The monster of Neverland: How JM Barrie did a 'Peter Pan' and stole another couple's children

By Tony Rennell
Last updated at 6:19 PM on 08th July 2008

They met in the park. With bright red Tam O'Shanters on their heads, little George and his brother Jack were out with their nanny and baby Peter, taking the air as all upper-middle-class children did in late Victorian Britain if they were lucky enough to live near Kensington Gardens. Then up bounded the toast-of-the-town, playwright and novelist J. M. Barrie, with his St Bernard dog.

To the boys' amazement and amusement, man and dog began play- wrestling - the St Bernard, up on its hind legs, standing as tall as the diminutive Barrie. The show over, the great man crouched down and began talking to his young audience, captivating them with stories of fairies and make-believe woods, and doing magic tricks.

So began an association that spawned one of the classic children's stories of all time - Peter Pan.

The boys - five in all, eventually - were the sons of a struggling lawyer, Arthur Llewelyn Davies, and his wife Sylvia. From that first meeting, Barrie became an intimate of the family, lavishing money on them for motor cars and holidays abroad they could not otherwise afford.

But it was the boys he focused his attention on. Physically more like an older brother than a grown man, he wowed and wooed them with his fertile, child-like imagination, throwing himself with complete abandon into games of pirates and redskins and coral island castaways.

The outdoor adventures they shared, the sleepovers, the story- telling, all became the fantasy world of Neverland, with Wendy and the Lost Boys, Tinkerbell and Captain Hook - tales that would endure for a century and more.

But the truth that lay behind this child-friendly panorama was deeply unsettling. In a book published next week, author Piers Dudgeon - who in previous works shone light into the shady corners of the life of Catherine Cookson - lays out what he calls 'the dark side of Neverland'.

The problems he highlights are not those that have attracted attention in the 70 years since Barrie's death - the sexual overtones and the physical over-familiarity that would have observers calling social services in today's paedophile-conscious society.

His sexuality was not the issue. Barrie was almost certainly impotent and his marriage was never consummated, according to Mary, his wife for 15 years: 'Love in its fullest sense could never be felt by him or experienced.'

Instead, his thrills came from the power dynamics of relationships and playing mind games with people, at which he proved a master. This was what made Barrie a dangerous man to know, particularly for children.

Scottish-born, the son of a weaver, he had made his way in the world from humble origins. But, as a boy, he had been rejected by his mother, cast to one side while she grieved for his older brother, dead in an accident.

The accident happened while ice skating, the older boy, on the eve of his 14th birthday, falling on the ice and fracturing his skull. Dudgeon speculates that the seven-year-old Barrie may have been responsible, for which his mother could not bring herself to forgive him.

He began his story-telling as a means of getting her attention again.

But his heart was hardened. There was no real love in him, only a saccharine sentimentality. He knew it too, admitting openly to having 'a darker and more sinister' side. He learned from an early age the art of manipulation.

It follows, then, that his meeting with the Llewelyn Davies family and their boys was no chance encounter. Barrie had sought it and planned it.

He was, by nature, a stalker. As a boy in Dumfries, he would follow the cloaked figure of famous essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle. He longed to touch the great man, just to be able to boast that he had done so, but, typically for him, never plucked up the courage.

Then, as a writer trying to make his way in London, he pursued the novelist and poet George Meredith, only to turn and run when Meredith approached him. 'Throughout his life,' writes Dudgeon, 'Barrie was driven by hero-worship, perhaps because he felt himself to be so un- heroic.'

Another idol he fixated on, and crucial to this account, was the Punch illustrator and bestselling novelist George du Maurier, one of the social giants of literary London. Du Maurier was the acclaimed author of Trilby, the story of an obsessive musician named Svengali who falls in love with Trilby, a carefree artist's model. He dreams of making her a great singer - except that she is tone deaf.

But through hypnotism, which he has mastered to perfection, Svengali transforms her, releasing from her lips the most exquisite music the world has ever known. It also makes her lips available to him. She is his slave.

To the readers of repressed Victorian Britain, this was all too thrilling. Trilby sold 300,000 copies in its first year (1894) - more than Dickens - and was the first bestseller of modern times.

So successful were du Maurier's fictional creations that the novel coined not just one, but two new words in the English language.

Trilby denotes a hat with a narrow brim and an indented crown, as worn in the stage version of the novel. And Svengali is a person 'who exercises a controlling influence on another'. Du Maurier knew what he was talking about. As a young art student in Paris and Antwerp, he practised hypnotism on the nude models he sketched.

One in particular, a 17-year-old church organist's daughter, with 'blue inquisitive eyes and a figure of peculiar elasticity', as he recalled, became his besotted plaything.

To Barrie, Trilby represented the very sort of mind-games and manipulation that appealed to his nature. He must also have suspected that du Maurier had written from experience. He wanted to connect with him, for the mesmeric magic to rub off on him too.

But du Maurier was dead, from cancer, in 1896, just two years after his great literary success. So Barrie turned to the next best thing. He inveigled his way into the du Maurier family - and, in particular his daughter, Sylvia, married to Arthur Llewelyn Davies and mother of those boys in the park.

Ever the stalker, he engineered a meeting with Sylvia and Arthur at a society dinner party, where he pronounced Sylvia 'the most beautiful creature' he had ever seen. He noticed her squirreling away sweets, which she said were for her boys. Barrie was in.

Then, like a cuckoo in the nest, with generous gifts and ever- presence, he cleverly sidelined Arthur and wheedled his way into Sylvia's affections. His intention was not love, but control, as he steadily stole her and the boys away.

They had something he craved. The boys had the du Maurier magic about them, the charisma that Barrie fed on, particularly those he singled out as 'The One' and gave his keenest attention to.

