David Delvin
Lively and light-hearted sex guru whose breezy advice reassured both the curious and the insecure
DAVID DELVIN, who has died aged 79, was a doctor and media sex guru who dispensed breezy advice to the curious and insecure, reassuring them, as a colleague once put it, “that you’re touching the right bits at the right time”; he also achieved the rare distinction of having been both the subject of a complaint to the General Medical Council (GMC) and a council member.
The author of more than 30 books with titles such as How to Improve Your Sex Life (1983) and The Big O (1995, co-written with his second wife, Christine Webber), as well as magazine columns, Delvin appeared frequently on television, addressing problems from erectile dysfunction to the female orgasm (real and fake).
In the opening episode of The Good Sex Guide, the 1993 ITV late-night documentary series (for which he wrote a lavishly illustrated companion book), he was seen in a working men’s club presiding over a “pin the tail on the donkey” game to see if club members could locate a woman’s clitoris – half could not. His jokey, matey approach was not, perhaps, to everyone’s taste, but it proved highly effective.
It was a style that Delvin developed in his first major work, The Book Of Love (1974), an explicit sex guide which was banned in Ireland, translated into more than 10 languages, won the American Medical Writers’ Association “Best Book” award and became a family planning textbook, selling more than a million copies in Britain alone.
Mostly Delvin aimed to quell anxieties. While in books such as Position of the Week (2013 – a work described by its publishers as a “light-hearted Kama Sutra with 52 new ways to make love”) he offered a tongue-incheek smorgasbord of exotic approaches to sex, he advised the average practitioner to avoid those which could be achieved only by a “trained acrobat or contortionist”. Likewise, the nation’s menfolk might have been reassured by his observation that things often look smaller than they really are when viewed from above.
David George Delvin was born in London on January 28 1939 to an Irish mother and Scots teacher father, and spent his early wartime childhood moving between homes in Ireland, Scotland and England to avoid the bombings. As a child he developed a passion for reading and writing, but after his mother succumbed to kidney failure when he was 17, he set his sights on a medical career, training at King’s College Hospital, London, after education at St Dunstan’s College, Catford.
By the time he qualified in 1962, he had become interested in sexual medicine, struck by the widespread ignorance of patients and doctors on such matters. As a medical student the full extent of his training had consisted of “one lecture on the cap, and one on abortion, infanticide and rape”.
As a junior doctor at King’s,
Delvin saw many Jamaican patients from nearby Brixton. Charmed by their “sense of fun and courage”, he was delighted to be sent in 1966 to Jamaica by the Ministry of Overseas Development. There he began contributing a weekly
“Dear Doc” column in the Daily Gleaner, which he continued to write for 50 years.
Back in Britain, he worked with the Family Planning Association and the Institute of Psychosexual Medicine, became a founding fellow of the Faculty of Family Planning of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and began writing professionally after a short piece in the Guardian earned him more than he took home in a week as a junior doctor.
In 1974, however, he was informed by the GMC that he had been reported for a “Love, Sex and Health” column in She magazine which he had started to write under his own name, contrary to GMC rules banning “self-advertisement”, though Delvin felt the real reason was that “a lot of stuffy people couldn’t cope with articles about sex”. (The “offending” articles would later be commended in the Medical Journalists’ Association awards).
After a traumatic seven weeks, Delvin managed to avoid being struck off courtesy of fellow doctors, mainly GPS, who were angered at what they saw as the council’s double standards. “Nobody would insist that the Queen’s physician not be named. It was only general practitioners who had to remain anonymous,” he recalled. Many in the profession credit Delvin for opening a channel between medicine and the media now seen as vital in public health education.
In 1979 Delvin contrived to get himself elected to the GMC partly motivated, he later admitted, by a desire “to show the buggers”, and partly by a determination to challenge the culture of what he described as “a reactionary and racist organisation”. He spent his first few years on the council campaigning against its links with South Africa.
He married his first wife, Kathy, in 1966. The marriage was dissolved and in 1988 he married, secondly, Christine Webber, a lead singer in the Black And White Minstrel Show in the 1970s who became a television presenter, writer and psychotherapist and collaborated with her husband, on among other things a column for The Spectator.
She survives him with two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.
David Delvin, born January 28 1939, died March 9 2018