“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead?”
Introduction: Glamor Vice
Who in today’s world has the courage to write for truth and justice? Who is willing to be that square?
It’s easy enough to write about things that don’t directly concern us; or about things that do concern us but that people want to hear, good things that we will be loved and admired for sharing. But what about the things we have been trained, from the inception of self-awareness, not to speak about? The things we are socially bound to keep hidden? To talk or write of these things is to break an unspoken contract of silence, a contract we never consciously agreed to, and one we never had the option of consciously refusing.
This is the thing no one wants to do.
It’s also the thing that most needs to be done. Because until the agreement not to speak, write, or even think about certain things is broken, our speaking, writing, and thinking will be strangled by the fear, conscious or not, of breaking that contract: of expressing the unspeakable. At which point, the social support system which we have relied on for our whole lives, and on which the survival of our identity depends, will no longer support us. We will be cut loose, and set adrift on a cold, dark, and unforgiving sea of broken meanings.
If I write this, it’s not because I want to; it’s because I have to.
*
“I too found my inner child some years ago—and had an abortion.”
—Sebastian Horsley, 2004, private correspondence
My brother, self-proclaimed “dandy in the underworld” Sebastian Horsley, was an artist most celebrated for his potentially (and in the end actually) self-destructive pursuits. A recent Time Out article listed him as one of London’s top ten drug-users; another 2014 piece about the Hollywood actor Shia LeBeouf wrote that my brother “convincingly made his own fatal self-destruction a work of art.” That sentence speaks volumes. Who exactly did my brother’s artistic self-destruction convince, and of what? That suicide is a worthy artistic pursuit? Or that artistic expression (or fame) is worth destroying oneself for? What sort of legacy does such a “work of art” leave? How can someone compulsively driven to destroy themselves be turned into a cause for celebration?
I am one of two people still living (along with my sister, a psychotherapist) with close inside knowledge of the forces that drove my brother to self-destruct. As such, one thing is painfully clear to me: whatever “message” my brother conveyed, via his life and death, it is not a true message but a fiction: a cover story that covers a legion of sins. Ironically, it covers them not with an illusion of virtue, as in the much more famous case of Jimmy Savile, but with a dandy’s parade of glamorized vice. It’s my belief that Sebastian Horsley’s “art” was not self-destruction but the elaborate concealment of the social, cultural, and domestic forces that made his destruction inevitable. I think it shows how the abused is programmed by abuse, 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 wore top hats. I doubt my brother ever emulated Savile, but at the same time it’s difficult to guess at 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, 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 them in his autobiography. Yet nobody said anything.
The ongoing, seemingly unending revelations in the UK 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 privileges 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.”
*
“If someone were to set up a production in which Bette Davis was directed by Roman Polanski, 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.”
—Dandy in the Underworld
My brother and I were born into that same sort 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, 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 Labor party, and Russell Brand is currently 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, there are other striking parallels between them; onTime Out’s list of drug-users, Brand is no. 9 to my brother’s 7). 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 his associate Bertrand Russell’s footsteps, being an 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 (Northern Foods “invented” the packaged sandwich and pioneered package meals). 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 (Fabian-affiliated) Rowntree Mackintosh, which meant our house was always full of chocolates. What I was aware of were 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: Confessions of a Movie Autist, I quoted a passage in Dandy in the Underworld that describes a “pedophile friend of Grandfather’s, his face riddled with cancer” 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, so 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 me under the dinner table were told with amusement by my parents. The incident is equally lost to memory, but apparently it was never seen as 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 Groat’s 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 (in a van following behind him). So you could say that my family’s business literally fueled Jimmy Savile’s “run.”
What’s in a metaphor?
*
“A lifetime of neglect had left me seething with a lust for revenge.”
—Dandy in the Underworld
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 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.”[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 notorious Yorkshire ripper (whom Savile also knew), allegedly stalked his victims during my teen years.[2]
As I 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. 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 Pedophile 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 simply abolish it altogether.
It wasn’t until I was writing Seen and Not Seen that I began to try and put all of these pieces together. It was like a first flyover of the charred earth of my childhood. Since then I have touched down and began 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 to 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 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 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 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 given scorpions in place of eggs.
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 put 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.” 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 clock 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.” 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 God, of that pleasure. More poetically, he wrote in Dandy that the 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. Everyone who grew up during this period in Britain, watching Jimmy Savile cracking jokes about his crimes on national TV every week, going to schools and care homes run by sexual predators, unable to talk about it or even consciously acknowledge it, 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 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 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 own teacup.
