Tom Driberg - Marriage

Marriage

On 16 February 1951 Driberg surprised his friends by announcing his engagement to Ena Mary Binfield, née Lyttelton, the common law widow of Joe Binfield, who had died in 1948. A former Suffolk county councillor, she worked as an administrator at the Marie Curie Hospital in London. She was well known in senior Labour circles, and had met Driberg in 1949, at a weekend party given by the government minister George Strauss. According to her son, she was fully aware of Driberg's sexual preferences, but looked forward to some political excitement, and "thought they could do a useful job as Mr. and Mrs." Driberg's motives are less clear, but he told his friend John Freeman that he needed someone to run Bradwell Lodge, to which he had returned in 1946 after its release by the RAF.

At Driberg's insistence Binfield, a non-practising Jew, was baptised into the Church of England before the wedding at St Mary the Virgin, Pimlico, on 30 June 1951. The bride entered to a chorale arranged from the Labour Party anthem "The Red Flag"; this was followed by a nuptial mass described by Driberg's biographer Francis Wheen as "outrageously ornate". Four hundred guests then attended an elaborate reception at the House of Commons. In the ensuing years Ena tried hard to adapt to Driberg's way of life and to control his wayward finances, but with little success. He continued his frequent travels and casual homosexual liaisons, and was hostile to her efforts to control or change any aspect of his life. In 1961 she wrote to him: "I have tried for ten years to make a compromise with you in your extraordinary mode of life and have now given up." Thereafter they often lived apart, though they never formally separated. Even after a final breach in 1971, they remained legally married.