| JB
Fact File: Eton
College |
 Jeremy Huggins, Eton portrait, 1949. |
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The Worst of Times: I'd rather my nose had been smashed at school: Jeremy Brett talks to Danny Danziger -Published in The Independent, Monday, 12th October 1992. (article orginally posted by The well known adventuress on Holmesian.net) |
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I
REMEMBER the desolation when Mummy's car left and I was marooned.
I found that so frightening. And having my own room made me
instantly lonely. I cried the first night because I was alone. Well, I was scared. I found the uniform alarming. I don't think black is a frightfully good idea for someone that young. I remember the first morning trying to open my starched collar with a nail file so I could breathe. I was crippled by a kind of beauty, which was hell for me, and I got a lot of wrong responses. I had blondish, long hair, and in a school full of boys that is the nearest thing to a girl you can get. It makes you very self-conscious. I watched other pretty boys do better than me. I remember walking around holding my mouth differently, and out-staring, and I cut my hair and poked at my face with a pin, and tried to infect the wound with dirt. |
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older boys could send junior boys on errands, and I was sent by
one of the top members of my house to take a message to a boy in
another house. And when I got there, after a few minutes, I was
aware that I had been sent for other reasons, and I began to
retreat. He said: 'I want a picture of you, that's all.' But I felt
threatened by him, and frightened by the fact I had been set up by
the boy in my house. But you never told your parents you were unhappy, because you knew, especially me, the youngest of four, that it was costing them practically everything they had to keep you there. I was beaten a great deal. You had to wait until after the beating when they asked: 'Do you have anything to say?' You would say: 'No.' 'You may leave,' they then said. And you must then say: 'Thank you.' The first time, I got up, and out of panic, I immediately said thank you. 'Oh,' they said, 'he likes it, bend over,' and I got another five. I got 158 strokes altogether, which now seems unbelievable. Sometimes I wasn't quite certain why I was being beaten. I hope they got their kicks . . . but that made me very bitter. The experience haunted me for quite a time after I left. It made me very unsure of my gender, because I was attractive. When girls found me attractive, that was the most enormous relief. I went to drama school, and I overheard two girls talking about me: they were saying that I was attractive, and I ran back to my digs and had a look at myself in the mirror.
Younger Brother, Younger Son: A Memoir by Colin Clark (page 72-73): The need for a love object starts in the early teens for boys, as it does for girl. Just as schoolgirls have fevered crushes on their older classmates in girls' schools, the real sexual tension in our all-male world was between the boys. For the last three years of my time at Eton, most of the boys, including me, were in love with the same boy. They may have forgotten it now, after busy, successful heterosexual lives, but that is the way it was. The boy's name was Jeremy Huggins, and he sang in the choir. He had the most beautiful treble voice you could imagine, and he was remarkably handsome. In his white vestal robe, with his brown hair brushed until it glowed, his eyes gazing heavenward and his mouth open in pure song, he could make his audience swoon away during the psalms. Quite a few boys did actually faint, but no one took any notice. Church attendance was compulsory at Eton in 1948 - every weekday morning except Saturday, and twice on Sundays - and we all flocked in gleefully, hardly daring to hope that Huggins would be singing a solo that day. Eventually his voice broke into a mellow tenor, and his looks, if anything, improved. But all that attention must have been a terrific strain on him, just as it was to be on Marilyn Monroe, and he seemed to have great difficulty settling down. He became an actor and changed his name to Jeremy Brett. He played various good-looking but rather uninteresting young men, like Freddie in the London stage version of My Fair Lady. At one stage he married the actress Anna Massey, whose brother, the actor Dan Massey, had also been at Eton. Finally he took on the role of Sherlock Holmes - a character as eccentric as himself- giving some wonderful performances on television. To millions of people his tortured, lined face became what Holmes actually looked like. He even suffered the same depressions that the great detective was supposed to have been prey to. Since he and I were both in show business, we used to meet every now and then, and although I never referred to it, he seemed to be aware of the role he had played in my early affections. He was sweet and sad and sincere, and still very good looking. When he died, tragically young, in 1995, I suddenly felt guilty. I've no idea whether anyone actually seduced him when we were at school, but there is no doubt that he had been the idol of hundreds of his contemporaries. In a sense I felt that he had been abused, and I had been part of it. I suppose that his beauty had been a curse, as well as a blessing. |
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