DBC Pierre - Early Life

Early Life

Born into an old Reynella winery homestead in South Australia, where his father was lecturing in genetics at the University of Adelaide, by the age of 2 Pierre had already spent time in the United States, the South Pacific and Great Britain. He was then raised from early childhood into his 20s in a lavish mansion in Mexico City's landmark modernist community of Jardines del Pedregal, and attended Edron Academy. Pierre wrote of his upbringing in the British magazine Quintessentially in December 2009:

In the neighbourhood where I grew up I was only once ever sniped with a gun. Only one Bengal tiger ever threatened me there, and of all the earthquakes only one was ever strong enough to throw me out of bed. One raccoon lived there, who was my pet. And despite our house ... being immense, still only one child was ever discovered hidden in an upstairs room for over a decade who neither I nor my parents knew anything about. Among the neighbour’s daughter’s wedding presents were thirteen cars; but it wasn’t that neighbour’s Bengal tiger which threatened me.

Pierre was taken to revisit this home by Alan Yentob for the BBC television series Imagine in 2004. He reflected that the seeds of a later troubled and often outrageous youth were planted there, citing constant attendance by servants, and a social system where money could buy anything including the law. Pierre has told the press that of the gang of 7 youths that formed his fast-living teenage milieu, only he and one other survive today. In the Yentob documentary, a childhood friend and neighbour of Pierre's, the financier and industrialist Antonio Mayer, stated that "we were bad - but we weren't rotten".

Owing to his father's work around the globe Pierre was part of the original jetset, and claims that constant travel took its toll on his academic life, though he was always able to draw and paint, and was published as a cartoonist while still in his early teens. He went on to practice photography, graphic design and filmmaking, working freelance for clients around the world. His varied cultural background added more reasons to travel - his mother was born in the shadow of Durham castle in North East England, and Pierre also once attended Bow School there as a child.

He recalls in a Guardian article of 1 September 2004, that he would later return to Durham most years, usually around the 2nd week in July, to see the Big Meeting. Also known as the Durham Miners Gala, the event was at one time the largest gathering of mineworkers outside the Soviet Union. He found the meeting of working folk moving and inspiring, and enjoyed contact with more "realistic" family roots than those suggested by his opulent existence in Mexico City. His first setback was when, aged seven, he fell ill with hepatitis and had to spend a year in bed. After he recovered, his parents were faced with the choice of keeping him a year behind in school, or letting him stay in his class and just catch up. They chose the latter. Pierre sees this as his "all the trouble began when ... " moment, as it meant him falling out with his peers.

His father, once decorated as a Lancaster Bomber pilot in World War 2, by then a scientific partner to Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman E. Borlaug, fell ill when Pierre was sixteen, and died three years later. During that time Pierre was left alone with the family mansion and its servants and cars. He later said that in trying to deal with his father's slipping away from him he started a party at the house which "Ran for more than a decade in some form or other." He also spent long periods in New York City and on the Mediterranean, until President José López Portillo issued a decree nationalising Mexico's banking system and greatly devaluing its currency overnight. Pierre has called the period of his father's illness and death, and the financial collapse which cost his family much of its fortune, "the beginning of my problems".