most important thing about facing the firing squad was to give the order oneself. Much of my brother's self-mythologizing was effective. It was believed, even, perhaps especially, by the people he kept close to him (which did not include his family). It was then picked up by the mainstream media, and today his death is seen by many as less tragic than heroic, as proof of a life lived on its own terms. Live by the needle, die by the needle. Such a view conveniently ignores—banishes—the question of what caused the suicidal addiction to begin with.
My brother and I were born and raised in an environment that glamorized vice and normalized corruption—in which corruption disguised itself as virtue. How else was he to feel safe in such an environment except by matching it, rejecting all virtue as a lie, and becoming as corrupt—openly so—as the world around him?
Children imitate not what they are told but what they are shown. Thinking of everyone who grew up during this period in Britain, watching Jimmy Savile cracking jokes about his crimes on national TV, going to schools and care homes run by sexual predators, unable to talk about it or even consciously acknowledge it, the question arises, what sort of long-term effect does this have on generations of children? My brother's case may just be one, particularly extreme case among legion.
There's no hard evidence my brother was sexually abused as a child. But then, there almost never is. Often the incident or incidents that traumatize a person's psyche are pushed into unconsciousness, shrouded by a protective veil of amnesia; and the deeper the trauma, the darker the veil. But the trauma shows through anyway: it shows through as behaviors. There is very little about my brother's public life, his persona, and his interest-obsessions, that doesn't point to a hidden history of abuse. Add to that the countless pieces of circumstantial evidence that our family circle overlapped, at multiple points—if it wasn't entirely at one with—the circles of systematized sexual abuse currently coming to light in the UK, and what does that leave?
Glamorized vice. If you can't beat them, join them.
The only reason you are reading this work is because my own efforts to join the culture that abused me have proven as futile as my efforts to beat it. All that leaves is to make official my refusal to participate, to testify, to defy my programming, to be the voice that was strangled, the voice that says no in thunder, even if the storm goes no further than my teacup.
It has to start somewhere.
PART I
OCCULT YORKSHIRE: FABIAN FAMILY SECRETS AND JIMMY SAVILE'S BRITAIN
“There is in society a parallel universe that is very close. All of us, whether knowingly or unknowingly, have frequent contact with it. It is populated by individuals who outwardly appear to be respectable, law abiding and not infrequently influential, and even popular members of society. They are found in all professions and they sexually abuse children, some in ways that are almost unimaginably extreme.”
—“Institutional abuse and societal silence: An emerging global problem” (Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, January 2014)
“If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?”
—Luke, 11:11
CHAPTER I
The Grandfather: Alec Horsley, Northern Dairies, the Fabian Society
“Even though meritocracy is their reliable cover, social stratification was always the Fabians’ real trump suit. Entitlements are another Fabian insertion into the social fabric, even though the idea antedates them, of course.”
—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education
The first thing that stood out about my family history was my brother's relationship to Jimmy Boyle. My brother first met Boyle at Stevenson College, Edinburgh where Boyle was doing a “Training for Freedom” course, working two days a week at the local community center then returning to Saughton Prison at night. I knew he'd met Boyle via our paternal grandfather, so that was the next logical place to focus, in terms of seeking the beginning of the rot that eventually felled the tree. My brother was the eldest son of the eldest son of my grandfather, so back to the paternal ancestors I would go.
There isn't much online about Alec Horsley; fortunately, a cousin, who was also interested in our family background, sent me a PDF of a short memoir Alec wrote in 1987, as a foreword to a collection of poems by a prisoner he'd befriended in his seventies, Joy and Woe by Trevor Ounsworth. Ounsworth was a convicted rapist and one of the poems is allegedly about rape. I wasn't able to read the poems, but Alec's short introduction-memoir provided me with some names and dates that allowed for a whole latticework of associations to emerge.
My grandfather was born in 1902 and went to Oxford, Worcester College, probably in 1922. By his own account, he won a scholarship that almost entirely paid his way there. Who did he meet there and what was his involvement, if any, in the arcane Oxford secret societies and hazing rituals? My initial guess is that, since my grandfather (apparently) wasn't from the aristocracy, it was here he made the connections that sent him on the road to “Bilderberg” thereafter. As he writes: “My family progressed from working class to lower middle. And as for me, thanks to Oxford, country sport, and colonial appointment, I was busy scaling the class ladder, without being aware of my own drives” (Ounsworth, 1987, p. 5, emphasis added). There is some reason to question Alec's account of things, however. His father, George Horsley, drove a Rolls-Royce some of the time (a habit my brother unconsciously copied in his early twenties), apparently alternating between wealth and poverty depending how well his enterprises were going. A Rolls-Royce is not a well-known perk for the “lower middle.”
After Oxford, Alec worked in Nigeria from 1925 to 1932, either as assistant to the district officer or as district officer, depending on the source (Alec himself claimed the former, so it's most likely accurate). After he returned to the UK, got married, had children, and founded Northern Dairies, World War II broke out and my grandparents established their family home Talbot Lodge, in Hessle. “From the start,” he writes, “we gained a reputation for holding ‘open house’ and encouraged and of course enjoyed the visits of our many friends…They came from all over Britain and several far off and sometimes exotic places abroad” (Ounsworth, 1987, p. 8).
As I wrote in Seen and Not Seen, among Alec's lifelong pals were
Jacob Bronowski (The Ascent of Man), who worked for the Ministry of Home Security during World War Two (i.e., he was a spy), and Baron Eric Roll. Roll was appointed Professor of Economics and Commerce at University College, Hull, with the backing of John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist and (not so famous) pederast. This would have been around the time my grandfather met Roll. Roll worked for the Ministry of Food, went on to become director of the Bank of England, and between 1986 and 1989 acted as chairman of the notorious (among conspirologists) Bilderberg meetings. (p. 274)
In 1954, Alec held the office of sheriff of Hull. The position was abolished in 1974 for whatever reason, and then reestablished in 2013. Since then it has been held by Virginia Bottomley, who was a governor of the London School of Economics for thirty-one years!1 The closely-related office of high steward of Kingston upon Hull has been occupied by the infamous Peter Mandelson since the same year, 2013, having also been abolished for the same period. Mandelson is accused of being a high-level “Satanist” at some of the more extreme conspiracy theory internet sites (e.g., Henry Makow), as well as, jokingly, of
