Why I will never love my father: When art critic Brian Sewell set out to find the truth about the father he'd never known, he uncovered a sinister story of sex, cruelty and betrayal

By Brian Sewell
Updated: 08:07 EDT, 14 November 2011

Discovery: Brian Sewell's father was Philip Heseltine, better known as composer Peter Warlock

To put it bluntly, I am illegitimate, a bastard, the child of a one-parent family. My mother, a Roman Catholic, refused my father’s instruction to abort me, and in the 1930s, a decade devastated by the Great Depression, educated me as best she could, despite being as poor as a church mouse.

As a child I did not miss my father, did not even know that I should have one and was not curious until, when I was ten, my mother married my stepfather and they attempted to convince me that he was my true father.

Children are too knowing for such deceptions, and the deceit was to spoil the relationship with him that might have developed had they told the truth.

When my stepfather eventually told me, shortly before I joined the Army as a National Serviceman, that he was not my father, I answered: ‘I know. I’ve always known.’

Who then was my father, and why was I never told? Why did my mother tell me so much about her early life — and as a girl-about-town in the 1920s it had been wonderfully colourful — but never tell me who my father was?

She let slip snippets of information when in nostalgic mood. Although they seemed of scant significance I treasured them, and over the years, as I stitched them together, I had a sense of him, shadowy, but never a name.

It seemed, at first, romantic, but then the need to know became a longing that gnawed at my mind.

In the summer of 1986, when I was 55 and on my way to make an inventory of early churches in Turkish Armenia, I let loose a sudden misery. It came during a rare moment of total relaxation, eating strawberries with a friend and discussing the antiquities of the great museum where I had spent the day.

Suddenly, I was overwhelmed by the need to know who I was. It was instantly followed by the resolution to find out.

Months later, back in London, I began the campaign to persuade my mother to confess the facts and tell me why she had for so long been determined to conceal them. I wheedled and I bullied; I confronted her with all that I thought I knew — but she gave me nothing.

Yet to the friend who had been with me in Turkey, however, she eventually told the tale. Telling him, she must have argued with Catholic reasoning, was not the same as telling me.

Troubled: A young Brian Sewell, who spent a decade working for Christie's as an expert on paintings by Old Masters

My father was Philip Heseltine, better known as Peter Warlock (his chosen alter ego), a minor composer of the early 20th century, critic, writer, editor, man-about-town and waspish maker of enemies; my mother was one of his several mistresses, more or less concurrent.

He was sexually voracious, happiest with three in his bed — either men or women. His tastes ran to sadism and were said to include flagellation. If his girls became pregnant, as often they did, he gave them a fiver to pay for an abortion.

My mother, pregnant with me, refused this offer — as a devout Roman Catholic — and within days of a blazing row over the matter, Warlock committed suicide. For this my mother blamed herself.

For three years or so after my birth, my mother and I lived in the handsome house in Wales where Warlock’s mother lived. But although she was welcoming enough at first, she also had his legitimate first son, by then a teenager, to care for and educate, and she wanted no confusion — the Heseltines were a family of some substance and reputation, though her son had neither.

We were suddenly banished, but, on an undertaking from my mother never to tell me of my origin and to make no further claim, she was given a small monthly stipend, which left her teetering on the verge of penury. This ended when World War II got into its stride and my stepfather came into my life.

Left, Sewell's mother, aged 34, after banishment from Cefn Bryntalch. Right, Sewell's mother at the time of her involvement with Heseltine/Warlock. Sewell says she was far the most beautiful of his mistresses, most of them 'dumpy little frumps'

I am not unhappy to have had Peter Warlock as my father — it perhaps explains my passionate response to music and my wayward sexuality. And wayward it has been, even more random and casual than his, though without the abortions and other consequences.

It was at school, Haberdashers’ in Hampstead, as it then was — the only school that would take a boy who’d had no formal education of any kind — that I realised, by the time I was 12, that I was not quite as other boys. Our sexual fumblings meant more to me than to them; mine were more selective and there was soon an emotional element that went beyond their curiosity.

At 18, troubled by the conflict between my sexuality and my devout Catholicism, I determined to abstain from sex.

