual, sort of getting

15:20

Tom to focus on these markings that he's made on

15:23

this piece of paper and to tell him what he sees and he's

15:25

getting into a predictive future. Now,

15:27

Crowley had actually given Tom one of his manuscript

15:30

diaries some years earlier, perhaps when

15:32

he was drunk and he'd forgotten about it, but

15:34

Tom had it and had read it. So Tom plays this

15:37

trick by pretending that he's seeing this

15:39

diary and he describes in great detail,

15:41

it's red leather case, the silver lining and

15:43

so on and so on. And Crowley is astonished,

15:47

probably more than anything, because he thinks his magic is actually working

15:50

and he asks him to continue. And

15:53

Tom's sort of in this trance-like state and

15:55

he says, no, I can't

15:57

see anything else. Although back to you.

15:59

perhaps if we have one more

16:02

bottle of champagne. Yeah,

16:08

drink some dry. But his

16:11

biggest extracurricular activity at

16:13

Oxford and the one would ultimately see him, I

16:15

think leaving university about his degree was

16:17

his lifelong hobby of cocksucking.

16:20

The very bad gay Lord Boothby,

16:23

who I think we discussed in quite some

16:25

depth in our earlier episode on Ronnie Cray, he

16:28

said that Tom once told him that he thought,

16:30

quote, sex was only enjoyable if someone

16:32

you'd never met before and would never meet again.

16:35

Oh, boy. Yeah, this is a not uncommon

16:38

thing among this sort of class

16:41

of gay at this time.

16:42

It's like

16:45

a – it's hard not to read it as a form of repression.

16:48

Like these are people extremely, extremely

16:52

proud often, sodomites

16:55

or cocksuckers or what have you. But

16:58

it's like by

17:01

transmitting all of that sexual

17:04

attraction onto these different – onto

17:06

these sort of transitory

17:08

working class partners,

17:11

they're sort of – it's

17:14

a kind of distancing in a weird way. It always feels

17:16

like to me. Yeah, and there's a way to keep sort of

17:18

like a degree of independence, but I think there's also

17:20

maybe some aspect of – I mean, I think there's

17:23

a huge aspect of internalized

17:25

homophobia going on, I think. Oh,

17:27

yeah, for sure. In fact, I want to read this

17:29

sort of passage from his autobiography

17:32

in full because I think it gives a taste of that.

17:35

So while he was at Oxford, his mother took

17:37

him on holiday to Liguria in Italy, and

17:40

they stayed just south of Genoa. And

17:43

one day they decided to go for a walk together, and Tom writes

17:45

this in his autobiography.

17:59

probably on the pine needles, and fell.

18:02

She was not at all seriously hurt, but when we reached

18:04

the lighthouse she decided to sit and rest outside

18:07

while I climbed to the top.

18:09

There were no other visitors. The

18:11

lighthouse keeper was young, perhaps twenty-five,

18:14

and sensuously attractive. Not

18:16

of the lean, dark, Roman type of Italian,

18:19

nor of the invitingly sinister Neapolitan

18:21

or Sicilian types. Almost more

18:23

Austrian looking, with a round, tender

18:26

face, plump but virile figure,

18:28

fairish hair, and thick, mobile,

18:31

smiling lips. Tom, were your mums

18:33

sitting right downstairs? We

18:35

climbed the stairs. It was not a very tall lighthouse,

18:38

but a lookout gallery that surrounded it was protected

18:40

from snooping eyes by a chest-high barrier.

18:43

We stood close together. He started

18:45

to breathe heavily. I caught

18:47

a whiff of garlic, and looked straight

18:50

into my eyes. Contact was

18:52

instant, consummation almost as

18:54

quick. He clearly had not had any sex

18:56

for some days.

18:57

Within five minutes or so I had rejoined my

18:59

mother.

19:00

What a long time you were up there,

19:03

dear. Well, it was a lovely view, mother.

19:06

Oh, Tom. Oh,

19:08

Tom. I'm starting to love Tom.

19:12

Well, it only gets more like this. It only gets better. Until

19:16

it gets worse. Uh-oh. After

19:19

he left Oxford, Tom struggled to make it as a poet,

19:21

you'll be surprised to hear, although the connections

19:24

that he made were quite useful.

19:26

Unlike many of his peers, Tom wasn't particularly well

19:28

off, and his attempts to match their consumption

19:30

and his predilection for partying had

19:32

detrimental effects on his finances, a lifelong

19:35

struggle.

19:36

He moved to Soho in London, where he worked

19:38

as a washer up in a cafe, and he shared

19:41

a bed in a room upstairs with the cook. Times

19:43

were very hard for him. Even in war,

19:46

we can't see him at all. In

19:48

the past, he says, quote, I went to church in Margaret Street, where I

19:50

was discomposed to observe Tom Dryberg's

19:52

satanic face in the congregation.

19:55

He told me he was starving, but he would not

19:57

come to luncheon. Luckily, uh, he

19:59

did

19:59

with Sitwell, who was probably the only person to ever

20:02

see anything in Tom's poetry, was there to lend

20:04

a hand. And he was spending quite a lot of time

20:06

at her place in the hours where he wasn't working,

20:08

having tea with her frequent guests

20:10

who included T.S. Eliot, Aldous

20:13

Huxley and H.G. Wells.

20:15

Seeing that he was struggling, she got him a trial

20:18

as a reporter at Daily Express, owned

20:20

by the press baron and actual baron,

20:23

the Tory Pier Lord Beaverbrook.

20:25

He got the measure of the British press pretty quickly, however

20:28

it was essentially a mouthpiece for the rich, the undue

20:30

influence that it had, still has, continues to

20:32

have, on sort of who was acceptable

20:35

in public life and who must be suppressed and

20:37

on shaping public discourse in general.

20:40

In his biography he wrote that quote, freedom

20:42

of the press in Britain means freedom to print

20:44

such of the proprietors' prejudices as the advertisers

20:47

don't object to.

20:49

This is entirely

20:51

correct. Yeah,

20:53

exactly the same.

20:55

But he did have two lucky breaks.

20:58

First of all, Lord Beaverbrook liked him

21:00

and due to the capricious power of proprietors, this

21:03

would actually allow him enormous leeway at the start of his career.

21:06

And secondly, he got a scoop when covering

21:08

the arrival in Britain of Frank Bookman,

21:11

a Lutheran evangelical leader who'd come

21:13

to the UK to help spread his revivalist movement

21:15

and especially amongst young men.

21:17

This group was known at the time as the Oxford

21:19

Group but would later take the name Moral Rearmament.

21:22

Oh, that sounds ominous.

21:25

Yeah. I do not like the sound of that.

21:29

Well, it organised these meetings with these young students

21:32

and its aims were, by its own understanding

21:34

really, to rebuild the moral

21:36

basis of society through encouraging a deeper

21:38

Christian faith amongst its members. This

21:41

manifested in a deep anti-communism

21:44

and through this tacit acceptance

21:47

of Nazism. Although Bookman

21:49

did travel to Germany in an attempt to reconvert

21:51

Hitler to Christianity,

21:52

which is I think a good summing up of the sort of

21:55

worldview of the organisation. Oh, God.

21:58

Yeah, one of those types. He

22:01

famously once said, in fact, quote, I thank

22:03

heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a

22:05

front line of defense against the Antichrist of

22:07

communism. Oh,

22:09

God. Well, of course, Hitler is redeemable,

22:11

but communism is irredeemable. It

22:14

was this sort of

22:15

strange mixture of like

22:17

religion, positive thinking, management

22:19

training and self-help that obviously has thrived

22:22

in the US for the past century. But

22:24

obviously- That's the prosperity gospel.

22:27

It's like the prosperity gospel. Yeah. Or

22:29

something like that. But it also had this very strong emphasis on

22:32

a conservative Christian sexual morality.

22:34

So as an anti-communist, anti-cocksucker,

22:37

it was no wonder that Tom talked against them and it

22:39

was this very opposition that he held throughout

22:41

the rest of his life, actually.

22:45

Anyway, as a result of this scoop, he was kept on

22:47

the express. So this was

22:49

the era of the bright young things,

22:51

which is this coterie of young

22:54

aristocratic Bohemians who were the sort of British

22:56

manifestation of what American

22:59

listeners might know as the roaring twenties. The

23:02

British equivalent, I guess, of F.

