Early life and education
Icke was born in Leicester General Hospital to Beric Vaughan Icke (born 1907) and Barbara J. Icke (née Cooke, died 2006), who were married in Leicester in 1951. There was a brother, Trevor, seven years older than Icke, and another, Paul, seven years younger. Beric had wanted to be a doctor, but his family had no money, so he joined the Royal Air Force instead, becoming a Leading Aircraftman and medical orderly. He was awarded a British Empire Medal for gallantry in May 1943 after helping to save the crew of an aircraft that had crashed into the Chipping Warden air base in Oxfordshire. Along with a Squadron Leader, he ran into the burning aircraft, without protective clothing, and saved the life of a crew member who was trapped inside. 1479714 Leading Aircraftman Beric Vaughan Icke, Royal Air Force, RAF website, taken from the
London Gazette, May 14, 1943. The citation reads: "One night in March, 1943, an aircraft crashed on a Royal Air Force Station and immediately burst into flames. Squadron Leader Moore (the duty medical officer) saw the accident and, accompanied by Leading Aircraftman Icke, a medical orderly, proceeded to the scene. Squadron Leader Moore directed the removal of the rear gunner, who was dazed and sitting amongst the burning wreckage, to a place of safety. The aircraft was now enveloped in flames and ammunition was exploding. Nevertheless, despite the intense heat and the danger from exploding oxygen bottles this officer and airman entered the burning wreckage in an attempt to rescue another member of the crew who was pinned down. Without any protective clothing they lifted aside the burning wreckage and, with great difficulty, succeeded in extricating the injured man. Squadron Leader Moore rendered first aid to the rescued man. Squadron Leader Moore sustained burns to his chest and hands in carrying out the operation. This officer and airman both displayed courage and devotion to duty in keeping with the highest traditions of the Royal Air Force. Acting Squadron Leader Frederick Thomas Moore, B.S., F.R.C.S., L.R.C.P. (23417), Reserve of Air Force Officers was awarded the MBE for his part in this action."
After the war, Beric got a job in the Gents clock factory. The family lived in a slum terraced house on Lead Street, near Wharf Street in the centre of Leicester; then, when Icke was three, they moved to a housing estate known as the Goodwood, one of the massive 1950s council estates the post-war Labour government had built, their new home just across the road from the hospital. The family had nothing. "To say we were skint," he wrote in 1993, "is like saying it is a little chilly at the North Pole." He remembers having to hide under a window or chair when the council man came to collect the rent—after knocking, the rent man would walk round the house peering through the windows to see whether anyone was at home. His mother never explained that it was about the rent; she just told him to hide, and Icke writes that he still gets a fright when he hears a knock on the door.
He was always a loner, and felt different from other children, spending hours playing by himself with little steam trains that he had, and preferring to cross the street rather than speak to anyone. He attended Whitehall Infant School, then Whitehall Junior School, where he spent most of his time nervous and shy, often to the point of feeling faint during the morning assembly and having to leave before he passed out. The family doctor suggested a referral to a child psychologist, but his father put his foot down. He made no effort at school and failed at practically everything, but when he was nine, he was chosen for the junior school's football team. It was the first time in his life that he had succeeded at anything, and he came to see football as the only way out of his poverty. He played in goal, which he writes suited the loner in him, and gave him a sense of living on the edge between hero and villain.
Football and first marriage
He failed his 11-plus, a test that was used at the time to divide children between grammar schools, supposedly for the brightest, and secondary moderns or technical schools for the rest, so Icke was sent in 1963 to the city's Crown Hills Secondary Modern. He left at 15 after being talent-spotted while playing football, and was signed up as a goalkeeper for Coventry City. Every Saturday when not playing himself, he would travel the 60 km to Nottingham to watch Peter Shilton, one of England's legendary goalkeepers. Arthritis in his left knee—which later spread to the right knee, ankles, elbows, wrists, and hands—stopped him making a career out of football, but as well as playing for Coventry, he managed to play for Oxford United, Northampton Town, and Hereford United, before he had to give it up completely in 1973 at the age of 21.
