J. R. Ackerley - Family and Education

Family and Education

Ackerley's memoir My Father and Myself, begins: "I was born in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919." Registered at birth as Joe Ackerley, he later took the middle name Randolph after an uncle. As an adult, he published under his first two initials and surname. His father Roger Ackerley was a successful fruit merchant known as the "Banana King" of London. (Roger was first married to an actress named Louise Burckhardt, who died young in 1892, probably of tuberculosis, and before they had children).

His mother was Janetta Aylward (known as Netta), an actress whom Roger met in Paris; the two returned to London together. They had an intermittent relationship and three years later in 1895, she gave birth to a son, Peter, then Joe a year later, and Nancy in 1899. According to Joe's maternal Aunt Bunny, Peter's birth, and likely all of them, were "accidents." She told him, "Your father happened to have run out of French letters that day," (when Peter was conceived). His father set up a household with his mother starting in 1903, after which the children saw him more regularly. His business did very well and the family had a "butler, a gardener, and, evidently, a very good table."

Ackerley was educated at Rossall School, a public and preparatory school in Fleetwood, Lancashire. During this time, he discovered he was attracted to other boys. His striking good looks earned him the nickname "Girlie," but he was not very sexually active as a schoolboy. He described himself as

"a chaste, puritanical, priggish, rather narcissistic little boy, more repelled than attracted to sex, which seemed to me a furtive, guilty, soiling thing, exciting, yes, but nothing whatever to do with those feelings which I had not yet experienced but about which I was already writing a lot of dreadful sentimental verse, called romance and love."

His father gave him a generous allowance and never insisted that he follow him into business.

Failing his entrance examinations for Cambridge University, Ackerley applied for a commission in the Army and went off to the First World War. After the war, he returned and attended Cambridge but never wrote much about it.

In October 1929 his father Roger Ackerley died of tertiary syphilis. Shortly afterward, Ackerley found a sealed note from his father addressed to him, which concluded:

"I am not going to make any excuses, old man. I have done my duty towards everybody as far as my nature would allow and I hope people generally will be kind to my memory. All my men pals know of my second family and of their mother, so you won't find it difficult to get on their track."

Ackerley thus discovered his father had had a second family for more than 20 years. Roger would visit his daughters three or four times a year when supposedly traveling for business, and sometimes when out to walk his first family's dog. His mistress, Muriel Perry, served as a nurse during the First World War and was busy with her career; she seldom saw their three daughters: Sally and Elizabeth, twins born in 1909, and Diana, born in 1912; all were cared for by a Miss Coutts. The birth of the youngest was never registered; but they were all given their mother's surname. Ackerley described the lives of his half-sisters in his 1968 memoir: "They had no parental care, no family life, no friends." For years, the girls thought his father Roger was their much-loved "Uncle Bodger", who occasionally brought them gifts and money.

Joe looked after his father's second family without telling his mother, who died in 1946. For years, Ackerley was obsessed with his relationship with his father, both because of the tension of the son's covert homosexuality and what he described as his father's domineering personality. In his memoir, My Father and Myself(1969), which one reviewer termed the "mystery" of the son on the track of his father, Ackerley speculated that his father had some homosexual experiences as a young guardsman, but never proved it. In trying to understand his father's life, he grappled with his own.

In 1975 Diana Perry, then Diana Petre, published a memoir called The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley. The term "secret orchard" was Roger's for his second family, used in one of his final notes to his son Joe.