For a decade I fought this demon, a decade that included my years as a student and a soldier, when the temptations were legion, depending on my faith for strength. Faith, however, declined inexorably into the dry discipline of regular observance, brought me no comfort and eventually withered into despair.

Discovery: Brian Sewell's father was Philip Heseltine, better known as composer Peter Warlock, left. To a great extent, his early career was directed by his friendship with Anthony Blunt, right

For the first time in my life I dared to challenge God. Feeling wretched and not in a state of Grace, I walked past my church and into London’s Kensington Gardens, and there complained that for ten years I had touched no other man or boy, but that God had not removed or even reduced the power of the demon.

I don’t quite know what I expected, but nothing happened — no thunderclap, no revelation, no comfort. Or so I thought. Within days I encountered Eric Bewsey, discreetly dressed, conventionally good-looking, a civil servant, and went to bed with him.

This arked a period of promiscuity in which I was often bedding two, three, four and even five lovers a day. Was I making up for lost opportunities or was I exultant at the new freedom of not being constrained by Catholic guilt?

Used: Brian felt he was never treated well by Christie's auction house and felt bitter for years after he left

It was a good thing I had adopted a more open attitude to sex by this point — or I would have found the decade I spent working for Christie’s as an expert on paintings by Old Masters quite shocking.

In the carpet warehouse there was regular brothel business at lunchtime, with the senior porter guarding the door and taking the entrance fee from below-stairs staff wishing to conjugate with a working girl or two on the heaped treasures of the silk route.

I found that my own sexuality was ingeniously exploited while working there. I was in the terrible position of being the pretty boy sent from London to ‘seal the deal’ with members of high society who were considering buying valuable artworks and often found myself trying to fend them off.

One High Court judge fell to his knees, pleading with me. I never complied, but I felt used by Christie’s, and was bitter about the way they treated me for years afterwards. Does this still happen in the art market, I wonder?

To a great extent, my early career was directed by my friendship with Anthony Blunt, who became Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures and was later exposed as a spy. Both my friendship with him and my life as an art critic were founded in my decade of arid celibacy and were closely intertwined.

I was a student at the Courtauld Institute in London, with Anthony Blunt among my most inspired and inspiring tutors.

My post-graduate work at Windsor, on Old Master drawings in the Royal Collection, came through Anthony; so did my work on 17th century French painting at the Royal Academy — the point at which, quite early, I was first recognised as something of a scholar (now forgotten and overtaken).

Joining Christie’s was the kiss of death as far as scholarship was concerned, though. Through every subsequent professional vicissitude Anthony remained a staunch friend and adviser. The gutter press and Private Eye would have it that we were lovers, but it was never so.
Ours was the uncluttered platonic friendship of men who can confide the deepest secret, trust in silence and discretion, and reliably depend on each other in emergencies. I have said I loved him, but in the sense that Saint Francis was loved by his followers.

Scholar: Brian Sewell was a student at the Courtauld Institute in London

If, at 80, I write of these private things, it is for the benefit and encouragement of others.

I am so much aware of the damage done by the concealment of identity — both in terms of sexuality and one’s parentage. For me searching for my father became an anguished quest, and I know this to be so for thousands of adopted children who confront the pretence and the effect of feeling that asking the question is forbidden.

With the death of my stepfather I thought the barrier had perhaps been removed, only to find my mother intransigent for another quarter of a century, by then into her 80s and perhaps soon to lose her once clear memory.

When at last I had the answer to my ‘Who was my father?’ question, I experienced an overwhelming relief, an extraordinary sense of relaxation.

There was neither exultation nor pleasure in the knowledge, just satisfaction that I knew.

I had always disliked Warlock’s music — mournful, self-conscious, forced; now I dislike it more and will not listen to it. I dislike the crude sexual humour of his limericks — written to ridicule other musicians.

Indeed there is very little to like about the man (or so I deduce from the couple of biographies about him), and so I feel no pride in our relationship and am mildly disturbed by our similarities.

One thing redeems him. When he decided to take his life in December 1930, he did so by turning on the gas oven. His last act before putting finger and thumb to the tap was to put out his cat.

• Outsider. Always Almost: Never Quite, £25, is published by Quartet Books on November 23.