He met his first wife, Linda Atherton, in May 1971 at a dance at the Chesford Grange Hotel near Leamington Spa. She was working at the time as a van driver for a garage in Leamington. Shortly after they met, Icke had another one of the huge rows he had started having with his father—always a domineering man, his father was upset that Icke's arthritis was interfering with his football career—so he packed his bags and left home. He moved into a tiny bedsit and worked in a local travel agency during the day, travelling to Hereford in the evenings to practice or play football. He and Linda were married on September 30, four months after they'd met. Their daughter, Kerry, was born two years later on March 7, 1975, followed by a son, Gareth, on December 12, 1981, and another son, Jaymie, on November 18, 1992.
Journalism
Icke found a job in 1973 as a reporter with the weekly
Leicester Advertiser, through a contact who was a sports editor at the
Daily Mail, though he writes that he got the job because he was the only applicant. He advanced quickly through local radio to television, and became a regional sports presenter for the BBC's
South Today in 1982, around the time his first son was born, and the year he moved to Ryde on the Isle of Wight, somewhere he had always wanted to live. He appeared on the first edition of British television's first national breakfast show,
Breakfast Time, on January 17, 1983, presenting the sports news for them until 1985. He published his first book in 1983,
It's a tough game, son! about football and how to break into it. He worked for BBC Sport until August 1990, often as a stand-in host on
Grandstand and snooker programmes, and also at the 1988 Summer Olympics, but a career in television began to lose its appeal for him—he wrote in
Tales from the Time Loop that he found the people working in television to be insincere, shallow, and vicious, with rare exceptions.
His contract with the BBC was terminated in 1990 when he refused to pay his poll tax, a new local tax introduced by Margaret Thatcher that was controversial because the same payment was required by everyone, regardless of income. He ended up paying it in November 1990, but his initial announcement that he was willing to go to jail rather than pay prompted the BBC, by charter an impartial public-service broadcaster, to distance itself from him.
Green Party
At some point during the 1980s, he began to flirt with fringe medicine and New Age philosophies in an effort to find relief from his arthritis. He wrote his second book in 1989,
It Doesn't Have To Be Like This, an outline of his views on the environment, and became involved with the Green Party from 1988 to 1991, rising to the position of one of their four national Speakers, a position the party had created in lieu of a leader. He soon became the party's most alluring speaker,
The Observer calling him "the Greens' Tony Blair." He became a household name, appearing on talk shows and in debates. He was invited in 1989 to debate whether animals should have rights at the Royal Institute of Great Britain, alongside Tom Regan, Mary Warnock, and Germaine Greer, and in September 1990, his name appeared on advertisements in national newspapers for the children's charity, Children's Vigils, alongside a cast of American and British celebrities, including Audrey Hepburn, Woody Allen, Cher, and Whoopi Goldberg.
Sessions with a psychic healer
Icke writes that it was when he was working for the Green Party, and particularly while he was writing the book in 1989, that he began to feel a presence around him, as though there was always someone else in the room, even when he was alone. He writes in
Days of Decision (1993) that it was a time of considerable personal despair for him, though he gives no details. In March 1990, he had an experience in a newsagent's that felt as though a magnetic force was pulling his feet to the ground, and he heard a voice tell him to look at a particular section of books. One of the books was by Betty Shine, a psychic healer, or channeller, in Brighton. He decided to visit her to ask for help with his arthritis. She told him she had a message for him. He was a healer who had been sent to heal the Earth, she said, and would become world famous, but would face enormous opposition. The spirit world was going to pass on ideas to him, which he would then speak to others about, sometimes not understanding the words himself. He was told he would write five books in three years; that in 20 years there will be a different kind of flying machine, where we can go wherever we want and time will have no meaning; and that there will be great earthquakes in unusual places, because the inner earth is being destabilized by having oil taken from the seabed.
