AA Bibliography Home

The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament,
A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement
 
  Tom Driberg
Secker & Warberg, London, 1964.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1965.
Library of Congress number BJ10 .M6D7
L.C. catalog card number 64-19084
Dewey number 248.25 D831

1960's This was a happy period for him but when Edith Sitwell got to know of his circumstances she was horrified and arranged for Beverley Baxter, who was managing editor of the Daily Express to consider him for a job, and in January 1928 he was taken on as a reporter. Within a month he had a scoop when he discovered the arrival of the Moral Re-Armament movement. The story was run on for several days starting on the front page on 28th. February, 1928. He continued to take an interest in the movement and in the 1950s was invited to lecture on the subject at Oslo and Göteborg universities. His friend David Ferrer of Secker & Warberg also commissioned a book which came out in 1964 as The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament.
(I forgot to make footnote about where I got the above quote sorry)


 Driberg was an out homosexual.
He Became A British MP
and eventually a Lord. In 1999 published reports became
public about him being a spy for Russia
but he played both sides and reported all the British

http://www.sbu.ac.uk/stafflag/tomdriberg.html

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRdribergT.htm

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/446305.s

 Tom Drieberg

Born 1905; died 12th. August, 1976, in London.
British journalist and Member of Parliament, 1942-1974.
In 1975 he was made a life peer and became Lord Bradwell

The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament,
A Study of Frank Buchman and His Movement
 
  Tom Driberg
Secker & Warberg, London, 1964.
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1965.
Library of Congress number BJ10 .M6D7
L.C. catalog card number 64-19084
Dewey number 248.25 D831

This is a great book, one of the most detailed, well-documented, and complete sources of information about Frank Buchman and his religious movement. And it is easy, fascinating reading, written by a fellow who didn't pull his punches when criticizing Buchman. It was written by Tom Driberg, a fellow who was a colorful personality in his own right, starting as a newspaper reporter in London, and then becoming one of the first openly-gay Members of Parliament in history. In the early nineteen-sixties, the London publishing house of Secker & Warburg asked Driberg to do a book on Buchman and the MRA, since he had previously reported on them.
above  and Below Quotes from Works written by Agent Orange

In The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament, Tom Driberg cites numerous examples of MRA’s false claims. One example is a claim made at the January 16, 1952 MRA “Assembly of the Americas” in Miami, Florida, where a British delegate, “Bill Birmingham, Union Secretary of the Mosley Common Pit, Lancashire,” stated that because of MRA activity at the mine “production had increased from 11½ to 15 tons per man per shift,” while wages had increased from 37 to 52 shillings per day. According to figures from Lord Robens, chairman of the National Coal Board (which oversees all mine operations in Britain), production had actually increased from 2110 pounds per man in 1947 to 2190 pounds per man in 1952, while wages increased from 27 shillings 6 pence to 38 shillings per day

It is very interesting to see the roots of AA and NA in Buchmanism. For instance, on pages 150 and 151,(in Garth Lean's Book -On the Tail of a Comet) we read about a fellow named Jim Driberg who had a drinking problem, and The Oxford Group had dried him out. But there was something about the Oxford Group that put him off, so he wrote a letter explaining that he could no longer work with the group. The Buchmanites' conclusion: "His elder brother John attributed the sudden move to the mental factor which has now and then sent Jim off on absurd tangents." In other words, he's crazy. "Alas, Jim Driberg could not make it alone. As Tom, his brother, relates in Ruling Passions, he soon turned back to the bottle and to massive borrowing." You are crazy if you quit the group and stop practicing Buchmanism, and you will never make it alone. The seeds of AA are all there.

 

Tom Driberg, in his The Mystery of Moral Re-Armament, quotes a story that was found in the Nazi secret police records that an ex-AA member might find amusing. A Swedish woman who had been angrily denouncing the Nazis, after attending an Oxford Group meeting, felt guilty and proceeded to "make amends,"
writing a letter of apology to the Nazi leader
Tom Driberg

 

 

Francis Wheen
TOM DRIBERG: THE SOUL OF INDISCRETION
Poet, Philanderer, Legistlator and Outlaw
In his obituary The Times described Tom Driberg as "an unreliable man of undoubted distinction …he was the admiration and despair of his friends and acquaintances". But what friends, and what acquaintances. And what glorious unreliability. A Brideshead-generation Oxford Socialist, Tom Driberg was also a flamboyant and promiscuous homosexual, an intriguer, gossip, friend to the Sitwells and the Krays (though not on the same evening) and one of the most colourful figures of the London social set. Living in an era when the establishment looked after its own and the press looked the other way, Tom Driberg was able to shatter almost every idea of polite society from its epicentre. His was a gloriously indulgent life that included a highly public wedding in 1951 just a few years after he had concluded and extravagant series of affairs with soldiers, sailors and airmen. Drieberg had had a good war by his own unique standards. As could truthfully be said of the rest of his life.
405 pages, paperback

 

Francis Wheen
TOM DRIBERG: His Life & Indiscretions
Politician, gossip-columnist, promiscuous homosexual and alleged double-agent, a friend of such disparate characters as Edith Sitwell, Nye Bevan, Guy Burgess and Mick Jagger, Driberg was one of the most colourful figures in London's political, literary and social life for over forty years. A keen High Churchman, he continually risked prosecution and disgrace by his compulsive "cottaging" in public lavatories; an uncompromising socialist, he was also an ardent socialite with a Georgian mansion in Essex.
452 pages hardback (Chatto & Windus, 1990)

Tom Driberg
Later a distinguished if maverick Labour politician, but at Oxford an ambitious poet. Coaxing Edith Sitwell into coming to speak earned Driberg a considerable reputation among his fellows: his poetry impressed them less, and John Betjeman parodied it mercilessly


http://www.gnelson.demon.co.uk/oxpoetry/index/id.html