Lee knew that he was not like other boys from an early age, but the exact nature and source of this difference were still unclear to him. His mother picked up the fact that her youngest son was a strange mix of surface toughness and unusual vulnerabilities and did everything she could to protect him. ‘He was this little fat boy from the East End with bad teeth who didn’t have much to offer, but he had this one special thing, this talent, and Joyce believed in him,’ said Alice Smith. ‘He told me once that she had said to him, “Whatever you want to do, do it.” He was adored; they had a special relationship, it was a mutual adoration.’20
When Lee was a boy he would watch in wonder as his mother unrolled an eight-foot-long scroll decorated with elaborate coats of arms. She would point out the names of long-dead ancestors on the family tree and talk about the past. Joyce was passionate about genealogy – she later taught the subject at Canning Town Adult Education Centre – and she told her young son that she suspected that the McQueen side of the family had originated from the Isle of Skye. Lee had become increasingly fascinated with the island’s gothic history and his ancestors’ place in it. It was on a holiday with Janet in 2007 that he had first visited the small cemetery in Kilmuir – the last resting place of the Jacobite heroine Flora MacDonald – and saw a grave marked with the name Alexander McQueen; in May 2010, the designer’s cremated remains were buried in the same graveyard.
Joyce spent years plotting out the family tree, but by the end of her research she had failed to find any definitive evidence linking her husband’s McQueen ancestors to Skye. But like many things in Lee’s life the romance of the idea was more alluring than the reality. Listening to his mother’s tales of Scotland’s brutal history, and the suffering that his ancestors endured at the hands of the English landowners, he constructed an imaginative bloodline across the centuries. One of the attractions of boyfriend Murray Arthur was the fact that he was from north of the border. ‘He was obsessed by Scotland, and loved the fact that I was Scottish,’ he said.21 Lee’s bond with Scotland grew increasingly strong over the years – it inspired collections such as Highland Rape (1995) and Widows of Culloden (2006) – and in 2004, when his mother asked him what his Scottish roots meant to him, McQueen replied, ‘Everything’.22
Joyce McQueen’s journey back into the past started when her husband asked her to find out about the origins of his family: ‘Are we Irish or Scottish?’ By 1992, she had gathered her work into a manuscript that told the story of the McQueens’ roots. ‘Researching family history can be fun, but more than this it can give us a sense of belonging and how we came to be,’ wrote Joyce.23 For Lee, this was especially important as it provided him with a connection to history and opened up possibilities that allowed his imagination to fly.
Joyce noted how the earliest mention of the name McQueen on the Isle of Skye was in the fourteenth century during the reign of John MacLeod, Laird of Dunvegan Castle, a place that Lee visited later in his life. MacLeod ‘was a man of fiendish cruelty who on hearing that two of his daughters wanted to marry the two brothers of the MacQueen of Roag had his two daughters buried alive,’ wrote Joyce. ‘The two brothers MacQueen were flogged to death and thrown over the precipice.’24 Another story unearthed by Mrs McQueen and passed down to her son related to another supposed ancestor, Duncan McQueen, who in 1742, together with his friend Angus Buchanan, waylaid a merchant at Rigg, where they robbed and then murdered him. After both men were caught they confessed to the crime and were sentenced to death by hanging. ‘The history of Skye contains much cruelty and dark deeds,’ wrote Joyce.25
In Joyce’s booklet on the history of the McQueen family she reproduced a rough sketch of two ‘Highland peasants’ wearing ‘the actual clothing which was discovered on skeletons who lived in the early 1700s’. Detailed glimpses of historical costume, illustrating Lee’s intertwined passions of history and fashion, can be found throughout his mother’s manuscript. For instance, in the section on the Gallowglass sept (or clan), a cross between the Norse and Pict men who had invaded Ireland by the middle of the thirteenth century, Mrs McQueen described how these ‘foreign young fighting men’ were ‘of great stature, courage and fierce in battle’ and dressed ‘in coats of mail to the knees and armed with battleaxes’. Joyce, and in turn Lee, learnt how the Clan McQueen were said to be of Norse descent and of how they invaded Ireland and the Western Isles of Scotland. ‘Swean, Sweyn is certainly a Norse name as is Revan which appears among the McQueens’ early history,’ wrote Joyce. ‘The Revan or Refan is Norse for raven, the black bird that is the emblem of the Danes.’26 (Later, McQueen would include references to ravens in his collections, such as Eclect Dissect and The Horn of Plenty.) It is thought that some of these early McQueens were subjects of a lord who settled in the area around Snizort on Skye, where one of the earliest effigies of a clan member can be found.
