by Mark Blake
Freddie himself would claim to have had what he called a ‘sheltered’ upbringing, recalling the splendour of his uncle’s villa in Dar es Salaam in neighbouring Tanganyika: ‘I’d be woken by the servant. Clutching an orange juice, I’d literally step out on to the beach.’ In truth, Freddie’s paternal uncle, Manchershaw Bulsara, worked for the Zanzibar Electrical and Telegraph Company, also in Stone Town. Interviewed in 1974, Mercury would also scotch the notion that he’d enjoyed a privileged childhood, deploying the smoke-and-mirrors approach he liked to use when asked about his personal life: ‘It wasn’t as affluent as people think. But I suppose I give the appearance of being affluent. I love that.’
At the age of five Freddie began attending the local missionary school, and showed the first glimmer of interest in music, singing for his family and guests at social functions. In early 1955, his life would undergo its first upheaval. Believing that his education on Zanzibar was limited, the Bulsaras enrolled their eight-year-old son at a boarding school in India. ‘I was a precocious child,’ said Mercury. ‘My parents thought boarding school would do me good.’
Later, when asked by one interviewer why he was ‘so sensitively defensive of his Persian roots and the family ties he has in India’, Mercury snapped, ‘Oh, you sod. Don’t ask me about it. Oh, it’s so mundane.’ During his lifetime then, the finer details of his upbringing remained vague. Contrary to earlier claims, the Bulsaras did not move as a family to India. Instead, Freddie alone made the voyage to Bombay (now Mumbai), where his maternal and paternal aunts lived.
Once in India, Freddie travelled by train 168 miles north to his new school in the Maharashtrian province. According to its records, Bulsara began his new life at St Peter’s Boys School in Panchgani in 1955. St Peter’s was founded in 1902. It ran on traditional disciplinarian lines, with a school motto of ‘Ut Prosim’ (‘I may profit’), and had an outstanding academic record, priding itself on educating its pupils to English university standard. While welcoming pupils of many faiths, including Parsees, St Peter’s was essentially a Church of England school. It also adopted many of the traits of the English public school system. Boys roomed together in dormitories, and Freddie became part of Ashlin House, one of four schoolhouses. In a letter from 1958, Bulsara wrote: ‘My friends at the Ashlin House are like a second family.’ It was a fortunate arrangement, given his physical distance from the real thing.
Another pupil, in the year above Freddie, remembered him as ‘a shy, timid boy, who had to wear a very painful brace on his teeth’, and who could sometimes be the victim of cruel comments from his schoolmates. ‘Of course there were feelings of being sent away from my parents and sister – feelings of loneliness, feelings of rejection – but you had to do what you told,’ Mercury said later. ‘So the sensible thing was to make the most of it. One thing boarding school taught me was to fend for myself.’
At St Peter’s, Fred became friends with Subash Shah, the school’s only other pupil from Zanzibar. ‘We were born on the same day and in the same year, my parents knew his father, but we had never seen each other in Stone Town,’ says Shah now. During some school holidays, the two would make the long trip back home together. ‘We were together on that ship twice. It would stop in the Seychelles, Mombassa, Zanzibar and then on to South Africa.’ To pass the time, the boys played endless games of table tennis, at which Freddie became an expert. ‘On one trip the captain realised that there were a few of us from the same school travelling together,’ says Shah. It was here that the future Freddie Mercury experienced his first upgrade. ‘Most of us were travelling third class, but the captain made an exception and let us join the second-and first-class customers, which meant we had special privileges and much better games.’
During other school holidays, when he couldn’t take the ship, Freddie would remain at St Peter’s or stay at his maternal grandmother and aunt’s house in Bombay or with friends from school. It was his Aunt Sheroo who noticed he was becoming a good artist, and she bought him a set of oil paints. She also spotted his growing interest in music and suggested to his parents that they sign him up for piano lessons at the school. With the encouragement of his teachers, Freddie studied with an elderly Irish pianist, who, according to one former pupil, ‘absolutely doted on him’.
