“The BBC isn’t the Catholic Church, but it has its own ideals and traditions…“
A friend of Gamlin’s remembers going to see him in a flat in All Souls Place in the 1950s, just round the corner from Broadcasting House. A man from Light Entertainment used the flat during the working week and Gamlin often stayed there with young boys. It was clear to the friend that both men were renting the boys, and that the boys were young: ‘They were boys with the kind of good looks that would seem very lewd in a woman.’ He also remembers going for a coffee with one of the boys from the flat. ‘The boy was nice,’ he said, ‘very young. He thought he might get a job or something of that sort. And it was clear the men were using him for sex. Broadcasting House was well stocked with men interested in sleeping with young boys. It was a milieu back then. And people who sought to be sexual predators knew that. It wasn’t spoken about.’ “
I had peripheral involvement with a theatre in Canada. A somewhat known British actor worked his way through a number of presumably legal gay guys. I have spent 30 years believing him to be gay and recently looked him up on Wikipedia and see that he had a few wives and many children. Must be a British thing.
One supposes that because the fellow’s name is O’Hagan, he must know all about the Catholic Church’s problems in this field? However, never in the Anglican Church, to which most of these people belong. Oddly, having been an adherent of the RCC, I have never come across it, though I’m sure it does occur in EVERY institution of the world.
Also, it is very easy to accuse Malcolm Muggeridge of naughtiness with a presenter at the BBC. Especially considering he’s been dead all these many years. Also, in his autobiographical writings, he admits to being involved somewhat (as most kids experienced it in the “public” (govenment run, as opposed to Catholic) schools. And of course he didn’t convert to the Roman Church until much later in his life.
What is it about the Brits and buggering young boys? Gotta keep up with them Catholics?
This barely counts as an anecdote, and it’s pretty random, but bear with me… the only reason I’d ever heard Jimmy Savile’s name before this week is that my father (from Leeds, like J.S.) mentioned once or twice that a friend he’d knnown when they were both in their 20s (or something like that, I wasn’t taking notes) would get very angry if the man’s name ever came up. As in – “Jimmy Savile *spit* – don’t talk about that {*#^“ (As odd as it seems, Savile was apparently a huge star at one point in Britain.) The friend never explained it, but he absolutely loathed J.S. So I think I now might have an idea why my father’s buddy felt the way he did.
LAS, you clearly haven’t read the article or learned anything from the past decade. Your ignorance confounds.
The man in charge of having an inquiry halted, is now in charge of the New York Times.
“All the news we decide to print”?
Larben,
The English “public” schools were “public” only in that they were open to the public, as opposed to the private tutoring services enjoyed by (say) the royal family. They were privately run, and only the well-off could afford them.
Generations of rich English “toffs,” whose wives were too proud and spoiled to actually raise their own children (only fools and poor women did that), gladly handed over the children that got in the way of their lives in high society to be recruited for sodomy by masters and older boys at English boarding schools. A term starting with F that may set off the filter and rhymes with “Piggott” originally meant a student who was expected to wait on an older boy hand and foot. No prizes for guessing how it came to mean what it does now.
No prizes either for guessing what the culture of English public schools contributed to the den of iniquity that was the BBC.
The harridans running the place now must use strapons.
Exactly as you state Dick, so why are they comparing the BBC to the Catholic Church when it was mostly the “public” schools that were involved. Evelyn Waugh was brought up in both schools, as I understand, and he talks about the “gay” side of life in these schools – most grew out of the “fagging” stage and went on to marry and live happily, though having a name like “Evelyn” didn’t make things any easier. Waugh became Catholic long after having left the corrupt “public” and “private” systems. He never had any “Catholic” influence when growing up. It was the State Schools and those whose that presumably used Anglicanism as their guiding principles.
“…having a name like “Evelyn” didn’t make things any easier.”
His first wife was named Evelyn too. Their friends called them he-Evelyn and she-Evelyn.
Right, Black Mamba, but it didn’t last long, and although Waugh was a remarkable writer with a wicked sense of humour, one thinks he would have been hard to live with.
Jimmy Saville was indeed enormously popular in England. Very hard to describe just how big he was, since there’s nothing like it here. Imagine a CBC DJ that everybody actually listened to… no, that’s unimaginable. Imagine if Dick Clark and the Real Don Steele were one and the same man and had a complete monopoly on all American radio and TV pop programming, and you start to get the idea.