a cover story that covers a legion of sins. Ironically, it covers them not so much with an illusion of virtue, as in the much more famous case of Jimmy Savile (though Savile also paraded his vices). More akin to the magician Aleister Crowley (the subject of Part II of this work), my brother's cover was a dandy's cloak of glamorized vice, the art of which can be summed up (in a phrase he plagiarized from Quentin Crisp) as: “[T]hat which cannot be wholly concealed should be deliberately displayed” (S. Horsley, 2007, p. 184). It's my belief that Sebastian Horsley's “art” was not self-destruction, per se (though that was certainly a consequence of it), but the elaborate concealment of the social, cultural, and domestic forces that made his destruction inevitable. I think it shows how the abused is engineered, not only to protect his abusers, but to perpetuate the abuse.
Nor is my comparison to Savile entirely random. As I wrote in Seen and Not Seen, with his flamboyant outfits, bleached hair, jingle-jangling jewelry, and bizarre persona, Savile was also a dandy. Like my brother, and like the Child Catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Savile was known to wear a top hat once in a while. For those (non-British) readers who are unfamiliar with Savile, he was an English DJ, television and radio personality, dance hall manager, and charity fundraiser who hosted the BBC television show Jim'll Fix It, was the first and last presenter of the long-running BBC music chart show Top of the Pops, and who raised an estimated £40 million for charities. At the time of his death, he was admired by millions. After his death, however, hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse were made against him, indicating that Savile was possibly Britain's most prolific predatory sex offender. There were allegations during his lifetime, and rumors circulating for decades, but the accusers were ignored or disbelieved (Savile took legal action against some of them), and the rumors were dismissed. Savile's predations covered at least five decades and included hundreds, if not thousands, of victims, both male and female, ranging in age from five to seventy-five. Yet what is perhaps just as remarkable is the degree to which Savile's activities were facilitated, indicating that he was part of a larger criminal network that included the highest levels, not just of mass media and entertainment, but of government, law enforcement, and the intelligence community. Of the many honors he received, only some were removed after the truth came out. As discussed in Prisoner of Infinity, Jimmy Savile was a Catholic and belonged to the religious order of the Knights of Malta. He was given an OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1972, was made a Knight Bachelor “for charitable services,” and awarded a papal knighthood (Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great (KCSG)) from Pope John Paul II, in 1990. He held an honorary doctorate of law (LLD) from the University of Leeds, was an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Radiologists (FRCR), had the Cross of Merit of the Order pro merito Melitensi, an honorary green beret from the Royal Marines, an honorary doctorate from the University of Bedfordshire, and he was a Freeman of the Borough of Scarborough. In short, he was a national institution, and tearing that institution down after his death has not obscured the fact that it was the nation that made him thus.
I doubt my brother ever emulated Savile, but at the same time it's difficult to calculate the extent of Savile's influence on us, growing up during the Sixties and Seventies. During that period, Savile was considered the most influential man in British rock and roll, and my brother and I watched Top of the Pops every week, you might say religiously. My brother's first, and most lasting, role model was glam-rocker Marc Bolan, and in some ways Savile was an avatar of glam rock. Is it possible my brother could have learned some of his dandy-tricks from Savile? One of the most disturbing things about Savile was how open he was about his proclivities. He joked about them on TV and the radio (sometimes even with his victims present). He admitted to some in his autobiography, As It Happens. Yet nobody said anything.
The ongoing, seemingly unending revelations in the UK (which I suspect are just beginning in the US) around the institutionalized sexual abuse of children have forced people to reevaluate what they know about how corruption works and what it looks like. Once upon a time, we looked for sexual predators lurking on street corners and outside schoolyards: shady, shifty characters malingering on the margins of society, easy to identify and even easier to scapegoat. In post-Savile Britain, such a simple view is a luxury of ignorance. The real predators are in positions of power and access; they aren't marginal characters or outsiders, but the pillars of our community. Far from unwittingly exposing themselves by their shifty looks and guilty demeanors, they seem devoid of the self-awareness necessary for guilt. They don't give any of the “tells” we count on to alert us that someone is up to no good. In their own eyes, they are entitled to act the way they do. It is the power of privilege, and the privilege of power.
It's my view that the qualities for which my brother's self-destructive life and art (his artful self-destruction) are being celebrated were not the unique expressions of a creative soul, but symptoms of a fatally traumatized psyche. They were his desperate public attempt to get free of a cultural and familial morass, a struggle that, ironically and tragically, was embraced by that same culture as “art.” In Dandy in the Underworld, he even described that morass in terms of art: “If someone were to set up a production in which Bette Davis was directed by Roman Polanski,” he wrote, “it could not express to the full the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of my family. It was a foul octopus from whose tentacles I would never quite escape.”
“‘Sensation’ is deeply conventional, but it obeys a wicked and socially destructive convention.”
—Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It
My brother and I were born into the same tentacles of privilege. Our grandfather, Alec Horsley, went to Oxford, was assistant district officer in Nigeria from 1925 to 1932, and founded his own business, Northern Dairies, in 1937. He was also a founding member of the Hull Fabian Society, whose logo was and is a wolf in sheep's clothing. The Fabian Society laid the foundations for the UK Labour party, and Russell Brand has recently been advocating their ideas to the masses: a curious detail because my brother saw Brand as a rival. (Besides a penchant for top hats, sex, and drugs, and a camp messiah complex, there are other striking parallels between them.) In my grandfather's day, Fabian Society members advocated the ideal of “a scientifically planned society” which included “eugenics by way of sterilization.” The Hull branch of the Fabians was established in 1943, with sixteen members including a committee chaired by my grandfather. Apparently my grandfather followed closely in Bertrand Russell's footsteps, being a (closet) aristocrat who spoke out for the common man yet had little in common with him. (As far as I know, and apart from visiting prisons, he rarely if ever mixed with the lower classes.)
My father, Nicholas Horsley, joined Northern Dairies in the late 1950s, shortly after meeting my mother. Eventually, he took over as chairman and Northern Dairies became Northern Foods, a massive conglomerate most famously affiliated with Marks & Spencer (along with M&S, Northern Foods is credited with creating the chilled food industry). I was only dimly aware of any of this while growing up. The most significant development for me as a child was probably when Northern Foods forged an alliance with Rowntree Mackintosh, which meant our house was always full of chocolates. I was aware of the many parties, at both our own house and that of our grandparents, and of the many strangers who came and went, the general atmosphere of drunkenness, social and intellectual idealism, sexual license, and my grandfather's peculiar interest, not just in celebrity but in criminality.
In Seen and Not Seen, I quoted a passage in Dandy in the Underworld that describes a “pedophile friend of Grandfather's” who took a shine to me as a child. The book describes me as having “one of those faces of marvelous beauty which stopped strangers in the streets,” then adds that “a pedophile invited into the family circle could hardly have been expected to be indifferent.” I have no memory of this man, but I do recall how stories of his clumsy attempt at fondling