During his first few terms, Freddie became close friends with four other pupils in Ashlin House: Bruce Murray, Farang Irani, Derrick Branche and Victory Rana. ‘We used to listen to the pop charts on the radio,’ recalls Bruce Murray now. ‘It was a programme sponsored by a toothpaste company. We’d hear these songs, and then Freddie would go to the piano and play them note-perfect, only after hearing them once. His passion was for Little Richard, Fats Domino, Cliff Richard …’ Subash Shah adds, ‘His knowledge of Hindi was limited but he could also listen to Indian songs and somehow capture the same rhythm on the piano. When he wanted to, he could be incredibly focused.’ Freddie joined most of his friends in the school choir, which gave them a rare opportunity to mix with pupils from the affiliated girls’ school. ‘Hindu, Muslim, Christian … if you could sing you were in the choir,’ says Murray.
Although shy, the future Freddie Mercury’s flair for drama showed itself at St Peter’s, in more ways than one. He played a doctor in the school’s production of the nineteenth-century farce Cure for the Fidgets, and, during one performance, was accidentally jabbed in the backside by another actor’s sword. Outraged, he slapped the guilty pupil across the face and stormed off the stage. ‘There was a side to him which was somewhat frenzied,’ recalled Derrick Branche, who likened the teenage Freddie’s demeanour to that of Dean Martin’s goofball comedy partner Jerry Lewis: ‘Hands flapping and legs going every which way.’
In Panchgani, the boys were surrounded by classical and Indian music, but Western pop was the soundtrack of choice. As Bruce Murray explains, ‘We all wanted to be Elvis.’ Three years into their time at school, Freddie, Bruce, Farang, Derrick and Victory formed their own group, The Hectics. The band commandeered the art room close to their new dormitory, and drove their art teacher to distraction with their primitive twanging and thumping. Murray sang, Branche played guitar, Rana the drums, while Farang Irani copied the popular English skiffle groups of the time by fashioning a makeshift one-string bass out of a tea chest, a stick of wood and a piece of wire. Freddie played the school’s upright piano.
In an environment starved of the real thing, The Hectics became the star attraction at any school function, playing to a mixed audience that included a highly enthusiastic contingent from the neighbouring girls’ school. ‘They would stand at the front and scream,’ recalled Derrick Branche, ‘just like they’d heard girls the world over were beginning to do when faced with current idols.’ Yet Freddie was happy to let Bruce Murray hog the limelight. ‘Freddie didn’t seem a natural frontman at all,’ said Branche. ‘He was quite content to stay well in the background.’
‘I was the singer as I was the best-looking one,’ laughs Murray. ‘We played The Coasters’ “Yakety Yak”, lots of Elvis, Dion, maybe some Ricky Nelson stuff. Fred sang backing vocals, but his thing was still the piano. He also had this quirky way of moving onstage, which you could see a little of later with Queen. We never played outside the school, except one time when I was visiting my aunt in Bombay and I saw Freddie on the street. He came into the house and he played the piano while I sang. For years after, my aunt would ask about “the boy with the buck teeth that played the piano”.’
A photograph of The Hectics onstage shows a typical teenage school group of the early sixties. In the standard dress of white shirts, black ties, pleated trousers and identically greased hair, they pose self-consciously with their instruments; Farang Irani preparing to leap from the top of his cumbersome tea chest, onto which the band’s name has been wonkily stencilled. Bulsara looks even less like a future pop star than his bandmates, still a gawky schoolboy, grinning and showing the protruding front teeth, caused by the presence of four extra teeth at the back of his mouth.
Bruce Murray insists that nobody called Freddie ‘Bucky’ to his face (‘or they would have had us to contend with’). But others maintain that he was widely known by this nickname or, as Subash Shah remembers it, ‘Buckwee’. Similarly, while Bruce Murray says that Freddie was always known by his adopted English name, Subash Shah remembers him only being known by his birth name of Farrokh while at Panchgani.
At the age of twelve, Freddie won the school’s annual Junior All-Rounder prize for combined academic and sporting achievement. As the years passed, he became a capable cricketer (though he later claimed to loathe the game), field hockey player and bantamweight boxer. It was in the boxing ring that his friends saw further evidence of their classmate’s strength of character and focus. ‘I never fought him as I was a different weight,’ remembers Shah. ‘But those who did fight him had to go for a technical knockout. Because of his teeth, his mouth would bleed very badly. So to protect himself, he used to really give it to his opponent.’
