Patrick Hazlewood

Patrick Hazlewood is the keeper of Western Art at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery and the central subject of two intertwined accounts: his own journal from 1957 and Marion Burgess’s recollections, addressed to him decades later. Through these different voices, he emerges as an observant curator and a man who risks intimacy despite the danger of exposure. His relationship with Tom Burgess is concealed within the social and legal pressures of the period; the consequences eventually reach beyond the two men, drawing in Marion, the police, and the courts. In the 1999 narrative, Patrick survives but is profoundly disabled after strokes, and Marion becomes his carer.

Identity and Introduction

When Marion Taylor first meets Patrick at the museum, he is thirty-four, of average height, with dark curls, a thick moustache, and a neatly fitted navy waistcoat over a white shirt. He initially watches Tom with concentrated attention rather than greeting him. His reserve gives way to a small, boyish smile when he reaches Tom and takes his hand. The moment presents two contrasting aspects of Patrick: the composed professional, responsible for Western Art 1500–1900, and the warmth that appears when he sees Tom.

Tom introduces Patrick to Marion as a museum colleague and introduces Marion as a teacher at St Luke’s Primary. Patrick greets her courteously and invites both to lunch. Marion notices his cool, soft fingers and the steadiness of his gaze. Her account retrospectively makes this meeting significant: she is not simply being introduced to Tom’s friend, but entering a relationship whose emotional truth will remain consequential for all three of them.

Patrick’s work gives him a life organized around art and its interpretation. When he and Tom have half an hour before the museum closes, Patrick chooses the bronze Icarus to show him. He asks whether it is unusual for a policeman to take an interest in art and whether Tom’s colleagues share that interest. Tom laughs and says they do not; Patrick responds that this is a shame. The exchange joins Patrick’s professional world to Tom’s, while marking a difference between the cultural attention Patrick values and the norms of Tom’s police environment.

The Journal and His Relationship with Tom

Patrick’s journal entry dated 29 September 1957 records his decision to write again despite the risks of putting his desires on paper. He describes caution as necessary in a world where men who pursue same-sex relationships can be targeted and where public hostility can make ordinary encounters dangerous. Yet he says that something has changed: he has met someone, and Patrick, aged thirty-four, has not given up. He calls the new attachment ideal, distinguishing it from earlier affairs that had tended to be complicated, hesitant, or fleeting.

The journal’s form makes secrecy visible. Patrick withholds the other man’s name because he is not willing to be completely reckless, but writing itself is an act of disclosure. His private record offers a counterpoint to the public identities the men must maintain. Later, at Patrick’s trial, a diary passage about the unmistakable line of a man’s shoulders and the sight of him in the museum is read aloud. The court asks Marion who Patrick’s policeman is. The words make the journal’s concealed attachment a matter of public scrutiny.

Patrick’s growing bond with Tom also alters his approach to risk. When he tells Charlie that the man he is seeing is a policeman, Charlie reacts with surprise at Patrick’s abandonment of his old caution. Patrick says that he has buried the cautious version of himself. The exchange does not suggest that the danger has disappeared; rather, it shows that his desire for this particular relationship has become strong enough to change how he acts in spite of it.

Marion, Marriage, and the Pressures of Respectability

Patrick’s connection with Marion begins through Tom’s introduction, but it develops under the shadow of Tom’s marriage to her. As spring approaches, Marion grows impatient with the pace of her relationship with Tom. Her mother’s reminders, the marriages of former schoolmates, and the prospect of being regarded as a woman left unmarried weigh on her. Marion sees how a single woman teacher can be judged for working, reading, wearing trousers, or living without the expected signs of family life. That pressure helps explain why marriage appears to her as an urgent future, even while the emotional situation is more complicated than she can yet acknowledge.

Tom and Marion marry on 29 March 1958, after an engagement of less than a month. Marion later wonders whether Tom hurried because he wanted to complete the marriage before changing his mind. On the rain-soaked wedding day, she imagines the downpour as a cleansing beginning, but the retrospective account undercuts that hope: the short engagement and Tom’s haste may have concealed a decision already shaped by his attachment to Patrick. Patrick’s place in their lives is therefore not peripheral to the marriage. He is close enough to be a friend and to join the couple’s holiday, while the relationship between him and Tom remains hidden beneath the public arrangement.

