David Icke Biography

David Vaughan Icke is an English writer, public speaker, and former media personality best known for his views on what he calls “who and what is really controlling the world”. Describing himself as the most controversial speaker and author in the world, he has written 16 books explaining his position, dubbed “New Age conspiracism”, and has attracted a substantial following across the political spectrum.

David Icke Age

He was on April 29, 1952, Leicester, Leicestershire, England, United Kingdom. His birth sign is Taurus. Currently, he is 67 years old.

David Icke Nationality

He is from the United Kingdom.

David Icke Education

He attended Whitehall Infant School, and then Whitehall Junior School. He has said he made no effort at school, but when he was nine he was chosen for the junior school’s third-year football team. He writes that this was the first time he had succeeded at anything, and he came to see football as his way out of poverty. He played in goal, which he wrote suited the loner in him and gave him a sense of living on the edge between hero and villain.

David Icke Family

The middle son of three boys born seven years apart, he was born in Leicester General Hospital to Beric Vaughan Icke and Barbara J. Icke, née Cooke, who were married in Leicester in 1951. His father wanted to be a doctor, but the family had no money, so he joined the Royal Air Force as a medical orderly. He was awarded a British Empire Medal for gallantry in 1943 after an aircraft crashed into the Chipping Warden airfield in Northamptonshire and his father, along with a squadron leader, ran into the burning aircraft without protective clothing and saved the life of a crew member trapped inside.

After the war, his father became a clerk in the Gents clock factory. The family lived in a terraced house on Lead Street in the center of Leicester, an area that was demolished in the mid-1950s as part of the city’s slum clearance. When he was three, around 1955, they moved to the Goodwood estate, one of the council estates the post-war Labour government built. “To say we were skint,” he wrote in 1993, “is like saying it is a little chilly at the North Pole. He recalls having to hide under a window or chair when the councilman came for the rent; after knocking, the rent man would walk around the house peering through windows. His mother never explained that it was about the rent; she just told Icke to hide. He wrote in 2003 that he still gets a fright when someone knocks on the door.

David Icke

David Icke Marriage

He met his first wife, Linda Atherton, in May 1971 at a dance at the Chesford Grange Hotel near Leamington Spa. Shortly after they met he left home, following one of a number of frequent arguments he had started having with his father. His father was upset that his arthritis was interfering with his football career. He moved into a bedsit and worked in a travel agency, traveling to Hereford twice a week in the evenings to play football. The couples got married on 30 September 1971, four months after they met. Their daughter was born in March 1975, followed by one son in December 1981, and another in November 1992.

The couple divorced in 2001 but remained good friends.

David Icke Football Career

After failing his 11-plus exam in 1963,  where he was given a trial for the Leicester Boys Under-Fourteen team. He left school at 15 after being talent-spotted by Coventry City, who signed him up in 1967 as their youth team’s goalkeeper. He also played for Oxford United’s reserve team and Northampton Town, on loan from Coventry. He later suffered Rheumatoid arthritis in his left knee, which spread to the right knee, ankles, elbows, wrists, and hands, stopped him from making a career out of football. Despite stating that he was often in agony during training, he managed to play part-time for Hereford United, including in the first team when they were in the fourth, and later in the third, division of the English Football League. He was earning up to $33 a week. But in 1973, at the age of 21, the pain in his joints became so severe that he was forced to retire.

David Icke Journalism Career

In 1973, he found a job as a reporter with the weekly Leicester Advertiser, through a contact who was a sports editor at the Daily Mail. He moved on to the Leicester News Agency, did some work for BBC Radio Leicester as its football reporter, then worked his way up through the Loughborough Monitor, the Leicester Mercury and BRMB Radio in Birmingham. In 1976, he worked for two months in Saudi Arabia, helping with the national football team. It was supposed to be a longer-term position, but he missed his wife and daughter and decided not to return after his first holiday back to the UK. BRMB gave him his job back, after which he successfully applied to Midlands today at the BBC’s Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham, a job that included on-air appearances. One of the earliest stories he covered there was the murder of Carl Bridgewater, the paperboy shot during a robbery in 1978.

In 1981 Icke became a sports presenter for the BBC’s national program Newsnight, which had begun the previous year. Two years later, on 17 January 1983, he appeared on the first edition of the BBC’s Breakfast Time, British television’s first national breakfast show, and presented the sports news there until 1985, which meant getting up at two o’clock in the morning five days a week. In the middle of 1983, he achieved his ambition when he co-hosted Grandstand, at the time the BBC’s flagship national sports program. He also published his first book that year, It’s  Tough Game, Son!, about how to break into the football.

In August 1990, his contract with the BBC was terminated when he initially refused to pay the Community Charge (also known as the “poll tax”), a local tax Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced that year. He ultimately paid it, but his announcement that he was willing to go to prison rather than pay prompted the BBC, by charter an impartial public-service broadcaster, to distance itself from him.

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