It has to start somewhere.
**********
This is an 18-part work which I will serialize over the coming weeks. The full piece, without images, is available as a PDF on request, for those who prefer not to wait.
[1] From Seen and Not Seen: ‘A year after his release, in 1983, Jimmy Boyle and his wife Sarah (Boyle’s psychiatrist in prison, and daughter of the aristocrat and British film censor, John Trevelyan) opened The Gateway Exchange, a rehabilitation center in Edinburgh for alcoholics and drug addicts that encouraged creative expression. My brother and his then-girlfriend (eventually wife), Evlynn Smith, also came aboard the project. “Within a month of its launch,” Sebastian wrote in Dandy, “the Gateway was full of murderers, junkies, lunatics and sexual deviants—I was well camouflaged.” He describes himself as Boyle’s “servant”: ‘When [Boyle] gave commands there was nothing to do but obey. For me, he took the place of an absent parent. . . . What I loved about Jimmy was that he allowed me to express forbidden impulses, secret wishes and fantasies. He seduced me because he did not have the conflicts that I had.’”
[2] During that period, Savile was questioned by police about the murders and briefly considered by them to be a suspect.
Auticulture 
Wow. What a work. Admittedly I only made it about 1/2 the way in because of…lessee…erm, my own personal situation with writing about “the bad stuff.” But I’m hooked. Thank you.
Absolutely ready for this. I honor the courage and hard work that it took to publish something so raw. Thank you.
Stunning, gripping depth that leaves a body lost….for words.
It takes courage to write about these things publicly. While I’m not happy that your family struggled with these deep challenges, I enjoy reading about them from your perspective. I think one person’s healing can often help others to heal, which is one of the reasons for you to write about this topic I imagine.
From what I understand it has been several years since your brother’s passing. Still, I also just wanted to say that I’m sorry for your loss.
Thank you, and to everyone who’s commented. I realized once I added the images to this piece that I have moved from wanting to expose my brother to wanting to avenge him, tho of course that word is a bit more loaded than I’d like.
Let’s just say show the true meaning that his life had. & so I am still processing the loss of him, not just through his senseless death but in his life also.
Yes, I had also meant to imply the loss of him in life. Still, every life has it’s own meaning and every life is sacred. Not that it had to be that way, and I do think it’s tragic, but that once the totality of one’s life can be accepted as is we bypass the need for conflict – internal and external.
That movement from revenge to avenge is powerful. It’s a shift that moves mountains of fixed structures in our minds/bodies.
Got chills reading that. Had not thought of it as revenge to- avenge, but you may be right (that the desire to expose was a desire for revenge).
Of course you’re going to get around to explaining what your late brother meant by”latent violence” in your family, and why he compared his childhood environment to a “foul octopus” — was he grandstanding, joking, playing to his public, tapping into an existing fascination with depravity, just playing his role as a performing nihilist ?
Or did he mean it —
He meant it, as a true visceral response, I think, yet of course the memoir exaggerated everything. I was struck by it myself recently, what WAS he referring to? Consciously he was referring to the alcohol and wife-swapping, but for an avowed amoralist and heroin addict, that doesn’t really add up to a “foul octopus” (tho it might well be to a child). He also referred to his childhood as “magical,” which I think ties into the Prisoner of Infinity dissociation theme, maybe…
Interesting. You will always be my nephew. You are entitled to your point of view. I am sad that you try to besmirch the virtue of the Fabian Society which has a long standing history of left wing research as its motivating force. I don’t recall anything in Talbot Lodge in my youth about the Fabian Society in Hull. Alec certainly was a member of the Labour Party until 1949 when he left Hull City Council because it was always too rigid in its outlook – and he accused it of its own corruption. The Fabian Society didn’t feature in his life. I can’t speak about your father Nick as I wasn’t close to him – he was 8 yeares older than me but I doubt if he had much to do with it at all. Your uncle Jefferson
Thank you for commenting.
http://www.hullhistorycentre.org.uk/discover/hull_history_centre/our_collections/politics_and_pressure_groups/politicalcampaigns.aspx
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Very strong shot across the bow. The picture appears to be coming into sharp/deep focus. please send the PDF.
Your perspective on the not speakable is absolutely on point. I relate to your understanding of your experience in so many ways, visceral, somatic, emotional and psychological because the unspeakable was omnipresent in my and my sisters’ childhoods and in the childhood of my wife and her siblings. I have been wrestling with this for my lifetime.
