User talk:Roger Vlitos

I am the curator and archivist at Buscot Park, the only person with access to the papers of Gavin Henderson, the second Baron Faringdon. I am writing as I believe he has been grossly slandered in a slap-dash Wikipedia entry which is irresponsibly homophobic. I believe that most people would find there are far more interesting things to say about the man.

Firstly, your contributor quoted an entry from Hugh Dalton’s diary that he was ‘a pansy pacifist of whose private tendencies it might be slander to speak freely’.

An attentive reader will note Dalton was quoting Lord Winster – a recent convert from the Liberal Party – who did not know Lord Faringdon. Dalton was passing on Winster’s prejudices, and emphatically not offering this perception as fact. Indeed, all the other Labour peers mentioned in the same paragraph get equal vitriol from Winster – but none of that is quoted in their entries!

Dalton wrote this when he was of Minister of Economic Warfare in 1942, and it was not published until after both he and Lord Faringdon were dead. Whilst pacifists were not much appreciated in wartime, Gavin Faringdon went on to earn medals for front-line firefighting from the British, French and Dutch governments. What is more significant is that the Buscot Park visitor’s books show Dalton coming to stay five times afterwards, on each occasion with Labour Party luminaries such as High Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Nai Bevan, James Callaghan, Roy Jenkins, Barbara Castle and Dennis Healey. Shirley Williams, whose mother Vera Britten served on Medical Aid committees with Lord Faringdon, gave his funeral oration. Reading his current Wikipedia entry one would wonder why.

The entry goes on to quote David Cargill calling him a "roaring pansy". But who was this David Carghill? It seems unlikely it could have been the alpine skier or footballer who were contemporaries when he was elderly and infirm. So it must be the second-leading man actor of the 1950’s -60’s who has not earned an entry but whose slung mud has been allowed to stick. As far as we can tell, none of these Cargills knew Gavin Faringdon, hence the line is scurrilous hearsay and a gratuitous insult and should be deleted.

Also, any diligent researcher will find that Hansard does not have any record of Lord Faringdon opening a speech in the upper house with the words "My dears" instead of "My Lords". The source of this tale was Quintin Hogg, a notorious hater of effeminates and homosexuals, who opposed the Sexual reform bills of the 1960’s which Lord Faringdon supported.

The evidence is that Gavin Faringdon was bisexual, and intensely discrete. He suffered badly from a case of mumps in his early 20’s, and was never very promiscuous, either through inclination or inability afterwards. His voice was described by Evelyn Waugh, his Oxford contemporary, as ‘shrill and effeminate’. Whilst his marriage to the Hon. Honor Philipps was annulled - this occurred in the same year that her father Lord Kysant was imprisoned for fraud. However, Honor came to stay with Gavin regularly for the next 30 years, and they remained the closest of friends until her death. Some might call this an ideal relationship, but again the inference from this appalling entry is that their marriage failed because he was 'a roaring pansy'.

It is worth knowing that in spite of his high-pitched voice (Tom Driberg MP claimed he "whinnied") Gavin Faringdon was frequently called on to make rousing speeches at rallies at Trafalgar Sq, Hyde Park and Caxton Hall. He might be better remembered for “Setting the Thames on Fire” in 1927 with petrol the night before his arranged marriage (his best man was Bob Boothby MP), scandalizing his mother’s society guests by inviting a troupe of scantily-clad Harlem dancing girls called ‘The Blackbirds’ to perform the “black bottom” at the reception; abandoning a career in high finance to travel to India (1929) where he met and stayed with the Viceroy before interviewing Gandhi and becoming a supporter of the colonial independence movement; trekking to Tibet and staying with Joanna Lumley’s grandparents in Sikkim; travelling to Moscow during the Great Terror (1937), where he was Stalin’s guest at the May Day parade and “Uncle Joe” gave him an ermine collar so that he might “have the finest furs in the House of Lords” (Lord Faringdon wore them to the Coronation of George V a few weeks later) but he never joined the Communist Party; creating a colony for Basque refugees at Buscot Park after the bombing of Guernica, evacuating hundreds of Republican refugees from Valencia at the end of the Spanish Civil War, and then chartering a ship to take 1,800 to Mexico (1938-9).

So why, with all the above to choose from, are we offered this homophobic and scantily researched rubbish?