23:06

Scott Fitzgerald and Great Gatsby and stuff, that generation

23:08

of young people who were living through the prosperity

23:11

of the post-war years in these victorious

23:14

allied nations, but also through its cultural

23:16

aftermath.

23:17

Most of the bright young things were these sort of dissolute,

23:20

aristo snobs, but some

23:22

were talented artists or accomplished novelists.

23:25

People like Nancy Mitford, Evelyn

23:27

War, obviously, or Anthony Powell, all

23:29

of whom wrote excellent novels about it. I'd

23:32

recommend Mitford's The Pursuit of Love

23:35

and Evelyn War's Vile Bodies, especially.

23:37

Their parties and their shenanigans

23:40

were notorious. They were noted for their opulence

23:42

and their licentious behavior, something

23:45

that managed to offend both socialists and conservatives,

23:47

but obviously made for fantastic newspaper copy.

23:50

Yeah, it's a bit like in The Daily Mail today when they sort

23:52

of cover girls in short skirts

23:54

getting drunk on nights out up north, and

23:57

then just to make sure that you're sure

23:59

that you're near no- what you're appalled about as a viewer.

24:01

They show 50 photos of young

24:03

girls in their skirts then

24:07

their skirts riding up or whatever, their long legs, just

24:09

so you can know what you're truly appalled about.

24:11

Yes, of course. It's very important to

24:14

have many such photos

24:16

at which to be at least to be outraged. But

24:18

there's also sort of a tatler aspect to this as

24:20

well, because this is not

24:22

the scandalous sex

24:24

lives of the working class. This is the scandalous

24:26

sex lives of the rich and famous.

24:28

Right, absolutely. And it's a generational

24:30

aspect that people are appalled because

24:33

perhaps the elder brothers

24:35

of this generation had died in the war

24:37

and they'd seen sort of golden generation

24:40

who were lost. And with this

24:42

supposed freedom that they'd won for

24:44

their younger brothers and sisters

24:46

and so on, they were sort of wasting it by

24:48

living like this. But obviously, the war, I

24:50

think, had a huge psychic effect on the nation

24:53

and letting your hair down became a big

24:55

part of

24:55

culture afterwards.

24:57

Of course, and not just there. But

25:00

Tom obviously had been to university of a lot of them, so

25:02

he was in this very good position to be able to infiltrate

25:04

the scene. And he became the co-author

25:06

of the paper's gossip column, The Talk of London.

25:08

While Tom

25:09

would have been the first to admit that the gossip columns

25:11

were basically pretty frivolous, they did have

25:13

some repercussions. First

25:16

of all, Tom regards it as an opportunity to highlight what

25:18

he called, the absurdities and extravagances

25:20

of a ruling class in a way calculated to

25:22

enrage any working class or unemployed people.

25:25

Something he felt was, quote, not without value

25:28

to the Communist Party. So

25:30

this is a great example of balancing the contradictions

25:32

of his life. You know, you might call it hypocrisy,

25:35

that he's sort of going out every

25:37

weekend, every night, drinking champagne with all

25:39

these rich

25:39

and glamorous people. And I'm writing about it in his

25:41

newspaper column, getting paid, and he regards

25:43

this as an exercise in class struggle.

25:46

But perhaps more realistically than advancing

25:48

a class struggle through partying, he

25:51

did actually use the column to push quite a lot of avant-garde

25:53

culture such as Soviet films, as

25:56

well as defending the pioneering

25:58

lesbian novel The Well of the Dead. loneliness by Radcliffe

26:01

Hall.

26:02

So this all caught Bivoubroke's eye and

26:04

he got his own column, writing under

26:06

a new pseudonym William Hickey, in

26:09

which Bivoubroke urged him to cover more meaningful

26:11

aspects.

26:12

Over the years he did, from the coronations of

26:15

kings and popes, he

26:17

traveled across the world, covering events in the US,

26:19

the Middle East, and in the Soviet Union.

26:22

He visited Spain twice during the Civil War, the

26:25

first time at the start of the rebellion where he visited Madrid

26:27

and Valencia.

26:28

And in Valencia he actually dined with Ernest

26:30

Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn,

26:34

where it's claimed they yet stewed cat, such

26:36

were the shortages caused by the insurrection against

26:39

the Republic.

26:41

His visit hardened his anti-fascist

26:43

and republican views definitely, and

26:45

he managed to not only put those views into the paper but

26:47

also to cover Britain's own incipient fascist

26:49

movements, and he was actually nearly attacked

26:52

by a mob at a fascist meeting, having

26:54

been taunted by the speaker. He

26:56

was a sort of constant watchman against fascism,

26:59

something that had been bolstered by his return

27:01

to Spain at the end of the Civil War, when

27:04

fascist victory was looming where he sort of delivered

27:06

food and medicine.

27:08

But in 1939, on the eve

27:10

of war in Europe, Tom's mother died, and

27:12

so with his inheritance he bought Bradwell

27:14

Lodge, which is a reasonably modest

27:17

and crumbling but quite nice, half-tutor,

27:20

half-George and country house in Bradwell-on-Sea,

27:23

a small village on a peninsula in Essex.

27:26

For non-UK listeners, Essex

27:28

is a county just outside of London.

27:31

Bradwell Lodge was to become something like

27:33

his life's passion, where he loved

27:36

to entertain his many friends, but it was also

27:38

an albatross around his neck, causing him no

27:40

end of financial problems. But as the war

27:42

began, the the home would go on to change his life.

27:45

So having seen firsthand the effects of

27:47

fascism in Spain, and having always

27:49

been anti-appeasement, Tom

27:52

was a vocal supporter of the war against the Nazis.

27:54

But this was contrary to the position taken by a Communist

27:57

Party, which was held in the hands of Stalinists.

27:59

who supported a Molotov ribbon-trock pact.

28:02

And so, as Stalinists so want to do, he was expelled

28:05

from the party in the first years of the war.

28:07

He travelled to France to cover the war as a journalist,

28:10

and then to the US, where he was always keen to do his bit

28:12

for the Allied troops.

28:13

From his autobiography, quote,

28:16

I shared my room with a Canadian sailor who was

28:19

in acute need of consoling friendship. I'm

28:26

sure he was, Tom. Oh boy.

28:29

The kind only you could provide. I'll

28:32

just wait till the next line. One

28:34

sign of this is the warmth and tightness of

28:36

the embrace. Another is the speed,

28:38

explosiveness, and creamier consistency

28:41

of the ejaculation.

28:43

No! Tom! It doesn't

28:45

work like that.

28:48

It's not... It

28:54

does work like that, no? The consistency?

28:57

The creamier consistency of the ejaculation.

28:59

Signifies the

29:01

particular need of consoling friendship? Well,

29:04

they haven't had any consoling friendship for some time.

29:06

Well, I

29:09

think my objection is more that we're calling this consoling

29:11

friendship. Well,

29:14

the soldier seemed consoled.

29:17

Check out the consoling friendship on

29:19

the Canadian sailor. But

29:22

he didn't limit his war service solely to

29:25

the serving military, but also to merchant

29:27

mariners. In Scotland,

29:29

later in the war, he had gone down into an air

29:31

raid shelter off Princes Street with a Norwegian

29:33

sailor. He described

29:35

sinking to his knees and getting to work on the sailor's

29:38

quote, long, uncircumcised,

29:40

and tapering but rock hard. Consoling friendship.

29:44

But rock hard erection. And

29:47

then he... Uncircumcised,

29:49

tapering, consoling friendship, don't you? And

29:53

then he was caught, in his own words, wet

29:55

handed by a policeman.

29:59

He ended up talking

30:02

his way out of a morals charge, thanks to the

30:04

policeman actually being a fan of his column, and he struck

30:07

up a friendship.

30:08

Do you

30:11

think this is going to get us out of any morals charges?

30:15

They ended up striking up a friendship that

30:17

he had sort of fortuitously encouraged

30:19

by sending the policeman six guineas worth of

30:21

book tokens. Quote, I

30:24

thought it thoroughly decent and Scottish of

30:26

him not to pretend that this was a surreptitious

30:28

gift of bribe in any way connected to the shelter incident.

30:32

Thoroughly decent and Scottish of him. I

30:37

think it's worth pointing out that Tom's habit of cottaging

30:39

and cruising wasn't really

30:41

as I think maybe at the time it was for most men,

30:43

a sort of habit born out of necessity and

30:46

the persecution of gay men.

