UNITED KINGDOM
Irish Independent
Mary Kenny
09/08/2015
It has frequently been pointed out that attitudes to sexuality were different in the 1960s and 1970s: and this has been especially stressed when personalities from the past – like the late British prime minister Edward Heath – are retrospectively suspected of sexual abuse.
Attitudes certainly were once very different: an individual’s sexual conduct was generally considered to be something private – unless it emerged in a sensational divorce case, or a major sex scandal like the Profumo affair.
In the Westminster village – which extended to Fleet Street – there was plenty of casual gossip, and loud guffaws of laughter in the various watering-holes about the sexuality of certain personalities, but it wasn’t regarded as a public issue.
If (the late) Tom Driberg, ennobled as Baron Bradwell – a crony of Labour prime minister Harold Wilson and one of the grandees of British politics of the time – liked to engage teenage rent boys for his entertainment, well, he was sensible enough not to get caught, wasn’t he? Driberg, strong socialist and High Anglican, once explained to a colleague of mine in El Vino that he found the best protection against any member of the constabulary collaring him in a compromising situation was a handy £50 note in his breast pocket. This was met with chortles of laughter, as I recall. Wise old Tom! …
It was known, in those days, that the best proof-readers on The Times were unfrocked clergymen. They were valued because they usually had a classical education, and were meticulous about spotting printing errors that might occur. What, I asked, had they been unfrocked for? “Oh the usual – interfering with a choirboy,” I was told lightly.
They tended to be Anglican rather than Roman Catholic (ie, posher), but though they had been unfrocked from priestly duties, I don’t recall any case where they were actually prosecuted. When, later, the Catholic church tried to deal with paedophile clergy within the institution – they sent Brendan Smyth to a shrink six times – they were following in a tradition of virtually all other institutions.
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