Michael Davidson (journalist)

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Michael Davidson
Davidson in 1972
Born24 February 1897 (1897-02-24)
101 Warwick Road, Paddington, London
Died19 November 1975 (aged 78) Craig’s Hospital, Victoria, Gozo, Malta.
Alma materLancing College
OccupationJournalist

Michael Childers Davidson (1897–1975) was a British

memoirist, and an open pederast
.

Life and work

Davidson was born in London on 24 February 1897, into an upper-middle-class family but he was brought up in Guernsey from the ages of one to eleven when the family moved to Bitterne in Hampshire. He was educated at Lancing, England.

Davidson joined the army in 1914 and was wounded at Paschendaele in 1916. After the war, he made an unsuccessful attempt to set himself up as a farmer in South Africa. In 1922, he became a newspaper reporter, initially in Norwich. In 1928, he moved to Berlin where, apart from a stint as a proof-reader in the International Labour Office in Geneva, he was to remain until 1933, supporting himself as a translator of leftist books and articles. He also joined the Communist Party of Germany out of a belief that only it could seriously counter the rise of the Nazis.

The News Chronicle, The New York Times and other newspapers,[4]
drawing the ire of the British colonial authorities in Malaya and Cyprus for his revelations.

At age 26, Davidson met W. H. Auden, then 16, and they began a "poetic relationship".[5] Davidson mentored Auden and was responsible for his poems first publication.

Davidson was open about his love for adolescent boys. His 1962 autobiography The World, the Flesh and Myself, described by Arthur Koestler in The Observer as one of the three best books of that year,[6] begins: "This is the life-history of a lover of boys." His follow-up memoir Some Boys (1969) focused entirely on the boys he had met around the world, while working as a foreign correspondent. His last book, Sicilian Vespers,, about Favignana, the tiny island off Sicily where he lived from 1966 to 1973, together with a selection of his personal correspondence and a brief biography, was posthumously published.[7]

Published books

For a more complete list, see “A bibliography of Davidson’s writings” in Davidson's Sicilian Vespers listed below, pp. 357–60.

  • The World, the Flesh and Myself. 1st edition, London: Arthur Barker, 1962. Four editions, 1966–97. Current edition, London: Arcadian Dreams, 2022.
  • Some Boys. 1st edition, London: David Bruce & Watson, 1969. American and only unexpurgated edition, Kingston, New York: Oliver Layton, 1971; 2nd British edition, London: GMP, 1988.
  • Sicilian Vespers and other writings. London: Arcadian Dreams, 2021.

References

  1. ISBN 978-1-914571-00-8
  2. ^ Davidson, Michael (1962), The World, the Flesh and Myself, p. 157
  3. ^ National Archives, Kew: KV2/2975-2976
  4. ISBN 978-0-415-29161-3
  5. ^ Davidson, Michael (1962), The World, the Flesh and Myself, p. 126
  6. ^ The Observer, 23 December 1962, p. 7
  7. ISBN 978-1-914571-00-8
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