30:47

I think most of the time, most gay

30:50

men went cottaging because it was the only place that one

30:52

could really pick up and fuck in

30:54

any way safely, although not that safely, especially

30:57

if you're married or so on. But Tom

30:59

seemed to have

31:01

actively enjoyed cottaging as a sexual practice

31:03

in itself. In his autobiography

31:05

he wrote, quote, I hankered after

31:07

London, in particular after Soho,

31:10

and most of all I craved a certain deep and

31:12

dark doorway in Rupert Street, in

31:14

which I stood for hours at a time enjoying

31:16

the quick embraces and gropings of other young

31:18

layabouts, and even more dangerous

31:21

and then for a more thrilling alternative to the simple

31:23

urinals than plentiful and amused and alleyways

31:26

of West London.

31:27

Oh, amazing. By

31:29

the time he wrote his autobiography in the 1970s,

31:32

the crackdown on public homo

31:34

sex, I guess, that had followed the

31:37

quote unquote decriminalization, actually

31:38

it had been one of the sort of moral

31:41

forces, one of the impetuses behind decriminalization

31:43

was to get rid of public sex. That

31:46

actually led to the closure of many of those public toilets.

31:50

Today it's almost impossible to

31:52

take a piss outside your own home in London without

31:54

paying your theoretically paying, you know, you have to go

31:57

into a public cafe. And

31:59

this is supposedly a moral civilisation.

32:02

He too lamented this closure

32:04

of public conveniences with a

32:06

pretty strong argument to my mind, writing,

32:09

quote, why municipal vandals should

32:11

have thought it necessary to destroy so many of

32:13

them, I do not know. I

32:14

suppose there's one expression of anti-homosexual

32:17

prejudice. Yet no homo,

32:19

cottage cruising, ever prevented

32:21

a hetero from merely urinating. While

32:24

to do one's rounds at the cottages, the alley

32:26

by Astoria, the dogleg lane opposite

32:28

the Garret Club, the one near the Ivy, the

32:30

one off Wardoor Street, the narrow passage

32:32

by the Colosseum, ending up always

32:35

in Ovali, off Filia Street, provided

32:37

homos, not all of whom are given to the

32:39

rougher spots, with healthy exercise. A bit

32:42

of healthy exercise, a bit of consulting friendship.

32:44

Really they should bring back cottaging

32:46

as a public health exercise. By 1942,

32:49

Tom was back

32:51

in London and out of the Communist Party, although the

32:54

USSR had now entered the war.

32:56

The last general election in the UK

32:58

had been in 1935, but with

33:00

the war, the major parties all agreed a truce, and

33:02

so there was no election in 1940.

33:05

As part of the truce, each party had agreed

33:07

not to fill a candidate if an MP had died

33:09

in office and a by-election was held.

33:11

Tom, however, was now

33:13

an independent. So in 1942,

33:16

the MP for Malden, the Essex constituency

33:19

where Bradwell Lodge was based, was,

33:23

we need a great name alarm again, Colonel

33:25

Sir Edward Archibalds of Ruggles-Bryes

33:27

MP. I'm

33:29

sorry, what was that again, Hugh? Colonel

33:32

Sir Edward Archibalds of Ruggles-Bryes

33:34

MP. I mean, it sounds like a PG Woodhouse

33:38

name, but... It does sound like a PG Woodhouse

33:40

name, but also somehow sounds like a sentence, but continue.

33:45

So yeah, Colonel Sir

33:48

Ruggles-Bryes died, and

33:51

Tom decided to stand at what was known as an

33:53

independent Labour MP,

33:55

although it's confusing, but

33:57

that isn't the same thing as being a member of the independent...

33:59

Labour Party. But he

34:02

stood on a platform that was derived from the 1941 committee,

34:04

which was his group of independent

34:06

left-wing socialist and liberal political

34:09

figures who had called for increased

34:11

efficiency in the war effort and then later for

34:13

increased workers control and work councils

34:16

and after the war for full and free education,

34:18

etc. So

34:21

that later became the Commonwealth Party, which is a very

34:24

fascinating moment for the left in the UK, but that's

34:26

another story. Perhaps more striking

34:28

though, Dryberg cast himself

34:29

as something like a critical friend

34:32

of Churchill, like

34:33

here to tell him the hard truths about the war that

34:35

no one in his party would do.

34:37

So a few days before the by-election, the

34:40

Axis powers actually captured Tobruk

34:43

in North Africa and so Tom's message

34:46

seemed particularly appealing and then he beat his

34:48

Tory opponent.

34:49

He noted that on his first day

34:51

as an MP, the Tory

34:53

MP, Sir Henry Chipps

34:55

Cannon, showed him the best toilets

34:58

in the Palace of Westminster to go cruising in, in

35:00

what he called quote, an act of pure

35:03

disinterested sisterly friendship, for he

35:05

had no physical attraction for each other.

35:08

Oh bless.

35:12

In 1945, with the end

35:15

of the war, Tom joined the Labour Party and

35:17

he remained the Labour MP for Malden until 1955

35:20

when he stood down.

35:21

Throughout that time, he remained a backbencher,

35:24

but he was active on the left of the Labour Party as a Bevernite,

35:27

supporting state control of industry,

35:30

welfare state, full employment, social housing,

35:32

anti-fascism, he was anti-colonialist, and

35:35

all the other policies that today would probably get you expelled

35:37

from the Labour Party.

35:39

What's wrong with that? Why are we calling him that?

35:41

He seems so far pretty good, a nice, good lefty

35:44

with a fun track record of enthusiastic

35:47

cruising.

35:49

And we'll get to that shortly in

35:51

his relationship with his wife. Excuse

35:54

me what now? Yeah, quite.

35:58

But in the meantime, he remained a job.

35:59

journalist. He was working now

36:02

for Reynolds News and this caused

36:04

some real serious problems because the

36:06

Labour Party was in political

36:08

difficulty in the autumn of 1950 and Tom had taken

36:11

six weeks off to cover the Korean War, a

36:14

war in which he had opposed British involvement.

36:18

However, taken with both the excitement

36:20

of covering the war and of, I suspect,

36:22

spending so much time amongst British Marines, he

36:25

ended up staying there for three months. And

36:27

in Korea, he was actually quite popular. His friendliness

36:30

and his physical bravery were noted by

36:32

squadies and fellow reporters alike. And

36:34

he took part in a nighttime landing raids by

36:36

UN troops on

36:38

Chongjin in North Korea.

36:40

But back in London, however, his Labour

36:42

parties were furious. They'd lost 78

36:44

seats in the general election the year previously,

36:46

so they had a majority of just five seats.

36:49

In November, Parliament was to debate the legislation

36:52

that they'd laid out in the King's speech and

36:54

Labour feared that they wouldn't win the vote, which

36:57

would lead to a collapse of the government and another

36:59

election.

37:01

And Tom didn't make it in fact, back in

37:03

time for the vote. He only arrived for the final vote,

37:05

although in the end, Labour managed to squeak through.

37:08

But as a result, he was dragged before the parliamentary

37:10

party to be dressed down. He actually

37:13

managed to retain the whip, which is

37:15

a way of saying he wasn't,

37:17

not throwing out the party, but throwing

37:20

out a parliamentary party.

37:21

But that was only thanks to the intervention

37:23

of his friends who included the future

37:26

Labour leader, Michael Futt.

37:28

But he was however, censured for

37:30

gross neglect of his duties. But

37:32

miraculously, he did manage to retain his position

37:34

on the party's National Executive Committee.

37:38

None of this galler of anting around the Marines

37:40

or managing to escape career death would have

37:42

been particularly surprising to Tom's friends.

37:45

What was surprising was what was to come in the new year

37:47

of 1951. However, Tom

37:49

was to be married to one Ina Binfield,

37:52

a local dedicated Labour Party activist and

37:54

former vice chairman of her local party.

37:57

wife.

38:02

She was gracious to me, my condolences

38:05

to her. Well yeah,

38:08

she was very well respected, really. She was

38:10

an accomplished and very talented organiser.

38:13

She was liked, respected by the Labour officials

38:17

in the party. She was regarded as a very good fund, good

38:19

company. She was three

38:21

years Tom's senior. She'd been married before

38:23

and had a long-term common-law husband who

38:25

had recently died. So

38:28

had Tom hoodwinked her into marriage, or

38:30

are we talking about

38:31

a bad bisexual here? Well,

38:34

neither really. It was a marriage of convenience,

38:38

at least at first, and both parties

38:40

understood it to be so. Ina knew

38:42

that she would be of political

38:44

service to Tom, I guess, as a sort of political hostess,

38:48

and in return she would enjoy his company, his friendship

38:50

and his home.