It’s probable that Lee felt a certain empathy with the unnamed knights whose graves on Skeabost Island his mother wrote about in her history of the McQueens. In the booklet she included a description of one effigy, which lies to the south-west of a neglected church, as having a ‘bluish schist’. In a sunken panel one could just make out the figure of an armed man wearing a bascinet, a camail of banded mail and a quilted coat that reached to his knees, holding a three-foot long claymore.
Two events in Scottish history haunted McQueen’s consciousness and provided him with inspiration: the Jacobite rebellion and the Battle of Culloden in 1746, both of which he believed involved his ancestors. As his mother told him, the McQueens had joined with other small clans to form a body called the Clan Chattan, which, under the leadership of the Chief Mackintosh, helped defend their families on the Isle of Skye. But then in 1528, in Joyce’s words, ‘James V was responsible for a savage commission of fire and sword granted to his half-brother James Earl of Moray for punishing Clan Chattan for widespread discord . . . It demanded the “utter extermination and destruction” of the clan and its supporters leaving none alive, but priest, women and bairns, the latter to be shipped across the sea to the Low Countries or Norway.’ Although the order was not carried out to its fullest extent it inevitably meant a dispersal of the clan. Following the Battle of Culloden the family suffered further losses on Skye, while ‘those that were not killed during these battles were taken prisoner and endured great hardships’, said Joyce. ‘By ship they were taken south of the border where they were imprisoned or transported to other countries. Many would die of disease or from their wounds before they had even arrived at their destination. Some sailed from Liverpool to the Virginias in America while others were sent to such places as the Tower of London, Newgate prison and Tilbury Fort in Essex.’ However, some of the clan managed to receive pardons and others, who swore allegiance to the King, were released.
Joyce never could quite work out the exact connection between the McQueens of Skye and her husband’s forefathers, but she was certain that his ancestors would have suffered violence, poverty and fragmentation, a triumvirate that continued to shape the family over the course of the next couple of centuries. The more Joyce told Lee about his ancestors the more he came to identify with them, viewing them as brave outsiders who fought against a system. He would have been particularly intrigued to learn that his middle name, Alexander, had been passed down through his immediate family since the beginning of the nineteenth century when three brothers – Alexander, John and William McQueen, all stonemasons – settled in London, in the area of St George in the east.
In 1806, Alexander, the eldest of the three brothers, married Sarah Vallas, a woman of Huguenot descent. Her heritage appealed to Lee, who was told by his mother that the ‘Huguenots were French protestants who flew from France after the edict of Nantes to escape persecution. Their most popular place of settlement was in Spitalfields where they worked as silk weavers high in the garret rooms near a large window which lit their looms.’ Alexander and Sarah went on to have five sons, one of whom, also called Alexander, particularly interested both Joyce
and Lee. In the 1851 census, Alexander described himself as a mat manufacturer who lived with his wife, Ann, and daughter Ellen. ‘But this was not strictly true,’ wrote Joyce. ‘Alexander did not marry his wife Ann Seymour until their daughter Ellen was eighteen years old.’ Ten years later the couple owned a lodging house at 28–29 Dorset Street, which was, in Joyce’s words, ‘one of the most notorious streets in the area, where few dared to stray for fear of being robbed or assaulted’. This stretch of dank, crowded dosshouses, the so-called ‘worst street in London’, would forever be associated with Jack the Ripper, the unidentified serial killer who murdered at least five women in the East End of London in 1888. ‘It was in this environment that our ancestors lived and one can only imagine their fear and apprehension during the time these terrible murders were taking place,’ said Joyce.27
On 9 November 1888, the body of 25-year-old prostitute Mary Jane Kelly, thought to be the Ripper’s last victim, was discovered at 13 Millers Court, a room at the back of 26 Dorset Street. In his report, Dr Thomas Bond, the surgeon who performed the autopsy on Kelly’s body and who would later commit suicide by throwing himself from a bedroom window, described the horrific manner in which the woman had been mutilated. ‘The whole surface of the abdomen and thighs was removed and the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera,’ he said. ‘The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds and the face hacked beyond recognition of the features . . . The viscera were found in various parts . . . the uterus and kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side and the spleen by the left side of the body. The flaps removed from the abdomen and thighs were on a table.’28 Lee found this kind of macabre detail fascinating and later, while studying fashion at St Martins, he would take the name of the serial killer as inspiration for his graduate collection.
