Tom Driberg
was
born at Crowborough, Sussex,
on 22nd May 1905. His father, John Driberg, worked for the Indian
Civil Service. Educated at Lancing College, Driberg joined the Communist
Party when he was fifteen.
Driberg went to
Christ Church, Oxford,
and studied classics (1924-27) but left without graduating. During
the General
Strike Driberg
worked at party headquarters and began writing for the communist newspaper,
Sunday Worker. In 1928 he joined
the Daily
Express as
a gossip columnist. He came to the attention of Lord
Beaverbrook who
gave him his own column 'These Names Makes News'. It was at this time
that Driberg began using the pen name, William Hickey, a famous 18th
century diarist.
Driberg
was a strong opponent of the British government's Non-Intervention
policy in
the Spanish
Civil War.
He visited Spain as a journalist during
the war. In January 1939, he helped to take food supplies to the Republican
Army fighting
General Francisco
Franco
and his nationalist forces.
Maxwell
Knight, head of B5b, a unit that conducted the monitoring of political
subversion, recruited
Driberg as an agent for MI5.
In
1941 Anthony
Blunt informed
Harry Pollitt that Driberg was an informer
and he was expelled from the Communist
Party.
Knight now suspected that his unit had been infiltrated by the KGB
but it was not until after the war that MI5 discovered that Blunt
was responsible for exposing Driberg.
In 1942 he was
elected to the House of Commons at the
Maldon by-election as an Independent. In 1943 Driberg was dismissed
from the Daily
Express and
transferred to the Reynold's
News.
He later wrote for the Daily
Mail and
the New
Statesman.
During the Second
World War Driberg joined the Labour Party
and in 1945 retained his seat in Parliament. In 1949 he was elected
to the party's National Executive but he was severely censured in
1950 for gross neglect of his parliamentary duties by taking three
months off to report on the Korean
War.
Driberg served
as chairman of the Labour Party National Executive in 1957-58. After
losing Maldon in 1958 Driberg moved to Barking which he won in 1959.
Driberg left
the House of Commons in 1974 and the following
year was created Baron Bradwell. Tom
Driberg died of a heart-attack on 12th August 1976.
His autobiography, Ruling Passions,
was published posthumously in 1977.
(1)
When he was fifteen Tom Driberg joined
the Communist Party.
Several things happened during my last year
at Lancing. Political interest was quickened by the election of the
first Labour Government (but without a clear majority) under Ramsay
MacDonald. I cannot remember how soon disillusionment set in, but
both then and much later the Labour Party (of which I was to be Chairman
in 1957-8) seemed to me about as dull as a 'middle-stump' church.
During one of the long, boring holidays - when term ended I dreaded
going home, when holidays ended I dreaded going back to school - searching
for something that seemed more revolutionary, I joined the Brighton
branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and was assigned the
hopeless task of selling the Daily
Worker (or was it then the Workers' Weekly) at Crowborough.
(2)
Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions (1977)
The
first of these (visits to Spain) was early in the war, when Madrid
was still holding out against the Fascist siege. The other correspondents
whom I saw most of included Tom Delmer, also from the Express, and
Ernest Hemingway; with him was the brilliant American writer, Martha
Gellhorn. I enjoyed Hemingway's company, and we drank a good deal:
it is galling to have to record, of a writer much of whose work I
admired, that I cannot remember a single thing he said.
The
great tragedy of Spain at that time - one reason why the rebel Franco
won the war - was the mistrust and divisions between the two main
forces supporting the Republican government, the Communists and the
Anarchists. Propaganda
and press facilities were
looked after by the Communists: of them I remember best an able and
handsome woman of aristocratic ancestry, Constancia de la Mora. She
wrote a book entitled In Place of Splendour,and after the Fascist
victory went to Moscow.
The circumstances of my
second Spanish visit, in January,
1939, were very different. I had been travelling elsewhere in Europe;
by pre-arrangement, at Perpignan I met two comrades from Fleet Street
- one, Harry Harrison, was killed in the Second World War, one, Lou
Kenton, is still around. They were driving a food lorry into Spain
on behalf of the Printers' Anti-Fascist Movement, a purpose for which
we had for some time been raising funds.
As we drove into Spain
we should have realised that the war was almost over and the government
defeated; for, trudging up the road towards us and towards the French
frontier, alone and carrying a pack, was a stout middle-aged figure
whom I suddenly recognised: he was Alvarez del Vayo, Foreign Minister
of Spain. (He was not, in fact, running away from Spain - only taking
some government documents to safety in France.)
Our lorry was laden with
food: Women with faces of agony stretched out their hands to us crying
"Bread, bread!" It was
horrible to have to say: "We are here to help you but we can't
give you bread," and to explain that we had to go on to the central
depot. They clawed at the side of the lorry. Carabineers moved them
on.
(3)
Peter
Wright, Spycatcher (1987)
Since the 1960s a wealth
of material about the penetration of the latter two bodies had been
flowing into MI5's files, principally from two Czechoslovakian defectors
named Frolik and August. They named a series of Labour Party politicians
and trade union leaders as Eastern Bloc agents. Some were certainly
well founded, like the case of the MP Will Owen, who admitted being
paid thousands of pounds over a ten-year period to provide information
to Czechoslovakian intelligence officers, and yet, when he was prosecuted
in 1970, was acquitted because it was held that he had not had access
to classified information, and because the Czech defector could not
produce documentary evidence of what he had said at the trial.
Tom Driberg was another
MP named by the Czech defectors. I went to see Driberg myself, and
he finally admitted that he was providing material to a Czech controller
for money. For a while we ran Driberg on, but apart from picking up
a mass of salacious detail about Laboir Party peccadilloes, he had
nothing of interest for us.
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