38:51

Tom, meanwhile, probably felt like having

38:54

a wife would make the management of Bradwell Lodge

38:56

easier. It seems

38:58

she probably hoped that he would curtail, if

39:00

not stop, his cruising habits, but

39:02

nobody really regarded Tom as having turned.

39:05

Almost everyone in Tom's life knew exactly what

39:07

I got up to. On hearing

39:10

of his impending nuptials, Winston

39:12

Churchill is said to have remarked, oh

39:15

well, buggers can't be cheeses.

39:19

The men did have a way with words, and

39:23

it must be said, a lot of Churchill's gay

39:25

jokes

39:30

come from a knowing place, let's just say

39:32

that. I think he was pretty

39:34

open-minded about homosexuality, or at least

39:36

very worldly about it. He, you know, rums

39:39

sodomy in the lash is what he described the navy

39:41

traditions as being. But

39:45

he didn't like Tom Dryberg very much. He

39:47

once said, Tom Dryberg is the sort of man who

39:49

gives sodomy a bad name.

39:51

Why is that? Is that because

39:54

of Dryberg's left-wing politics, or

39:56

because of something else? I

39:59

think it makes sure of like...

39:59

his left-wing politics, probably his openness

40:02

in some ways. He just didn't like it. I think it's

40:05

a good line for someone you don't like.

40:07

It is, yeah.

40:10

So the church service for their

40:12

wedding was Pure Tom. He'd

40:15

asked the organist when they arrived to play

40:18

the old German folk song, O Tannenbaum.

40:21

Of course, that song is better known as

40:23

the tune to the socialist anthem, The

40:25

Red Flag. And

40:28

so the service then continued with absolute

40:31

bells and smells all the way through. One

40:33

guest actually had to leave the church after she had a coughing

40:35

fit from all the incense. A

40:38

wedding gold, Tom. A

40:40

Roman Catholic MP had said that he

40:43

thought the rights were so outrageous

40:45

that he felt like a non-conformist.

40:48

But the wedded bliss didn't last very long, however, upon

40:51

arriving- I was going to say that the more incense

40:53

that you have at the wedding, the less seriously you take

40:55

the vows. Perhaps. On

40:59

arriving at a hotel that he'd booked in Brighton for them,

41:01

Tom was appalled to find that Ina

41:03

had actually phoned ahead and changed their reservation

41:05

from two single rooms to one double.

41:07

She broke her- How dare the bride!

41:11

She broke her marriage vows, he would complain.

41:13

She tried to sleep with me.

41:17

Oh my god. The

41:20

marriage was unfortunately, and

41:23

strangely considering they both went into her eyes open,

41:26

a complete disaster from the start. And

41:29

frankly, that was all down to Tom's behaviour. By

41:31

all accounts, Ina was a very caring

41:33

and tolerant woman who cared very deeply for Tom,

41:36

who treated her abysmally in turn.

41:38

She did her best to get his

41:41

atrocious accounts back in the black, and

41:43

when he decided to open Bradwell Lodge to the public

41:46

for a fee in order to pay something towards his running

41:48

costs, it was Ina who managed

41:51

it and showed the guests around and stuff like

41:53

that.

41:53

But just a year after the wedding,

41:55

she wrote to him, quote, I am, or

41:58

was, a good-tempered, average, and

41:59

an averagely intelligent woman with wide

42:02

interests and many friends. You

42:04

were slowly turning me into a bad-tempered

42:06

bitch."

42:07

Well, that'll happen if you have a husband

42:10

who will not stop engaging in friendship

42:12

and toilets and completely ignoring you, you

42:15

know, and

42:17

not only ignoring her, but seemingly

42:19

being really dismissive and not

42:21

even attentive in a companionate way. Oh

42:23

yeah, cruel, yeah. Like, I think in saying that, she's being

42:25

unfair on herself there. Like, he would

42:27

ignore her, he would scowl at her, he would mock

42:30

her choice of reading, her choice

42:32

of music, what she put on the radio when he let

42:34

her play stuff on the radio. He was

42:36

sort of acting dignant when she was on the phone to her friends.

42:39

What an asshole. Why did he marry her? Yeah, I

42:42

don't get it. Like, I think he thought it was a good idea,

42:44

but when it came to it, he just couldn't live with someone else.

42:49

I get the impression, actually, it wasn't even like a lavender

42:51

wedding. It was more like just an attempt

42:53

to get a free servant slash be

42:55

it's a combination.

42:57

Actually, his friends say that he sort of treated

42:59

her like a servant. And as

43:02

his biographer, Francis Wien pointed out, like he was

43:04

notorious for his terrible treatment

43:06

of any sort of waiter or serving stuff anyway.

43:09

To the point of cruelty. Oh God. Yeah, classic. Excellent,

43:12

excellent communism there. Yeah,

43:14

classic Oxbridge leftist, basically.

43:18

So a decade into this wedding, into this marriage, sorry,

43:21

she wanted to get divorced, but

43:23

she still sort of thought of his best interests and the effect

43:25

that it would have on his career. So they worked out this deal

43:28

where she had spent get to spend time away, but she could

43:30

come back to Bradwell Lodge and sort of maintain this

43:32

front. But even then, like having had

43:34

this conversation, she still treated him absolutely abysmally.

43:37

And so another decade later, in 1971, after 20

43:40

years of marriage, when Tom had to sell

43:42

a house, she sort of finally broke free of him.

43:45

Although they have never actually got divorced.

43:47

She wrote to him, quote, the misunderstandings

43:50

between us are endless. And I suppose it is useless

43:52

to try to clear them up.

43:54

I have always been prepared to try and be friends with you,

43:56

but you have been unable and willing to respond. So

43:59

there it is.

44:03

in his reasonable. Yeah, totally reasonable. I

44:06

feel really feel for her.

44:07

And in his autobiography, as

44:11

you've heard, he's pretty open about

44:13

his personal life with all

44:15

the cocksucking of sailors and lighthouse

44:17

keepers. But in his autobiography,

44:19

she doesn't mention, she doesn't warrant

44:22

a single mention. After two decades of marriage,

44:24

she doesn't even mention her name.

44:26

Doesn't even mention her name. I mean,

44:29

to be fair, his autobiography,

44:32

he died halfway through writing it, but still you'd

44:34

think at some point she would have come up.

44:37

Jesus Christ. Maybe

44:40

he was leaving the apology

44:42

till the end, who knows. His

44:44

record

44:47

in parliament, meanwhile, was much better. In 1959,

44:50

he returns to parliament as MP for

44:52

Barking, a terrible constituency

44:55

MP by all accounts. But despite

44:57

being in his mid fifties, he was very much in tune with

44:59

the sort of emerging swinging sixties that we're

45:01

about to start.

45:02

His strongest advocacy

45:05

in parliament was for unilateral nuclear

45:07

disarmament and his constant pushing

45:09

for laws to tackle racial discrimination.

45:13

He called for, yeah,

45:15

he called for removal of troops from Northern Ireland.

45:18

Decades before it

45:20

happened, he opposed the war in Vietnam.

45:23

And he opposed the racist regimes in Rhodesia

45:25

and South Africa. Perhaps

45:28

more surprisingly, he was a very strong advocate for

45:30

the decriminalization of cannabis, something

45:32

that again, even today, would put him on the very far

45:35

left of the Labour Party. This

45:37

was partly due to the fact that he had met and made friends

45:39

with Mick Jagger,

45:41

who was at that

45:44

point being relentlessly hounded by the authorities

45:46

for his drug use. And he was

45:48

introduced to him by his new friend, Alan

45:51

Ginsberg,

45:52

who had met Tom and been impressed,

45:54

not just by his friendship with Alistair

45:56

Crowley, but also on learning that Tom

45:58

was a huge fan of

45:59

sparrows. So

46:02

we're getting really deep into Baccay's territory

46:04

now, you know, like, take

46:06

your pick of any of those as terrible, terrible

46:08

gays. So

46:12

he was sat next to Jagger

46:14

on a couch in Mick Jagger's flat and Tom

46:16

complimented him on the size of the bulge in his crotch.

46:19

And Ginsburg would write, quote, I

46:22

was astounded at his boldness. I

46:24

had eyes for Jagger myself, but I was very circumspect

46:26

about Jagger's body. Yet here was Dryberg

46:29

coming on crude. There was a kind of zen

46:31

directness about it that was interesting. I

46:33

suddenly realized that with directness like that, you could

46:36

score many times.