Bruce Murray witnessed a particularly vicious bout. ‘Freddie’s mouth was bleeding; he had blood all over his face. I was his second in the corner of the ring, holding the towel. I kept saying, “Look, Freddie, give up. You’re getting hurt.” But he would not stop. He had this steely look in his eye, as if he was looking at you but straight through you. I saw him again later when we met in England. This attitude of “Fuck them, I will do this” …’
By his final year at St Peter’s his results were slipping. Perhaps distracted by music and art, he had become an average student. While he was alive, the official party line was that he had acquired ‘several O-Levels, including English Literature, Art and History’. In truth, he failed to pass any at Panchgani. Another possibility is that teenage hormones proved a distraction. While having female friends at the neighbouring girl’s school, Freddie was never romantically linked to any of them. One ex-pupil, Gita Bharucha (later Choksi) supposedly became the object of his first schoolboy crush. ‘If he liked me, he didn’t tell me,’ said Gita, interviewed in 2000. ‘But it was a very simple, uncomplicated life. Boy meets girl. Boy holds hand with girl.’
Shockingly for the time, some teachers recall that Freddie had also begun using the term ‘darling’ to address other males, giving him the rarefied air for which he’d become known in Queen. According to some, he was teased about his effeminate behaviour, but more often that not it was ignored simply because, as one friend explained, ‘it was just Freddie’. While some of his St Peter’s contemporaries maintain that he was obviously gay, others contend he wasn’t. ‘I saw no sign of it,’ insists Bruce Murray. But Derrick Branche took a different view. ‘St Peter’s was no different to all the other public schools of the boarding variety,’ he said. ‘Pupils there, including Freddie, went through their own fair share of confusion as puberty overtook them and their bodies began giving their minds conflicting signals.’
Various conflicting rumours surfaced about Freddie Mercury’s schooldays, particularly in the years following his death. One story claimed that he had a relationship with another older male pupil at school; another that he was romantically involved with a boy in Bombay. Interviewed in the Hindustan Times in 2008, a former teacher from Panchgani claimed that one of Freddie’s homosexual relationships had been discovered, with drastic consequences: ‘His father would have been informed and I’m sure very disappointed. The family has a very rigid background going back generations, and Zoroastrians completely forbid homosexuality.’ The closest Mercury came to revealing more was in an interview with NME in 1974: ‘All the things they say about them [boarding schools] are true … I’ve had the odd schoolmaster chasing me. It didn’t shock me. I had a crush on a master and would have done anything for him.’ When asked if he was the ‘pretty boy that everyone wanted to lay’, Mercury replied, ‘Funnily enough, yes … I was considered the arch poof.’ When asked, in the parlance of the mid-seventies, if he was ‘bent’, Freddie answered, ‘Let’s put it this way, there were times when I was young and green. It’s a thing schoolboys go through, and I had my share of schoolboy pranks, but I’m not going to elaborate any further.’
In 1962, Freddie left St Peter’s and returned to the family home in Zanzibar. One of the last photographs of him at the school shows a louche sixteen-year-old reclining on a bench outside one of the dormitories. In it, Freddie sports large sunglasses and a perfectly sculpted quiff. A parting message written in a friend’s autograph book that year reads: ‘Modern paintings are like women, you can’t enjoy them if you try to understand them – your pal always, F. Bulsara.’
In 1979, his mother Jer donated photographs of her son and other memorabilia to St Peter’s, but it would be the closest Freddie came to revisiting his old school. In the years following his death in 1991, St Peter’s opened its doors to TV crews and journalists seeking to uncover more about Freddie’s Mercury’s childhood. Much of the school’s premises remain unchanged; the school hall in which The Hectics performed almost the same as it was in the fifties. Even the piano on which he performed remained in tact, until partly destroyed by a fire in 2002.
