MY VERY RACY GRANDAD

From my earliest days, my dad Joe Henson was my rock, my mentor, my hero, the man who taught me virtually all I know about farming. You’d think he was a country boy born and bred, but he wasn’t. Far from it. He came from a famous London showbiz family and he had a surprisingly unorthodox history. As he revealed to us, his family, towards the end of his life, he was illegitimate in an era when that was a huge social stigma. And his childhood had been so turbulent, a Greek melodrama and a Shakespearean love story rolled into one, it was a miracle he turned out so well.

Dad’s father was Leslie Henson, a music hall comedian of the 1920s and 1930s who became a West End star and was the inspired founder of ENSA, the organisation that entertained the troops during the Second World War. For that he may well have been knighted by King George VI, if it had not been for the fact that he was a divorcee. On the surface Leslie was a paragon of respectability, married to his second wife Gladys, another actor. But his real true love was a glamorous Cockney showgirl named Billie Dell. She became pregnant with his baby and he set her up in a love nest outside London, close to his golf club so he could visit Billie and his son, born in 1932, without causing suspicion.

After a few years Billie tired of waiting for him to divorce and L-r: Fred Astaire, his sister Adele and Leslie Henson moved to Bournemouth. There she met Cyril Day, manager of a Woolworths store, and married him just as the war broke out. He was a nice man who treated my father as his own son, until tragedy struck and Cyril, then a navigator in the RAF, was killed on a bombing raid.

Clearly the spark between Leslie and Billie was still there though because as the war ended, he finally got his divorce and they married and settled in Kent. But how unsettled my Dad’s early years must have been – the complete opposite of the idyllic childhood he and my mum gave me and my three sisters on our Cotswold farm. Was that the point, maybe? That he was giving us what he’d never had?

Dad died, aged 82, last year. He taught me everything I know and instilled in me a passion for the land. Subconsciously I was always following in his giant footsteps and there was no better place to be.