In a later confrontation, Marion names the possibility that Patrick is a sexual invert, using a stigmatizing category of the time. Tom rejects the accusation and describes the men brought into the station by the vice squad, repeating the police distinction between those marked as visibly deviant and Patrick, whom he considers respectable. He points to Patrick’s established museum position and his kindness to the couple, including his help with the wedding. Tom’s defense does not disclose the truth to Marion; instead, it shows how respectability can serve both as protection and as concealment. Patrick’s respectable employment does not make him safe, and Tom’s position in the police gives his denial a particular weight.

Accusation, Arrest, and Trial

Marion eventually sends an anonymous letter to Mr Houghton, head keeper at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. The letter identifies Patrick as a man engaged in acts of gross indecency with other men and presents him as a danger to schoolchildren and to the museum’s reputation. Its claims turn suspicion into an institutional threat: Patrick’s private life is recast as a matter for his employer, with professional respectability made part of the accusation rather than a shield against it.

In February 1959, police arrive at Patrick’s flat with a warrant for his arrest on suspicion of gross indecency with Laurence Cedric Coleman. Patrick learns during questioning that the case concerns a dark-haired youth he had encountered at the Argyle Hotel, not Tom. The distinction brings momentary relief because the arrest is not, as he had feared, about his relationship with Tom. But the relief does not undo the danger of the proceedings. Patrick knows the police may find his journal, which is open on his bedroom desk, and the record that preserved his private feelings is vulnerable to becoming evidence against him.

At the trial, Marion is asked whether she trusted Patrick with her pupils. She says that she did, completely. When the prosecution reads from Patrick’s diary and asks whether the policeman described there is Tom, Marion pauses for a long time and answers no. Afterward, she insists that Patrick was very good with the children. Her testimony holds two different truths in tension: her public answer protects the secret, while her insistence on his conduct with the pupils challenges the suggestion that he posed a danger to them. The trial exposes Patrick to public judgment but does not make his relationship with Tom openly speakable through Marion’s evidence.

Imprisonment, Memory, and Later Life

While imprisoned at HMP Wormwood Scrubs, Patrick continues to think about Tom. In his recollection of their trip to Venice, he returns to a night water-taxi crossing: the men sit together at the back of the boat, their thighs touching, and the city appears beyond the cabin windows. Patrick remembers not only the beauty of Venice but the privacy of that brief journey and Tom’s hand in his. The memory becomes more painful because, as Patrick reflects, he increasingly loses sight of the reasons they could not be together and remembers Tom’s sweetness instead.

A letter from Patrick’s mother offers him a home after his release and promises that he would have freedom there. The invitation suggests a possible refuge from prison and from the judgment of neighbours, though Patrick recognizes that the offer feels frighteningly attractive in his present circumstances. His imprisonment has narrowed his immediate choices, while the correspondence makes clear that a family bond remains available to him even when his future is uncertain.

The later narrative shifts to Peacehaven in November 1999. Marion has gone looking for Patrick and brought him back into her care. She recalls that he had lived alone in a Surrey house for many years after his mother died, keeping largely to himself while remaining attentive to a neighbour’s health. His former home contrasts with the book-lined rooms Marion remembers at Chichester Terrace, where Patrick’s art books and mahogany shelves had once expressed a more visible intellectual life.

By this stage Patrick has suffered strokes and cannot reliably speak or manage ordinary tasks. Marion describes his worsening condition through the small practical demands of care: he drops a spoon, struggles to swallow liquidised food, and needs pillows to keep him supported in an armchair. Tom does not join them at the family table and has withdrawn from Patrick’s room, despite Marion’s hope that he will come and see that Patrick still loves him. Marion’s care does not erase the history of betrayal, secrecy, and separation; it gives Patrick a place within the household again and makes her the witness to a relationship Tom can no longer openly sustain.

Narrative Role and Significance

Patrick’s character is shaped by the contrast between what can be recorded privately and what can be admitted publicly. His journal names an emotional life that the social world around him forces into concealment; the police and trial turn that concealed life into a source of vulnerability. Meanwhile, Marion’s retrospective narration addresses Patrick directly, bringing the past into a present in which he may no longer be able to answer. The shifts between his journal and her account make him both a narrator of his own desire and the recipient of another person’s testimony.

His story also unsettles the usual timetable of respectability. Marion’s fear of remaining unmarried helps lead her toward a marriage that cannot resolve Tom’s attachment to Patrick. The men’s relationship is delayed and hidden, while its consequences persist into the later years, when Marion travels alone to Venice, seeks Patrick out, and cares for him. Patrick’s significance lies not in a simple escape from repression, but in the way his lasting bond with Tom remains present through concealment, criminal accusation, imprisonment, and finally Marion’s acts of remembrance and care.