Tragedy and horror seemed to be a constant presence in the history of the McQueens. In 1841, while a branch of the family was living in Sun Court, Leadenhall Street, a two-year-old girl, Sarah McQueen, was so terribly scalded in an accident that she died from her injuries. Forty years later, in 1880, Ellen, the daughter of Alexander McQueen, who had grown up in Dorset Street, was living with her second cousin William MacQueen and her two-year-old daughter Clara in Hoxton, east London. One day Ellen was doing her washing with her daughter at her side, but ‘leaving the child for a few moments she returned to find that Clara had fallen into the tub of suds and drowned’, wrote Joyce. Such was the level of poverty it was, she added, difficult for her to imagine how people survived. She consulted records that showed that, at one point in the mid-nineteenth century, twelve members of the McQueen family were living at 6 Bakers Court, Bishopsgate, a dwelling place that was subsequently knocked down to make way for Liverpool Street station. ‘The living conditions of these people must have been intolerable for it is known that a whole family would have to live in just one room or perhaps two if they were lucky,’ wrote Joyce. Of course, she added, there was no such thing as hot running water. ‘There was only the fire to heat water and cook food. Light was provided by candle or oil lamps . . . In those days the poor people had to go to the Poor House for treatment if they were ill.’
In order to piece together the history of the family Joyce McQueen spent hours at various libraries, including public record offices in Chancery Lane, Clerkenwell and Kew, as well as the Society of Genealogists and the Guildhall Library. Each day, after hours of work, she returned to the family in Biggerstaff Road and told them of her discoveries. Joyce brought the past to life in a way that made it so real to Lee that he thought he could almost smell it. Who were these men who went by the name of Alexander McQueen and who had died so many years before? There was, he learnt, Alexander McQueen the stonemason, born in 1847, who married an Irish girl called Jane Little, from County Cork, Ireland, whose father brought the family over to England after the great potato famine. Alexander and Jane had six children, including three daughters, Rose, Jane and another Jane, all of whom died young. This Alexander, by all accounts a rather large man, made his money by collecting the money from the stallholders of Petticoat Lane, while Jane took in washing. Towards the end of his life he laid paving stones for a living and by the time of his death in 1920 he was living at 5 William Street, in the parish of St George in the East. ‘Perhaps it’s worth reflecting that had his only son Alexander not survived we might not have been here today,’ wrote Joyce.29
That man, Lee’s great-grandfather, was born on 19 March 1875 in Spitalfields and although he attended a charity or Sunday school he left being unable to write. At the age of twenty he was working as a bricklayer and was regarded, according to Joyce, as the ‘black sheep of the family’. In 1897, Alexander married Annie Gray at St John the Evangelist church in Golding Street, Stepney – ‘both made their mark with a cross because they could not write or spell their name,’ wrote Joyce. By 1907, Alexander had been forced to give up work as a bricklayer after he fell from a tall ladder breaking his foot; after the accident he took a job as a carman working down on the docks. ‘Annie, like thousands of women in her day, took in washing which draped in the rooms and all along the hallway to dry,’ wrote Joyce, who from relatives learnt of Annie’s skill as a clog dancer. Annie, a large woman, and Alexander, a short man with dark hair, had at least twelve children, but their marriage was far from happy. ‘She was known to have suffered violence from her husband mainly through drinking, which in those days seems to have been the normal thing to do,’ wrote Joyce. ‘She also witnessed a murder down Cable Street when a sailor was stabbed to death.’30 Three children did not live beyond infancy; a son Walter Samuel was injured at Dunkirk and died soon after he returned home; and another son Henry died at the age of twenty-eight from blood poisoning after a splinter lodged in his finger while he was playing snooker.