Of his bandmates in The Hectics, Farang Irani opened a restaurant in Mumbai, where he still shares stories with those stopping off for lunch as part of the Freddie Mercury Indian School Experience tour, Derrick Branche and Bruce Murray moved to England – Branche became an actor in countless seventies and eighties TV programmes and 1985’s Oscar-nominated film My Beautiful Launderette, while Murray went into music management. Victory Rana, The Hectics’ drummer, later graduated from the United States Army War College, and became Inspector-General of the Nepalese army, before being appointed by Kofi Annan as Commander of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Cyprus in 1999. Branche and Murray both came back into Freddie’s life later. But as another of his contemporaries recalled, ‘I think Freddie was keen to forget India and get on with the next stage in his life.’
That next stage would be a year with his family, trying to finish his education in Stone Town. Here, he again met up with Subash Shah, whose parents had decided to take him out of Panchgani after he had failed one of his exams: ‘Freddie walked into my class, and I was shocked as I had presumed he was already halfway across the Indian Ocean going back to Panchgani. But he never told me why his parents had brought him back from India, and I never asked.’
There would be no Hectics II in Zanzibar. Instead, Freddie gleaned any scraps of information about pop culture from the English magazines that arrived weeks, sometimes months after publication. For his birthday, he received a tape recorder and would record pop music broadcast late at night on British programmes. At school, Freddie, Subash and the other male pupils would sit in strictly delegated lines behind the female pupils. ‘All the African Arab girls would wear a traditional headdress called the bui-bui,’ says Shah. ‘One time we all went to the beach as a class. At this time the dance craze the Twist was very big on the island. It was the first time any of us had seen the girls without their bui-buis. There they were, twisting their butts off, with Freddie in the middle doing the same.’
By now, Cliff Richard, Fats Domino and Little Richard, who had fired up The Hectics barely a year before, were about to be usurped. By the close of 1963 in England, The Beatles had arrived and were busily revolutionising pop music, with the Rolling Stones about to follow suit. In Zanzibar, too, everything was about to change, with a political upheaval that would change the Bulsara family’s lives for ever.
By the early 1960s, British colonial rule of the island was weakening. Following an election in December 1963, the British handed power to the Arab-dominated Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Coalition Party. The opposition, the mainly African Afro-Shirazi party, believed the election had been rigged. To maintain order, the new government banned some opposition parties and expelled African policemen from the island, fanning the dissent. On 12 January 1964, several hundred party opponents including many of the expelled policemen, took to the streets amid violent protests. Under the stewardship of ‘Field Marshall’ Jo
hn Okello and a hardcore of some forty leading rebels, they seized control of government buildings in Zanzibar City, and had all but taken control of the island within nine hours.
‘After the revolution, things went crazy,’ recalls Shah. ‘But we had a routine where I would go over to Freddie’s house at around five-thirty for tea, and then we would go for a walk around town before making sure we were back home for seven-thirty. There had been so much death on the island that I asked him, “Buckwee, how long do you think you are going to live?” And he said, “For some reason, the number forty-five comes into my head.” Then he asked me how long I thought I was going to live, and I said, “Forty-seven.” It wasn’t a planned question; it was just something that came into my head simply because of the context of what had been going on.’ In 1996, Subash Shah would discover that his friend Freddie Bulsara had, indeed, died aged just forty-five. ‘It was my fiftieth birthday and my father had found a newspaper cutting about Freddie Mercury, who had died five years before,’ he says. ‘I listened to jazz. I knew nothing about Queen. My father read the article and realised that this singer was the same Farrokh Bulsara that we had known as a child.’
In June, Shah and his family moved to Ohio, where Subash had been offered a scholarship at Kent State University. Shah recalls the Bulsaras leaving earlier, in March. As Bomi had a British passport, it’s believed that the family fled, taking as many possessions as they could fit into two suitcases, before flying to England. The family settled in Feltham, Hounslow, an anonymous suburban town a little over three miles from the airport at which they’d arrived. Fellow resident Brian May’s blunt description of Feltham was ‘a place where nothing ever happened’. After first staying with relatives, the Bulsaras bought a Victorian terrace at 22, Gladstone Avenue. Bomi found work as an accountant for a local catering company, and Jer took a job as a shop assistant.
