Trevor Lock
February 18th, 2009 by sparky
Trevor Lock will perform at The Big Chill 2009.
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Trevor Lock - Biography
Trevor William Hughe Lock was born in Charleville, North Eastern France, in 1854, the youngest and frailest of seven children. He was the son of Fauntleroy ‘Hamstabber’ Lock, a man who upon laying eyes on his youngest child declared him ‘a presumptuous runt’ and had little to do with the boy from then on. Trevor’s mother was Catherine Shlapingrind - herself heiress of Bonn (she later remarried and distinguished herself as one of the archetypal proto-feminists of her day, she was strangled in a boating accident in Putney in 1904). His Paternal Grandfather was Vice Admiral Winchester Lock of French naval distinction, who had in 1830 single handily circumnavigated the globe, and developed the anti-mildew sowwester, he later settled in Tahiti with a 14 year old bride and opened a Hotel. He died of Flannel Poisoning in his eighties, without ever loving Trevor.
Trevor was a difficult child; petulant, peaky and often pneumonic. Early on in his infancy he developed an almost pathological interest in the whites of his own eyes and in newborn Wasps. He lived essentially uneventful early years until he was suddenly removed from local schooling after disgracing himself. (He had been caught in flagrante delicto with his elderly classics tutor). -This unfortunate incident was hotly followed by another sordid episode at the age of eight when he was discovered by his Father in the servant quarters wearing a crude mask resembling his mother’s face and a mammary waistcoat made from wasp-nests stitched together with a thread spun from his own dead hair. For this gross act of onenism he was understandably severely castigated (it is believed he never spoke word to his father again), and certainly established a precedent for the creeping mental illness that was to dog him for the rest of his days.
Estranged now from his family T Lock set off to make his fortune (fame was never something Lock planned for, it was so cruelly thrust upon him only in later life) initially he planned to make good on his hard won weaving skills, and in 1875, after hitching across rural Arles, (including a furtive, but fruitful stint in a burlesque house in Arles), he arrived in Paris, intent on becoming the premiere man in Tapestry and wicker laundry baskets. There is also a certain veracity in the suggestion that he perhaps harboured secret hopes of garnering a modicum of social acceptance and sexual understanding in the infamously libertarian Fin de Siecle capital. This was unfortunately not to be; he quickly squandered the few sheckles he had whored together in a sequence of obscene, brash and futile attempts to win social standing; one particularly note worthy episode being his purchasing of a gilt-gold lavatory to which he fitted coach-wheels and a harness for a horse, and in which he would regularly parade along the banks of the seine, declaiming odes he had had penned on the quality of his tapestries and the intensity of his lovemaking. This did little to ingratiate him to the bourgeois patrons of the capital. His ill-reputation spread as he lavishly over expended on vintage Babychams, exotic dancing show ponies and lithograph inks. It is also alleged that during this period, he spent some weeks as the mistress to the poet Baudelaire- although no directly documented evidence can be found in support of this, aside from vague and unsettling allusions in certain stanza’s in ‘Les Fleur Du Mal’ referencing the ‘shiniest boy-bride’.
Within six months T Lock was bankrupt and scandalised, the critical and financial ‘Weaving’ success Trevor so longed for evaded him, he now roamed nomadically from boarding house to boarding house, invariably drunk, paying his way in a variety of hands-on trades, and is reputed to have spent at least one evening in every whorehouse in the old-quarter of Paris. (This allegation is supported with physicians records of the time reporting Trevor’s plight at the hands of an unknown degenerative pox that is believed he is likely to have contracted from pawing a whore, the legions did eventually clear up, but left him permanently weeping a milky discharge from his hips and reeking of musk). It is noted that he had great difficulty forming stable friendships and was oft hounded out of drinking establishments for being uncomfortable and awkward. This social isolation can clearly be seen as a leitmotif in Trevor’s acclaimed work as a sculptor, indeed his magnum opus work ‘ an expression of a his idée fixe- the belief that no one could, nor would, ever truly show him love.
It was clear by later summer 1881 that Trevor’ time in Paris was coming to an end; disgrace hounded him, culminating in late one particularly infamous exchange when he was found to have been impersonating a Benedictine Priest and receiving confessional in Sacre Coeur, the gravity of this scandal, and the public reaction so intense that Trevor had little choice but to flee the capital and indeed France. He stowed away aboard a….
Trevor Lock will perform at The Big Chill 2009.
A-Z line-up | Buy tickets