Alexander and Annie’s second-eldest son, Samuel Frederick, Lee’s grandfather, was born on 24 December 1907 in St George in the East. He grew up to be a docker and also a presser who worked in ladies’ tailoring, a skill that he passed down to both his daughter, Irene or Renee, and his grandson Lee. In November 1926, while living at 5 Crellin Street, Lee’s grandfather married nineteen-year-old Grace Elizabeth Smith, a woman whose harsh upbringing resulted in a hardened character. Grace, Lee’s paternal grandmother, was the illegitimate daughter of Elizabeth Mary Smith and Ernest Edmund Jenkins, who worked on a paper stall in the City of London. ‘Grace was a hard and strict mother, she had no love for her stepfather, it was probably the hard life she suffered as a child that made her determined to be a survivor,’ wrote Joyce.31
In May 1940, Samuel volunteered to join the Royal Engineers and later that year he was employed in the bomb disposal unit. ‘I think he pissed off and went into the army without her [Grace] knowing,’ said Michael McQueen, Lee’s brother.32 Between July 1941 and September 1942 Samuel worked in Iceland ‘maintaining the ships until the Americans came to take over’, wrote Joyce.33 While her husband was away at war, Grace brought up her brood of children single-handedly – ‘they only surfaced to breed,’ Lee said later.34 ‘Grace kept her home and children spotless but this left very little time to demonstrate any love to her children,’ wrote Joyce.35
One day, Grace’s home in the East End was hit by a bomb and she and her teenage daughter, also called Grace, were buried under a mound of rubble. When Grace was at last pulled free she saw that ‘part of her ear was hanging off and had to be stitched back’, wrote Joyce.36 On Samuel’s return from war in November 1944, after being discharged from the army for medical reasons, the marriage deteriorated further. The couple’s eight children grew up in a home poisoned by domestic violence. ‘My mother told me that he was a very hard man, a drunkard,’ said Jacqui McQueen of her paternal grandfather.37 Michael remembers Grace, the woman he knew as ‘Nanny McQueen’, as being ‘as mad as a March hare’.38 Lee confessed in an interview, talking of his father’s background: ‘He didn’t have the best mother an
d father himself. His dad was an alcoholic, his mother not much better.’39 When Grace was around sixty years old her marriage finally broke down and she obtained a legal separation and went to live on her own in a flat in Abbey Wood.
Grace and Samuel’s eldest son Ronald Samuel – Lee’s father – was born on 19 April 1933 at 3 Raine Street and later moved with his parents to various addresses around Wapping, St John’s Hill and Artichoke Hill. Ronald attended Christian Street School in Stepney on the same street where his father worked as a tailor’s presser. Ronald and his brothers and sisters were brought up Catholics and they attended St Patrick’s Church, Tower Hill, where for a time Ron served as an altar boy. During the Second World War, the boy was evacuated to Newton Abbott and taken in by the Easterbrook family; Ronald always had fond memories of his time in Devon and later spoke lovingly of Mrs Easterbrook, ‘to whom he grew greatly attached’.40 No doubt he saw her as the mother he might have had: kind, loving and attentive. The return back to his real parents, Samuel and Grace, must have broken his heart. ‘My nan [Grace], she was pretty hard,’ said Tony McQueen. ‘I think she was quite stern with all the children and rumour has it that she hit my dad once with a milk bottle on the head. So he had a rough upbringing. His upbringing made him what he was.’41 According to Jacqui, Ron ‘had to take over being the breadwinner. He had three jobs and the money was taken from him. And then his mother took out her temper on him.’42
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