46:39

Like imagine shocking, shocking

46:42

Ginsburg as well with your homosexuality.

46:45

That takes that takes a true dedication

46:49

to the art and craft of, of,

46:52

well, not of sodomakes. It seems like he was just a cocksucker,

46:54

but it takes a true dedication to the

46:56

art and craft of cocksucking.

46:59

Absolutely.

47:01

I think that directness was perhaps like a result of

47:03

his libido, but

47:04

also of his power in his memoirs.

47:07

He had said, quote, fear

47:09

of the consequences, penal or even medical

47:11

does not for long deter the incorrigible practicing

47:13

homosexual any more than the fear of the rope

47:16

to turn to turn to the average murderer. If

47:18

anything, I became more promiscuous after my election

47:21

to parliament, relying on my new status

47:23

to get me out of tight corners.

47:25

Oh boy. I mean, this is just standard

47:27

for British homosexual MPs. A good

47:30

example of this double standard occurred

47:32

in the middle of the war in 1943 when

47:34

the conservative peer Ian Maitland, the

47:36

15th Earl of Lauderdale was caught

47:39

fucking a kitchen porter in a back alley in Soho.

47:42

And the judge ordered the jury were to

47:44

find the Lord not guilty as

47:46

he hadn't had sex with the porter, but to

47:48

find the porter guilty because he had

47:50

had sex with Lord Lauderdale.

47:52

What is this? The Immaculate Conception? Shroding

47:56

his homosexual. That's

48:00

right. Jesus Christ.

48:02

Shroding your sodomy. Yeah. Astonishingly,

48:05

Tom actually had only been prosecuted once in 1935 when he'd taken

48:07

to bed with

48:10

these two unemployed Scottish mine

48:12

workers who needed a place to sleep, and

48:14

he gallantly offered him his bed

48:17

with him in it.

48:18

And he clearly

48:20

tried it on with one of them and had been rebuffed, after

48:23

which the men went to the police. He

48:25

was arrested and kept in the cells overnight, but

48:27

Lord Beaverbrook paid for his lawyers. And

48:30

so he was acquitted in the end. On

48:32

another occasion, he was

48:34

arrested for cruising, having been picked up by

48:36

a pretty policeman, sort of, Aginpah

48:38

of Okotur in a cottage off Theobalds

48:41

Road. And there he got the charges dropped simply

48:43

by standing his ground and by telling the coppers

48:45

that, you know, magistrates don't really look kindly

48:49

on uncorroborated

48:51

police testimony. You

48:54

know, then, as now, I think most police were

48:56

looking for easy arrests and easy convictions.

48:59

And actually, he provided that advice to readers

49:01

of his autobiography, also

49:04

advising that when they were to visit a new town, for example,

49:06

gay men should pick up a copy of the gay news, and

49:08

they should get advice from the campaign for homosexual equality

49:10

about whether it's safe to cruise or not.

49:14

The 1967 act that decriminalized

49:16

gay sex between men in privately owned

49:19

homes was not much used

49:21

to a man such as him who might hit a cottage.

49:23

He wrote, quote, The passing of

49:26

the sexual offenses act welcome as it was

49:28

really made no difference to the problem that lonely

49:30

and promiscuous those who have not the gift

49:32

or the chance of fidelity to one partner.

49:35

For them, the best solution would be the

49:37

would seem to be the licensing of male brothels

49:39

on a modest scale run by respectable

49:41

persons with charges strictly controlled.

49:44

They could be free at the time of use as the NHS

49:47

was meant to be such as I have a catch. Actually, this

49:52

is amazing.

49:54

This is even better than Sam

49:56

Delaney's that Sam Delaney's like public

49:59

public.

49:59

clubs for all free at the point of use

50:02

brothels oh my god such as

50:05

I have occasionally patronized in

50:09

New York and San Francisco. I

50:11

don't think those were free at the point of use

50:13

Tom. No he was just saying he they

50:15

were the brothels and he was just advocating a national

50:18

a national rent

50:21

boy service I guess.

50:23

The NRS just

50:26

imagine just imagine Keir Starmer

50:29

coming out and giving a speech opposing

50:32

Tory cuts making the wait list

50:34

on the national rent boy service

50:37

more than 12 weeks. That's

50:40

the problem now is the only way you can get an appointment with a rent boy

50:42

is have to phone up at 8am every morning. Hope

50:46

to be in first in the queue. Anyway

50:51

oh god that's depressing. Can

50:53

you believe the Tories are trying to privatize the

50:55

rent boy?

50:56

Tom

51:00

retired from Parliament in 1974 and

51:03

he began work on his memoirs that would be

51:05

published very sadly for the

51:07

public for readers. They were

51:10

published unfinished after his death but

51:12

he was forced to sell Bradwell his

51:14

life passion due to his sort of financial

51:16

troubles and he tried to sell it to national trust

51:19

but his debts taken out against the house meant

51:21

that that was impossible and it went to a

51:23

private buyer.

51:25

Instead he moved into a flat in

51:27

a Barbican estate the modernist housing

51:29

development was still under construction at the time

51:31

actually

51:32

and he spent time with his friends often

51:34

younger men like the

51:37

at the time left-wing journalist Christopher

51:39

Hitchens who he was close with or

51:42

holidaying with Gore Vidal.

51:44

He also used

51:46

to write the crossword

51:49

for Private Eye which is a notoriously

51:52

filthy cryptic crossword

51:55

and he continued

51:57

to attend mass of course and

51:59

one must assume he continues

52:02

to visit public toilets.

52:04

In 1975 he was made a peer,

52:06

a member of the House of Lords, and he entered the

52:08

House of Lords in early 1976 as Baron

52:11

Bradwell.

52:13

He was still committed to political change and the

52:16

last months he moved a motion to

52:18

withdraw British troops from Northern Ireland, one

52:21

of the last things he did in Parliament, but his

52:23

health was failing. On the 12th of

52:25

August, in the back of a cab from Paddington to his

52:28

Barbican flat, he had a heart attack and

52:30

died. He was 71.

52:32

At his funeral the red flag

52:34

was laid over his coffin and they

52:36

sprinkled it with holy water. Thank

52:39

you all so much for supporting

52:41

the show, for listening to the show. A special shout

52:43

out to those of you who support us every

52:45

month on Patreon. That

52:48

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52:50

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52:51

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52:53

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52:56

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52:59

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53:01

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53:04

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53:26

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53:28

Another great way you can help support the show is to check

53:31

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53:33

A Homosexual History. It's out now

53:35

in hardback from Verso and will be coming out soon

53:37

in paperback, if you prefer paperback.

53:40

It covers a whole series of evil and complicated

53:43

LGBTQ people from history and the way

53:46

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53:48

and were affected by colonialism.

53:51

Yeah, it's, if

53:53

I say so myself, a fun read and

53:56

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53:59

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support the book at badgazepod.com

54:12

slash book.

54:13

And now on with the

54:15

show. Well thank you for telling that

54:17

story, Hugh. What an amazing, fascinating

54:20

life. I know he was friends with Guy

54:22

Burgess and there's some allegations about him

54:24

being involved in espionage. And

54:27

I also know that you are a resident expert

54:29

on gays and espionage. So is there

54:31

anything to that? Is

54:33

there anything to that? Well,

54:35

first off, yes. There's

54:38

no doubt that Tom was

54:40

a good friend of Guy Burgess,

54:42

the Cambridge Five member who was this British double

54:45

agent who defected to the Soviet Union. We've

54:47

discussed the Cambridge Five before in this podcast

54:49

and our episode on one of its members, Sansoli

54:51

Blunt.

54:54

Burgess is a bad gay, perhaps even more

54:56

interesting than Blunt actually. And Tom

54:58

visited him in Moscow after he defected and

55:00

he wrote a

55:01

pretty sympathetic book about him.

55:03

But after Tom died,

55:06

a British journalist for the Daily Express named

55:08

Chapman Pinscher

55:09

alleged that Tom had

55:11

also been a Soviet agent.

55:13

Pinscher was kind of like a self-declared

55:16

spy catcher journalist and

55:19

he was notorious for the

55:21

way he sort of threw around these allegations of

55:23

treachery, which

55:25

were usually made after the subjects had died and

55:27

they couldn't sue. His allegations

55:29

included both Sir Roger Hollis,

55:31

who was the Director General of MI5, one

55:33

of Britain's major spy

55:35

agencies,

55:37

and even Harold Wilson, the Labour

55:39

Prime Minister.

