Colin Brazier: The day I discovered my millionaire grandfather

Telegraph

06-07-2025

Five years ago, while explaining his conversion to Catholicism, America's vice-president, JD Vance, wrote that coincidences were evidence of 'the touch of God'. But how improbable need events be before rational explanations falter?
I ask this, not for a friend, but myself. Last month, on Friday the 13th no less, something happened which stretches statistical credulity. And since I am already a Catholic, I am not minded to dismiss it as happenstance.
I was sitting with my daughter at Lord's Cricket Ground when a message landed in my LinkedIn inbox. It was from a stranger, a woman claiming to be my aunt. A recent DNA test had apparently revealed the link. Without going into details, her story checked out. She also included two pictures of a man, bearing an unmistakable likeness to me, standing in front of a very grand house. This, she said, was my paternal grandfather, James JJ Doyle.
Her disclosure was, to put it mildly, a surprise. I was raised knowing nothing about my father's side of the family (indeed, I had only learnt my father's true identity as a young man). Now, out-of-blue, came my grandfather's story.
James 'Jimmy' Doyle was born in 1930 into extreme poverty in Hastings, where – coincidentally – I spent half a year training to be a journalist. He was a poor boy made good, up to a point. A spell in prison for handling stolen antiques (he was exposed by Esther Rantzen on That's Life) did not prevent a social ascent of Becky Sharp velocity.
He became a property developer and in 1971 pulled off the biggest coup of his career. After 20 years of trying, he finally bought Wykehurst Place, a 105-room country house set in 180-acres of Sussex countryside.
Doyle spent millions in today's money on a huge restoration project. Nikolaus Pevsner and Ian Nairn, in their influential series The Buildings Of England, described it as the 'epitome of high Victorian showiness and licence'.
The house became the setting for films like The Eagle Has Landed starring Michael Caine. According to my newly-discovered aunt, her father was a man of strong dynastic instincts. His yearning for a male heir to inherit the family pile was never requited (he had seven daughters). The reality, unknown to him, was that he had fathered a boy as a teenager in Brighton. That baby, adopted by a couple far away in Yorkshire, became my father. Neither knew of the other's existence.
Sadly, Doyle's life ultimately ended in ruin and despair. After divorce and bankruptcy, he killed himself in 1995.
Learning of all this made me reflect that in a world where DNA home-testing kits are cheap and widely available, the discovery of hidden branches of family trees must be increasingly commonplace. Doyle's story was simply more colourful, and ultimately tragic, than many.
But the genetic science that has made this possible is about more than ancestry tests. In the eternal debate about what makes people who they are, DNA now dominates the argument. Geneticists talk of characteristics as something we are born with, innate – not bred into us or learnt.
When I look at the parallels between my life and that of my grandfather, do I see coincidence or genetic predisposition? Doyle had seven daughters and a son. I had a son and five daughters. Does that suggest a biological sex-bias in our DNA, something in our genes which made us both more likely to beget girls? Or, is it broader than that?
There is evidence to suggest a genetic predisposition towards the decision to have children at all. What might feel like an act of free-will may actually have more to do with what lurks in our double-helix. Some scientists even believe that personality-traits like an openness to religion are genetically encoded. God-botherers like me are just born that way, it seems.
But how to explain the other stuff? As anyone who has followed my 35-year-long career in television will testify (BBC, Sky, GB News), over the decades I have moved sharply and publicly to the Right. On X, I post regularly about immigration issues, motivated to a great extent by my upbringing in Bradford, a city used (disastrously in my view) as a giant laboratory for multiculturalism. Doyle, though ostensibly a businessman, was also of the Right. He founded the Racial Preservation Society, which campaigned in the 1960s and 1970s for an end to mass immigration. Until Friday the 13th, I had never heard of the Racial Preservation Society, nor of The British Independent, a newspaper founded and funded by Doyle.
When I discovered Doyle's politics I was half-way through proof-reading a book about anti-Semitism for a Jewish friend. I have no time for racists. But I am also part of a growing cohort of commentators online and elsewhere who refuse to be shutdown by ideological enemies who use that slur to limit legitimate debate. I think Britain faces tough questions about its demographic future, and I am trying to explore them in the pages of The Salisbury Review, a conservative quarterly founded by the philosopher Roger Scruton and where I am now assistant editor. I have no idea how it compares to Doyle's British Independent. Yet it is odd that we should both be involved in Right-wing writing. If family formation and religiosity can be attributed to DNA, what about politics?
But where does genetics stop and coincidence begin? And, indeed, where does a coincidence become so improbable that it veers beyond the bounds of reasonable likelihood? It is odd that I should call my only son John Joseph, even though I never knew James JJ (John Joseph) Doyle. It is strange that my grandfather, when he sold Wykehurst Park in 1981, should buy a slightly lesser mansion, now apparently inhabited by a famous English journalist and media personality (Piers Morgan).
Yet these are everyday coincidences. How, though, to account for Bolney? I had never heard of Bolney, a village in Sussex, until a friend gave me a Virgin voucher as a wedding present last year. It was for a tour around a vineyard located there. We forgot all about it until, while my wife was organising her desk six weeks ago, she stumbled upon the card and noticed that the gift was about to expire. We decided to book a room there and spend a day walking on the South Downs.
That was a few days before Friday the 13th. There are more than 6,000 villages in Britain and yet the one that had come to our attention was the very village in which Wykehurst Place sits. The home, not just of a vineyard, but of my paternal grandfather. What are the odds?
The dictionary defines a coincidence as 'a remarkable concurrence of events or circumstances without apparent causal connection'. I prefer the definition given by the late Alistair Cooke, long-time and much-loved host of BBC radio's Letter From America. Extreme coincidence was, he said in a letter about the subject in 2001, a potential gift of grace.
'Somebody,' he said, 'is saying 'stay the course' … reminding you that they have you in mind.'