Thank you for sharing and for daring to make connections between institutionalized abuse and those in power who found such institutions often to legitimize their power and ability to exploit their environment and the people in it to the fullest extent that their fancy takes them. That is the fundamental base-meaning of the extolled cultural virtue of ‘profit maximization.’
We, the members of this culture, have almost universally accepted the righteousness of power in the hands of the powerful and, concomitantly by necessity of that acceptance, the subjugation and/or exploitation of everything else on the planet by the powerful, including the planet’s flora and fauna, the land, the water, and people regardless of age.
At our core we are members of the exploiter. And we will remain both the exploiter and exploited until truth and reconciliation is made to the truth of ourselves as keepers of the brutality, too.
This article is a great start.
Thanks egajd, that’s a great confirmation message. I think it’s not at our CORE, however, that we are aligned with the exploiter. The core surely is pristine and infinite, pure awareness. But at a deep level of defense of that core, we seem to have aligned. The mistake being perhaps that what is pure and foundational cannot be violated, does not need defending.
Jasun
People are praising you everywhere I look and it’s highly justified. You are helping a lot of us climb the barriers of the unspeakable – you provide a forum and also the tools we need to dismantle many taboos that keep us silent about abuse we either suffer or witness.
Over on your other forum I’ve left a comment that seems to say the opposite about a situation where I was a witness to child abuse. Except that wasnt exactly the case: I suspected it and in my attempts to deal with living next door to it, I got sucked into a world of punishment, pain and paranoia.
We need language to talk about all the moral shadings in these cases, and all the ways feelings and perceptions and reactions get repressed when we live by the rules instead of our instincts . Self censorship is stopping us from evolving on so many levels.
It’s good to read the signs: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.” Sometimes our feet walk us into places we have to talk ourselves out of afterwards.
I’ve been remembering what I learned in school about Fabians because at 13 I became a Marxist. Odd for a pubescent girl. I became enamored with VI Lenin although it really started with Ilya Kuryakin – i started learning Russian. Its hard to eroticize men with big smelly beards but I read The Communist Manifesto and wrote a book report on it. Who had gotten to me to make me so passionate about revolution? What were they putting in kids’ heads?
Fabian socialism was something the books skipped over to get to the Bolsheviks. Nobody I knew was ever a “Fabian” – but there were Maoists and Trotskyites and anarchists – it was much cooler to be hardline and violent. When I went to school, that is.
Now I realize the Fabians were there but they were the elite masterminds, invading the sciences and professions – where they studied ways of better controlling humans without our knowing. They set the agendas and studied the results, never saying what they were really thinking. Which was of ways to control, exploit and eliminate the rest of us.
Do you agree?
As happens I just read this in Fabian Freeway:
Perhaps not a coincidence then that the FS was founded the same year Marx died (in London)?
So, Bolshevism for the masses, Fabianism for the secretive elite and its enlightened despots.
I never realized until recently that ‘communism’ as an ideology and program was concocted to rule us more efficiently.
But there have also been inspiring moments when people, collectively, have come together to overthrow oppressive regimes. It does happen sometimes. Spontaneously. Not often enough.
Part of what my grandfather & Bertrand Russell were involved with, with CND, was setting the template for “peaceful protest.” It began with Oxford alumni Gandhi, of course. Who had a Russell quote on his wall:
‘From this time forth till the Independence of the nation, three major influences could be felt throughout the land: British Evangelicalism, Italian and German Fascism, and Russian Communism. While people like Gandhi and Tagore were influenced by British Evangelicalism, Golwalkar and Hedgewar (RSS) were influenced by Fascism, and Bhagat Singh was influenced by Communism (though these influences had a unique blend with the Indian socio-historical experience). The non-violent and peaceful protest methods that Gandhi upheld had an immense impact on the conscience of the nation. Certainly, as Bertrand Russell noted (and his statement hangs emblazoned in Mahatma Gandhi’s home in Ahmedabad), “It is doubtful that the method of Mahatma Gandhi would have succeeded except that he was appealing to the conscience of a Christianized people.’
http://domenicm.blogspot.ca/2010/11/the-war-of-kalinga-and-modern-religious.html
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Hi Jasun,
I am toying with the idea of translating your series into German and publishing them on my blog on “Allmystery”, the largest and most popular forum on conspiracies and fringe science in the German–speaking world. I am not a professional philologist and it would be a time-consuming effort for me.
I just want to ask you if you would mind.
Hi Stephan; I will email you about this later today, look out for a proton mail!
Thanks ! But I have not received any mail from you yet.
sorry, have done now