55:40

According to the eminent

55:42

historian of the left, E.P. Thompson, quote, the

55:45

columns of the Daily Express, meaning Chapman

55:47

Pinscher's columns, are a kind of

55:49

official urinal in which side

55:52

by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea

55:55

lords, permanent undersecretaries, Lord

55:59

George Brown, chief...

55:59

of the air staff, nuclear scientists,

56:02

Lord Wigg, and others stand patiently

56:05

leaking in the public interest.

56:07

Mr Pincher is too self-important and

56:09

light-witted to realize how often he is being

56:11

used.

56:12

It sounds like a good description of a lot of right-wing journalists.

56:16

Yeah, like basically people just feed him stuff because

56:18

they knew he'd publish it if it was anti-communist

56:21

or anti-Soviet. And

56:23

a lot of the stuff they fed was just bullshit, but they,

56:25

you know, they could use it in their own interests in

56:29

espionage, you know, like it's

56:31

useful to have someone like that on board, I guess.

56:33

The book Climate of

56:35

Treason by Andrew Boyle, which was an

56:37

exhaustive account of the Cambridge Five written

56:40

around the time that the whole thing

56:43

came to light, he includes no

56:45

details at all on Dryberg's alleged

56:47

treachery. And there are

56:49

later controversial books like Spy Catcher, which

56:51

did repeat the accusation, and the 2015

56:54

biography of Burgess by Andrew Lowney

56:57

fleshes those out a bit saying that Tom was turned,

56:59

as it were, by a KGB

57:02

sting operation at a urinal in a Metropole

57:04

hotel in Moscow where he'd been cottaging on his trip

57:06

to visit Burgess. And from

57:08

that moment on, he allegedly fed the

57:10

KGB information about the, you know, discussions

57:13

of the Labour Party National Executive Committee, which he'd

57:15

sat

57:16

on, you know, from 1949 to 1972. He

57:20

was even chairman of the Labour Party in 1958, I think.

57:24

Moscow, moreover, allegedly used Tom as

57:26

a willing dupe in the book about Burgess. And

57:30

he also alleged on information

57:32

that he'd claimed that he'd received from Blunt, that

57:35

between the wars, Tom had been recruited

57:37

by Maxwell Knight, the anti-Semitic,

57:40

anti-communist, homophobic

57:42

and homosexual MI5 spymaster.

57:44

He was actually the model for M in James Bond.

57:47

Dryberg, it's alleged was passing information

57:49

about the Communist Party of Great Britain to MI5, and

57:52

only stopped when Blunt figured out that this

57:54

mole who was codenamed M8 was

57:56

Dryberg. After reading one of Dryberg's

57:59

books,

57:59

So he passed it like a triple agent

58:02

or no at that point the allegation is that

58:04

he was just an MI5 agent who was a mole

58:06

in the Communist Party in Great Britain. And

58:09

the allegation is that Blunt figured it out

58:12

because he read one of Dryberg's books and somehow

58:14

put two and two together and then he passed that information

58:16

to this handler who then informed

58:18

the Communist Party and that's why Tom was expelled.

58:22

But the main problem here is that

58:24

actually

58:25

in this allegation is that Tom was expelled

58:28

from the

58:30

Communist Party like almost a

58:32

decade before he'd published his first book. So

58:34

that can't be true. And actually I think the reality

58:36

is perhaps even stranger. I

58:38

think Maxwell Knight was potentially

58:40

sexually attracted to Tom as a younger man.

58:42

I think he was also very

58:44

interested in finding out that Tom was a friend of Alistair

58:47

Crowley's because Maxwell

58:49

Knight had attempted to become one of his

58:51

adepts, part of his cult.

58:55

In fact one of the reasons that the sort

58:58

of rumor appeared was precisely because the two

59:00

of them were meeting so much. They were so indiscreet,

59:02

like dining out together and sharing gossip. And

59:06

also Tom was a member of the Communist Party

59:08

but he never held any meaningful position in the party

59:11

and he wasn't privy to any information that could ever have

59:13

been useful tonight really. There's no

59:15

information that Tom had that he couldn't have easily got anywhere elsewhere.

59:18

And one of the problems with this, as Francis

59:20

Weane pointed out and as I mentioned earlier, is that Pincher

59:23

himself was often used,

59:26

he was being fed information by the security services

59:28

to publish in his columns as part of their intelligence

59:30

operations. Things that aren't always true

59:32

but which Pincher who was this

59:34

constant red beta was all too willing to believe

59:37

and publish. And secondly that

59:39

Pincher was an veteran hater of the Labour

59:41

Party and especially the sort

59:44

of Bevanite Labour left. And

59:47

there are more logical areas in this as well. For

59:49

a start, how do you blackmail a man for

59:51

being homosexual when everyone

59:53

from his wife to Winston Churchill knows he's

59:56

a homosexual? Who are you going

59:58

to out him to?

59:59

his constituents? I guess,

1:00:02

but I don't know how you'd go about that as a KGB.

1:00:04

And

1:00:07

then secondly, intelligence

1:00:11

agent would trust their state secrets

1:00:14

to a man who was quite literally a gossip

1:00:16

columnist.

1:00:17

Wien actually remarks, he

1:00:21

quotes this guy called Lord Padgett, who was

1:00:24

no fan of the security services, but he said, quote,

1:00:26

he could not believe that even they were lunatic

1:00:29

enough to recruit a man like Dryberg.

1:00:32

So basically,

1:00:34

he just had a reputation as like this huge,

1:00:37

slutty, gossipy bottom. And

1:00:41

with no real access to power or secrets,

1:00:44

he doesn't sound like the perfect agent.

1:00:47

I think in reality, actually, I think these allegations

1:00:49

sort of gained ground after his death, because

1:00:52

there was this period of heightened interest in

1:00:54

espionage and treachery after Blunt had

1:00:56

been exposed as an agent. And

1:00:58

that sort of fascination was compounded by so

1:01:01

many of these spies having been gay.

1:01:04

And also, this was sort of at a time in the late 70s

1:01:06

and early 80s, where gay people were,

1:01:10

as a subject, were becoming much more part of the public

1:01:12

imagination, they were understood more and seen

1:01:14

more and that was part of this moral panic, and

1:01:16

especially a moral panic regarding the

1:01:18

left and especially the Labour left. So

1:01:21

this is all happening kind of around the same time of

1:01:23

the so called like, loony left councils, for example.

1:01:26

I've

1:01:27

actually written a piece for my

1:01:30

newsletter about how private I covered this period,

1:01:32

which gives a good taste of this sort of mixture

1:01:35

of like queer baiting and red baiting. And it's

1:01:37

a sort of moral panic that's not

1:01:39

dissimilar at all to what's happening at the moment.

1:01:42

So this story of like a gay Labour

1:01:45

left MP having also been

1:01:47

a KGB agent was kind of too good for papers not

1:01:49

to run.

1:01:51

Given that we're talking about bad gays, I also want

1:01:53

to ask, I've

1:01:55

heard allegations or I've

1:01:58

seen some sort of newspaper article don't remember the

1:02:00

details about Driver

1:02:03

having potentially been

1:02:05

involved in the abuse

1:02:08

of underage boys. And

1:02:11

I wonder if

1:02:12

that's something you've had evidence for, evidence against?

1:02:15

Yeah, I do want to talk about that because that is, I

1:02:18

think, the primary concern with his

1:02:21

sort of behavior and his history. And

1:02:23

it is extremely complicated. So

1:02:26

I'll go into that, and I'll present

1:02:30

what's out there.

1:02:31

So in 2015,

1:02:33

the Labour MP Simon Danshuk gave

1:02:36

a speech in London where he said that

1:02:39

he had been told by a retired

1:02:41

detective who had approached him that

1:02:44

in the 1950s and 1960s, he

1:02:46

had been monitoring Tom Dryberg's house. And

1:02:50

he had seen a number of teenage escapees from

1:02:52

a young offenders institute at

1:02:55

Felton enter his house.

1:02:58

And the policeman alleged that

1:03:01

he had

1:03:03

taken the case

1:03:05

that he'd then met

1:03:08

one of his teenage boys, and

1:03:13

the teenage boy had told him that

1:03:15

he'd been abused in the house. And that he'd

1:03:17

taken the Director for

1:03:19

Public Prosecutions and

1:03:21

that the Director for Public Prosecutions

1:03:23

had decided not to act on it.