First George was the favourite, then, as he grew older, Michael took his place. In their ' boyishness' Barrie saw what for him was the ideal life, representing the free, unconfined spirit and the key to eternal youth.

But he could never really let them be themselves; he could never let them go. What began with seduction of the du Maurier clan ended in abduction.

Humiliated by Sylvia's friendship with Barrie, Arthur Llewelyn Davies died at 44, of a horribly disfiguring cancer of the face - followed shortly after by Sylvia herself, also at 44 of cancer.

Barrie, though no relation, simply assumed guardianship of the boys on the pretence that he had been about to marry their mother before her death.

What is extraordinary is that no one else in the du Maurier family made any claim on the orphans, not grandparents nor aunts and uncles. Perhaps they were indifferent; perhaps they thought Barrie a perfectly fitting father.

But to head off any objections, Barrie had Sylvia's will to wave at them - which he had, with consummate calculation, forged in his favour.

She had intended her sister, Jenny, to be the guardian of her sons. But, with a flick of his pen, Barrie changed 'Jenny' to 'Jimmy'. Some of Barrie's biographers believe this was an accident and he had not altered the hand-written will but honestly misread its contents.

But Dudgeon, having compared the original and the doctored copy that Barrie made available, has no doubt that there had been skullduggery. He writes: 'He made the boys his own and the alteration of Sylvia's will shows that his strategy was predatory.'

Michael was ten when Sylvia died and the most handsome of all the brothers. Ten was the age Barrie considered perfection in a boy, and the two became very close, unhealthily so, according to many who witnessed their relationship.

For all his preferred image of innocence, walking by the Serpentine with a rapt child hanging on each hand, friends of the boys thought Barrie creepy. There was something 'sinister about him', one recalled. It wasn't so much the fear of sexual abuse that concerned them but the domination he exercised over such young and impressionable minds and personalities.

Nor did his power stop there. Barrie's malignant influence also extended into the rest of the du Maurier family. He struck up a firm friendship with Gerald, Sylvia's actor brother and the boys' uncle, insinuating himself into his household too.

Four-year-old Daphne, the second of Gerald's three daughters - destined to be a writer every bit the equal of Barrie - was drawn into his make- believe world, in which she was expected to behave like a boy, following the lead of her male cousins. Introverted, withdrawn but blessed with a vast imagination, she was a child of bewildering complexity and every bit as manipulative as Barrie, as her later life demonstrated.

She adored her father with a passion that, returned by him, may have edged too close for comfort to incest. Or maybe, when she confessed to such things, she was simply making it up. With master-storytellers, you can never be quite sure.

Not yet 16, she had an affair with a philandering cousin 22 years older, then, when sent away to a finishing school in France, claimed to be sleeping with the thirty-something lesbian principal. Later, there would be a marriage and children, but also lovers, two of them women.

She claimed, not a little resentfully, her sexual orientation had been confused by her childhood part in Barrie's 'boy-cult'. He had got inside her mind, toying with her sense of self, just as he had the Llewelyn Davies boys and their mother.

But those mind games also gave her perhaps the greatest character in her fiction, the unseen but all-pervasive Rebecca, someone outside the normal conventions, ruthless, demonic, supernatural - and exercising the same sort of predatory control on all around her as had Barrie, Daphne's mentor.

Daphne's life was never straightforward. She had a mental breakdown in 1957. The Llewelyn Davies boys also suffered hugely because of the hold Barrie had over them. George went to war to escape his influence and was killed in the trenches in France in 1915. Jack suffered from depression.

Michael drowned clasping a fellow undergraduate, another 'lost boy', it seems, in a pool near Oxford in 1921 in what was described at the time as a tragic bathing accident, but may well have been a suicide pact.

Dudgeon thinks it may even have been inspired in part by Peter Pan's assertion that 'death is an awfully big adventure'.

Peter also killed himself, beneath the wheels of a train. No wonder D.H. Lawrence was moved to say: 'J.M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves.'

Only Nicholas, the youngest, seemed to have emerged relatively unscathed and with an untarnished view of Barrie.

'I lived with him on and off for more than 20 years,' he said, 'alone with him in his flat for five of these years, and never saw a glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or paedophilia.

'He was an innocent, - which was why he could write Peter Pan!' As if that were argument enough.

But here, with Pan, is where Barrie pulled off his most masterly manipulation. Peter Pan, his greatest invention, has been woefully misunderstood over the generations, taken as a fairy tale, a harmless pantomime, a Disney adventure in a land of innocent children.

But Peter was no hero; he was a demon boy who, like Barrie, had no love in him. He stole children from their beds and killed without conscience - and that was how Barrie wanted him to be.

But the play (which is how it began; the book came later) changed from the moment of its first rehearsal. Captain Hook was inflated to boost the role of the actor taking the part - none other than Gerald du Maurier, Sylvia's brother.

He did such a good job that the evil Hook assumed a larger presence on stage than intended. As a result, when Peter Pan defeated the baddie, the demon boy was taken to be a goodie.

But this was not how Barrie ever conceived him. In the playwright's mind, Peter was cunning and sly, an anarchic character suffused with sadness. As a baby, he had flown out of the nursery to play with the fairies in the park, and then, when he tried to get back home, he found the window barred and his mother nursing another little boy.

He returned to his fantasy world only because the real world had rejected him - which was just how Sir James Barrie, for all the honours heaped on him, felt about himself.

He never found the magic touch that he so assiduously sought for himself by association with the du Maurier family - and all the magic that Peter Pan brought to generations of children never seemed enough for him. The 'never' in Neverland was finding his own happiness. He himself was the ultimate Lost Boy.

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