The incident is equally lost to memory, but apparently it was never seen as a cause for alarm.
Another odd detail is that my sister had Jimmy Savile's autograph when she was a teenager. Allegedly my father had a chance meeting with Savile on an airplane (though interestingly enough, Savile claimed he never flew). As the head of Northern Foods, my father was a highly respected businessman with political connections, and he might well have run into Savile in, shall we say, less neutral circumstances. In Savile's surprisingly revealing autobiography, As It Happens, Savile mentions that, on his famous John o'Groats to Land's End charity run, he was accompanied by an executive from Northern Foods, the company that supplied him with food and drink for the run. So you could say that my family's business literally fueled Jimmy Savile's “run.”
What's in a metaphor?
“[I]f all art is the breaking of taboos, all breaking of taboos soon comes to be regarded as art…. and what is broken symbolically in art will soon enough be broken in reality.”
—Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It
In Dandy in the Underworld, Sebastian wrote: “A lifetime of neglect had left me seething with a lust for revenge.”
It was our grandfather who introduced my brother to the Glaswegian ex-gangster Jimmy Boyle. Alec had arranged for some of Boyle's sculptures to be exhibited in Hull. With his staunch liberal values about reform, he was impressed by Boyle, a celebrity after his book A Sense of Freedom was turned into a BBC film. Boyle was first imprisoned for murder in 1967, and was released in 1982. In his heyday, he was an enforcer and debt collector for the Glasgow mafia, known as “Scotland's most violent man.” Despite this, his sentence was reduced, and it seems reasonable to suppose my grandfather's support had something to do with it.
In 1983, Boyle and his wife Sarah Trevelyan teamed up with my brother and his partner and started the Gateway Exchange, a reform center for drug addicts, sex offenders, and ex-convicts in which my brother professed to be “well-camouflaged.” In his memoir, he writes how Boyle “allowed [him] to express forbidden impulses, secret wishes and fantasies” (S. Horsley, 2007, p. 119).1 My brother's fascination for criminality was something he shared with Alec and that included writing letters to the Kray twins and the notorious Moors murderer, Myra Hindley. A 1999 Guardian article about Jimmy Boyle mentions how, in 1967 (just before he was arrested), Boyle “was on the run in London and under the protection of the Krays”. According to my brother, Boyle worked with the Krays during the Sixties and possibly earlier. Jimmy Savile was connected to the Krays, and Savile was from Yorkshire, where my brother and I grew up and where Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper (whom Savile also knew), allegedly stalked his victims during my teen years. (During that period, Savile was questioned by police about the murders and briefly considered to be a suspect.)
As described in Seen and Not Seen, Savile's early days as a dance-club manager meant rubbing shoulders with gangsters, maybe even as a teenager. He and the Krays worked and played together in the Sixties, and were likely involved with the sex trafficking of children to members of the British elite, including via care homes where children were allegedly tortured, even killed (see Chapter 14). Myra Hindley and Ian Brady frequented the same dance halls where Savile DJ-ed, in Manchester in the 1960s, and Savile talked about being friends with Ian Brady. Brady (who grew up in Glasgow before moving to Manchester), bragged about his associations with the Glasgow mafia and the Kray twins. Glasgow was also where the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was founded, in 1975. It was affiliated with the National Council for Civil Liberties, a cause my family would almost certainly have actively supported. PIE's aim was to lower the age of consent to four, or to abolish it altogether.
It wasn't until I was writing Seen and Not Seen that I began to try to put all of these pieces together. It was like a first flyover of the scorched earth of my childhood. Since then I have touched down and begun to explore it more directly. The present work is like the first draft of a charred map.
“It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that lead to a man's extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.”
—Sebastian Horsley, private correspondence with the author
My brother's life-path combined worldly success with self-destruction and showed that the two were inseparable for him. When I first quoted the above line in Seen and Not Seen (a line my brother inscribed to me, though he probably stole it from somewhere), I understood it differently. I understood it to mean that the unconscious forces within a person's soul that drive them to create can also drive them to self-destruct. I am fairly sure that was how my brother meant it. Yet he chose the word “success,” not creativity or genius, and success has a distinctly worldly flavor to it. The way I read that quote now (at the end of the investigation you are about to read, if you do), is that the acts a man must commit in order to succeed, and the forces he must align himself with, are also those most likely to destroy him. This has nothing to do with creative self-expression, and everything to do with the will to power.
The tragic paradox of the artist is that the desire for worldly status is completely at odds with the deeper need of the soul to express what is within it to express. Yet both my brother and I were raised with the notion that worldly success was the final measure of how true or valuable one's expression (one's soul) was. To become a cultural leader was bred into us as the supreme social and personal goal, and as something we were entitled to by birthright. Despite Alec's Quakerism, which he only adopted later on and which my father probably rejected as hypocrisy, we had no religion in our family. My father's highest regard, like his father's, was for the intelligentsia. He made fun of my brother (a dyslexic) for being stupid, thereby delivering an axe blow to my brother's soul from which he never recovered. He gave us money in place of love, a value-set he inherited from his father, who once said, “To show you how much my father loved me, he left all his money to my brother.” (Alec had a lifelong rivalry with his older brother—just as I did.) We were all given snakes in place of fish.
My brother was a lousy Fabian. He tore off the sheep clothes and openly embodied the wolf. He didn't want to please but to offend—to please by offending. My grandfather posed as the soul of virtue and community values but behind the scenes he was a ruthless businessman and something much more than that (as I think this work will show). Sebastian brought the hidden, criminal aspect of our family heirloom to the fore. He strove to take moral turpitude as far as it could be taken, “to turn decadence into a virtue [and] make the soul monstrous” (2007, p. 291). As I realized while writing Seen and Not Seen, for all his proud defiance of conventional morality and social conscience, there were almost certainly acts which my brother was involved in that he couldn't talk about, not only because of legal consequences but also for fear of reprisals from those involved. So while our father and grandfather hid their secret lives behind a cloak of virtue, my brother hid his behind a cloak of vice. In many ways, it is an even better disguise.
Were there things my brother, father, and grandfather were sworn not to tell? If so, what were they? What follows is an attempt to answer this maddening question, using a combination of investigation, deduction, and imagination—all of which are equally required when dealing with generational secrets.
My brother described himself as a “failed suicide” and “a futile blast of color in a colorless world” (2007, p. 323). Privately, he told me that he considered suicide the only honorable path for a nihilist, implying that at a certain point he planned to take his own life in order to cheat death, or