1:03:26

And Danshuk regarded

1:03:28

this as part of a pattern. And

1:03:30

there certainly were coverups, a

1:03:32

lot of coverups of MPs having

1:03:36

abused children at a time, such

1:03:38

as the Liberal MP, Cyril Smith,

1:03:41

who was a famous case, and

1:03:44

other Labour MPs at the time,

1:03:46

such as Tom Watson, had levelled similar

1:03:48

allegations against former MPs

1:03:51

like the conservative, Leon Britton. And

1:03:54

they often

1:03:55

made these allegations under parliamentary

1:03:57

privilege, which means...

1:04:00

In the UK, if you make a claim

1:04:02

under parliamentary privilege, you can't be sued for

1:04:04

it. So

1:04:05

it's a chance for

1:04:07

people to raise, to

1:04:08

whistle blow essentially. But

1:04:11

it makes it complicated if it's not then

1:04:13

a trial afterwards to determine the truth

1:04:15

as either a civil or criminal trial. So in this

1:04:17

case, this series

1:04:20

of allegations, as part

1:04:22

of a wider series of scandals

1:04:24

to do with childhood sexual abuse

1:04:27

in children's homes and regarding

1:04:29

religious organizations led to

1:04:31

an independent inquiry in the UK, which

1:04:33

was called the independent inquiry into child

1:04:36

sexual abuse.

1:04:37

So it's undeniable that childhood

1:04:39

sexual abuse was

1:04:40

committed by many high ranking men, such

1:04:43

as

1:04:44

Jimmy

1:04:46

Savile, for example, is probably the most famous

1:04:48

case, but also including MPs

1:04:52

throughout the period the inquiry covered.

1:04:55

The inquiry was extremely broad and

1:04:57

it covered everything from individual

1:05:00

MPs and organizations relationships

1:05:02

with PIE, which was the pedophile

1:05:04

information exchange, which was a pro-pedophilia

1:05:08

advocacy organization

1:05:09

is how it would have described itself. I think probably

1:05:12

a grooming

1:05:13

organization is probably more accurate and

1:05:15

a number of other cases. So it

1:05:18

has a very wide remit.

1:05:20

So yeah, it's clear that there were definitely police

1:05:23

coverups of important powerful

1:05:25

people at the time, powerful men, and

1:05:28

also that evidence was later destroyed.

1:05:33

And obviously, I think it's incumbent upon our understanding

1:05:35

of the sort of ethics around

1:05:37

sexual violence and sexual assault to

1:05:39

believe those who come forward with allegations.

1:05:43

But

1:05:45

in this case, that's complicated by the fact that we

1:05:47

don't actually know who the people are who are making

1:05:49

the allegations and what the allegations

1:05:52

are at all. The

1:05:54

person who came forward was actually a policeman

1:05:57

who had made a claim on behalf of Third

1:05:59

World. parties that he didn't name

1:06:02

and we don't know who the

1:06:04

alleged victims were. But

1:06:07

more importantly, we don't actually know what the nature

1:06:09

of those claims

1:06:10

are. So one

1:06:13

issue here is the elision then and

1:06:15

now, the sort of confusion between homosexuals,

1:06:19

sexual predators and pedophiles,

1:06:22

which was,

1:06:23

you know, that was clearly something that was understood

1:06:26

by wider popular culture, let's say, straight

1:06:29

culture in a very different way to what would be now.

1:06:31

So some of the more lurid

1:06:34

accusations that accompany these allegations

1:06:36

online and around Dryberg

1:06:38

specifically, for

1:06:41

example,

1:06:42

accused him of abusing

1:06:45

these children, well, these boys, and

1:06:48

wearing fishnet stockings.

1:06:50

There's a big part of them that there's a lot of these allegations

1:06:52

like, oh, he wore fishnet stockings. But

1:06:54

there seems to be

1:06:56

no evidence in that in the inquiry at all. And the

1:06:58

more I looked at the only place I could find any evidence

1:07:00

for this accusation about fishnet stockings actually

1:07:03

came from this comedy sketch from the time

1:07:06

by

1:07:08

this pair of comedians. Their

1:07:10

characters were called Derek and Clive,

1:07:13

Peter, Cook and Dudley Moore, like very famous

1:07:15

English satirists and comedians. And

1:07:17

they did this sketch at the time about when

1:07:19

they played these two cabbies. And they said how

1:07:22

they talk about having this Puffter Dryberg

1:07:24

in the back of his cab and that he's masturbating

1:07:27

in fishnet stockings with a rent boy,

1:07:29

which is like just a very standard piece of,

1:07:31

you know, Pete and Dudd's grotesquely. But

1:07:35

there's no, there seems to be no evidence in even

1:07:38

in the police officers accusations that

1:07:40

this was

1:07:41

part of the allegations. And then

1:07:43

this elision, of course, continues

1:07:45

to some extent in the report.

1:07:47

And I read the relevant parts of the report.

1:07:50

Well, there's quite a lot of discussion about Tom Dryberg, but only

1:07:52

to the extent

1:07:54

him being a cottager, like a compulsive

1:07:56

cottager,

1:07:57

and says that like any information about Dryberg

1:07:59

police but it doesn't remark further than

1:08:02

that but I don't really know what being a cottager necessarily

1:08:04

has to do with allegations that he abused

1:08:07

teenage boys in his home.

1:08:09

But the important part of this I think really in terms of this this

1:08:12

this elision, this like bringing together

1:08:14

confusion between these two categories is that up

1:08:16

until 1967 both

1:08:20

homosexuality

1:08:21

and childhood sexual abuse were sexual offenses

1:08:24

and this idea that homosexuals

1:08:27

were sort of inherently predatory and especially

1:08:29

towards children was commonplace. And

1:08:32

so while the age of consent is now

1:08:35

equalised at 16 in the UK regardless

1:08:39

of the gender of the

1:08:41

people having sex, at that time the

1:08:43

age of consent for same sex acts was 21

1:08:45

but was 16 for heterosexuals

1:08:49

precisely because there was this assumption of

1:08:51

sexual predation on the part of older men.

1:08:54

And so given that these were escapees

1:08:56

from Felton it's

1:09:00

likely that the boys would have been over the

1:09:02

age of consent today

1:09:03

let's say. I think the age of Felton

1:09:05

people who were detained at

1:09:09

Felton at the time was like 14 to 21.

1:09:13

I see so in other words it's possible that

1:09:15

a story about 20 year

1:09:19

olds has now been conflated into

1:09:21

a story about 14-15

1:09:23

year olds. Yeah exactly.

1:09:25

And that maybe it makes more sense

1:09:28

in this case to think of it as a story about 20

1:09:30

year olds given that we have a fairly

1:09:32

detailed record from multiple sources

1:09:35

of Dryberg's erotic life and

1:09:37

there doesn't seem to be other evidence.

1:09:41

That doesn't seem to be. Well that

1:09:43

if. Which

1:09:46

is not to say that nothing happened but it's to say that the

1:09:49

balance of evidence does not support

1:09:52

substantiating this kind of

1:09:54

serious claim. I wouldn't necessarily

1:09:56

even go that far. What I'd say is that we

1:09:58

do have.

1:09:59

a remarkably frank evidence on

1:10:02

the nature of his erotic life as

1:10:04

he himself reported it. If

1:10:07

he was to have been

1:10:09

abusing children or abusing teenage

1:10:12

boys, then he wouldn't

1:10:14

have written about that, of course,

1:10:16

in his memoirs. So

1:10:19

that's one thing to take to count. The

1:10:21

more important thing to say, oh, well,

1:10:23

having said that,

1:10:25

there perhaps was a more openness

1:10:27

about potential childhood sexual abuse

1:10:30

and people having, let's quote unquote, a

1:10:32

fondness for boys. At the time,

1:10:35

that was kind of understood maybe a little bit differently

1:10:38

improperly, of course, but

1:10:41

there was a vocabulary for people who were

1:10:44

pedophilic or pederastic to talk about

1:10:47

that.

1:10:48

And when he talks about his sexual desire

1:10:50

and he recounts his sexual desire, it's very

1:10:52

clear that what he is attracted

1:10:55

to in his own account is

1:10:57

not boys, but men. Right.

