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 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 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