In February 1991, Icke decided to travel to Peru, where he visited the pre-Inca Sillustani burial ground near Puno. He writes that he felt drawn to a large mound of earth, at the top of which lay a circle of waist-high stones. As he stood in the circle, he felt his feet pulled to the earth as if by a magnet, just as he had experienced in the newsagent's in Ryde, and an urge to outstrech his arms. His feet started to vibrate and burn, his head felt as though a drill was passing through it, and he felt two thoughts enter his mind: first, that people will be talking about this in 100 years, and then, "it will be over when you feel the rain." He said his body started shaking as though plugged into an electrical socket and new ideas began to pour into him. Time became meaningless, he writes, and he has no idea how long he stood there, arms outstretched. Then it started raining, and the experience ended as suddenly as it had begun. He described it later as the "kundalini"—a term from Indian yoga describing a libidinal force that lies coiled at the base of the spine—exploding up through his spine, activating his brain and his chakras, or energy centres, triggering a higher level of consciousness.
He returned to England and began to write a book about the experience,
Truth Vibrations, published in May that year. At a Green Party conference in Wolverhampton on March 20, 1991, before the book appeared, he resigned as one of the party's four prospective parliamentary candidates and Speakers, telling them he was about to be at the centre of "tremendous and increasing controversy," and winning a standing ovation from them after the announcement.
Turquoise period
What followed became what Icke calls his "turquoise period." He began to wear only turquoise because, he explained, it is a conduit of positive energy. He had met Deborah Shaw, an English psychic living in Calgary, Alberta, in August 1990, and after he returned from Peru, he struck up a relationship with her, which became close and led to the birth of a daughter, Rebecca, in December 1991. At one point, Shaw moved in with him and his wife. Shaw had changed her name to Mari Shawsun, while Icke's wife became known as Michaela, an aspect of the Archangel Michael, and they became known in the press as the "turquoise triangle," though Icke insisted at the time that he and Shaw were just friends. He answered reporters' questions about the relationship with, "if you resonate on this higher level then you see not two ladies, but two bodies with energy patterns."
In March 1991, a week after resigning from the Green Party, he, his wife, and Deborah/Mari held a press conference to announce that he had become a "channel for the Christ spirit," a title conferred on him by "the Godhead." He said the world would end in 1997, preceded by a number of disasters. There would be a severe hurricane around the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans, eruptions in Cuba, disruption in China, a hurricane in Derry, and an earthquake on the Isle of Arran. Los Angeles would become an island, New Zealand would disappear, and the cliffs of Kent would be under water by Christmas 1991. He said the information was being given to the three of them by voices and automatic writing.
In
In the Light of Experience (1993), Icke wrote that, at the time he gave the press conference, he didn't feel in control. He heard his voice predicting the end of the world, and was appalled by what he was saying. "I was speaking the words," he wrote, "but all the time I could hear the voice of the brakes in the background saying, 'David, what the hell are you saying? This is absolute nonsense'." His predictions were splashed all over the next day's front pages, to his great dismay.
Terry Wogan interview
The headlines attracted an invitation from the BBC's prime-time Terry Wogan talk show on April 29, 1991. Icke told Wogan, amid howls of laughter from the studio audience, that he was "the son of God," and that Britain would be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes. He later said that he had been misinterpreted, and that he had used the term "the son of God" to mean an "aspect" of the Infinite consciousness. The interview proved devastating for him. As the audience laughed, Wogan memorably pointed out that they were laughing
at him, not with him, and his humiliation seemed complete. He disappeared from public life, and for several years was unable to walk down the street without people pointing at and mocking him. His children were followed to school by journalists and ridiculed by schoolmates, and his wife would open the back door to get the washing in, only to find a camera crew filming her. Icke told Jon Ronson:
One of my very greatest fears as a child was being ridiculed in public. And there it was coming true. As a television presenter, I'd been respected. People come up to you in the street and shake your hand and talk to you in a respectful way. And suddenly, overnight, this was transformed into "Icke's a nutter." I couldn't walk down any street in Britain without being laughed at. It was a nightmare. My children were devastated because their dad was a figure of ridicule.
The BBC was criticized for allowing the interview to go ahead, Des Christy in
The Guardian calling it a "media crucifixion." Wogan interviewed Icke again in 2006, acknowledging that his comments had been a bit sharp, but Icke said the situation had been the making of him in the end, that the laughter had set him free. He wrote that every bridge back to his past was ablaze, giving him the courage to develop his ideas without caring what anyone thought of him.