1:11:00

And also none of the other people who are talking

1:11:02

about his sex life with each other, frankly, are

1:11:05

talking about a fondness for boys. No,

1:11:08

no. The thing that

1:11:10

after he dies, his friends are talking about

1:11:12

and saying it was sad and disappointing by his life

1:11:14

was specifically cottaging. But

1:11:18

I

1:11:19

think the more important thing is, I

1:11:22

think the thing that makes the most confusing in terms of the

1:11:24

allegations is that a police

1:11:26

officer at the time who was watching

1:11:28

his house and saw

1:11:31

someone who had now over the age of consent,

1:11:34

but could he even be in, you know, 20

1:11:37

or 21, would have

1:11:39

seen that as a sexual crime with a minor.

1:11:42

So when he says, I saw boys going in there,

1:11:44

he could have been talking about 19 or 20 year olds.

1:11:47

I'm not arguing that like a 50 something member

1:11:49

of parliament picking up an 18 year old

1:11:52

escapee in a public toilet doesn't raise

1:11:54

significant ethical questions, of course. But

1:11:57

I do think it's marked markedly different from

1:11:59

a

1:11:59

Most of the other crimes are covered in the inquiries

1:12:02

which are based around members of Parliament and other

1:12:04

powerful figures who were regularly

1:12:07

visiting Children's

1:12:09

homes and grooming underage vulnerable

1:12:12

sometimes prepubescent children for sexual abuse

1:12:14

it it different

1:12:16

Yeah, I

1:12:18

mean but having said that it doesn't necessarily

1:12:20

clean it clear up his innocence or guilt either

1:12:22

way I

1:12:25

Would say it's worth pointing out that many of the

1:12:27

accusations that were made at the time such

1:12:29

as the accusations that Tom Watson made

1:12:31

against Leon Britton Were

1:12:34

entirely without merit and they resulted in

1:12:36

large payouts for his family because

1:12:38

he died without being exonerated

1:12:42

And it's also clear that Being

1:12:45

gay homosexual MP at the time

1:12:48

did make you could make you a target for prosecution

1:12:50

So although we've talked about how he managed to get

1:12:52

away with it That was no

1:12:54

by no means a given for example Ian Harvey

1:12:57

Who was very promising young junior minister

1:12:59

conservative junior minister? He

1:13:02

was arrested for having sex of a man in st. James's

1:13:04

Park at exactly this time in the early well

1:13:06

in the early 50s And and

1:13:09

his power didn't protect him. He was he was fired and

1:13:11

charged But but having said

1:13:13

that the cover the cover-ups were were real

1:13:16

and were extremely effective. So it's

1:13:18

a very difficult call to make but I

1:13:21

Don't know it's

1:13:22

Perfectly possible that he could have met and

1:13:25

abused Miners while

1:13:27

cottaging but it's also perfectly

1:13:29

possible that like with Leon

1:13:31

Britton these accusations were sort of bound

1:13:34

up with Some political

1:13:36

false allegations and in Tom's case specifically

1:13:39

allegations that at the time And

1:13:43

now having read to report I was quite shocked at

1:13:45

the report by how much they focused on cottaging

1:13:47

as him

1:13:47

cottaging in

1:13:49

But the allegations

1:13:51

at a time that that conflated Homosexuality

1:13:55

with with child abuse.

1:13:57

Well that that makes a lot of sense And

1:14:00

I think that's a very detailed working

1:14:03

through of what can be known here. So

1:14:05

Hugh, Tom Driver, definitely

1:14:08

gay. I think that's a no

1:14:11

question. But no question. Bad or not

1:14:13

bad?

1:14:14

I think in some ways, maybe it's worth looking back at

1:14:16

the start of the episodes when, you know,

1:14:19

I said that he demanded that his own funeral features

1:14:21

this anti-unergy, cataloguing his

1:14:23

life as a sinner. And I think it's true

1:14:25

what this clergyman had said in

1:14:28

this,

1:14:29

which was, quote, he was something

1:14:31

of a greedy boy,

1:14:32

that he was sort of a sexual

1:14:34

glutton, more than anything else. He's someone who

1:14:36

wanted and enjoyed the physicality of sex. And

1:14:39

I also agree with the vicar who's when

1:14:41

he said, quote, Tom knew

1:14:43

he was a sinner and in need of grace, he also

1:14:46

knew how to avail himself of it. So I think that's

1:14:48

a much fairer assessment than those obiturists

1:14:51

who saw his homosexuality as his tragedy,

1:14:53

his Achilles heel. I don't really

1:14:56

believe he was a tragic man who lived an unfulfilled

1:14:58

life or, you know, failed to live up to his promises.

1:15:00

His friends seem to think,

1:15:02

I think he was an accomplished man,

1:15:04

a principled man to an extent, his accomplishments

1:15:08

were kind of overlooked as a result of his homosexuality.

1:15:11

I think, you

1:15:13

know, by sheer force of character, he overcame

1:15:16

what was probably a pretty shaky and unpleasant

1:15:18

start in life, in order to live his life

1:15:20

on his own terms as he wanted. I think

1:15:23

the idea that his life was tragic, or his potential

1:15:25

was unfulfilled, or that he was a traitor is something

1:15:28

that's been superimposed on him by people who

1:15:30

needed his life to appear tragic in order to justify

1:15:33

their own acquiescence to a moral order.

1:15:35

So his sex life, his emotional

1:15:37

life was mostly, you know, spent on his

1:15:39

knees in public toilets with strangers.

1:15:42

And his compatriots, who claim to be his friends, clearly

1:15:44

found that a sort of sad and unfilling form of human

1:15:47

affection. But

1:15:49

unlike many men at the time who who resorted

1:15:51

to coaching and cruising because society shuns

1:15:53

their attempts to

1:15:56

want to form longer lasting sexual

1:15:58

relations, I can't really find any... evidence

1:16:00

that Tom didn't just enjoy that sex

1:16:03

life wholeheartedly.

1:16:04

He wrote in his memoirs, quote,

1:16:08

the usual shallow sneer at homosexuals in

1:16:10

any sort of public life is that they're hypocrites.

1:16:12

The charge is false. In my own

1:16:14

case, the two interests were parallel and

1:16:16

simultaneous and I was not a hypocrite. Whether

1:16:19

functioning as an acolyte in a sanctuary or

1:16:21

practicing fellatio in some hotel room or

1:16:23

station WC, I was doing what

1:16:25

I most wanted to do at that moment and

1:16:28

doing it with complete sincerity.

1:16:30

So, on those terms, despite all the contradictions,

1:16:34

I do find him admirable. I

1:16:36

guess the question comes down to

1:16:39

the allegations made

1:16:41

by this policeman

1:16:43

about whether or not he was

1:16:46

involved in child sexual abuse. And

1:16:48

I think, you know, obviously that is the

1:16:51

crux

1:16:52

and it's something that without

1:16:54

further investigation we can never really know. Well,

1:16:57

thank you, Hugh, for telling us that story.

1:16:59

If people want to learn more about Tom Dryberg, where

1:17:02

are some places that they can go that you

1:17:04

used to research the episode?

1:17:06

Well, the first is the book,

1:17:09

his autobiography, which was called

1:17:11

Ruling Passions, the Autobiography of Tom

1:17:14

Dryberg. And the second is the

1:17:16

one by Francis Ween that I mentioned, which

1:17:19

currently its title, because that's actually changed,

1:17:22

I think, for its second edition, but currently its title

1:17:24

is The Soul of Indiscretion. Tom

1:17:26

Dryberg, poet, philanderer, legislator,

1:17:29

and outlaw, and that's by Francis Ween. And

1:17:32

I will also say that for those who

1:17:35

are interested specifically in

1:17:37

the inquiry, that

1:17:39

all the evidence from the inquiry is

1:17:42

uploaded onto the website

1:17:44

for the independent inquiry into

1:17:46

child sexual abuse and

1:17:49

can be seen online. Well, thanks for that, Hugh.

1:17:52

You can follow the show on Twitter

1:17:55

at BadGaysPod, and at BadGaysPod.com,

1:17:57

you can find out more about the show, find out

1:17:59

more about our...

1:17:59

Patreon and order our book Bad

1:18:02

Gays of Homosexual History or pre-order in

1:18:04

paperback You can find me

1:18:06

on Twitter at BenRightsThings

1:18:08

you can find me on Twitter at Hugh Lammy

1:18:10

and

1:18:11

See you soon till next week.

1:18:13

Bye now.

1:18:14

Bye