Detective work

After many months of searching, our agents have managed to unearth material which we believe has been missing for years. We are now able to exclusively reveal the lost years from the biography of video game magnate and entrepreneurial philanthropist Nick Garnell.

An unnamed agent takes up the story:


"It was rather like the Tutankhamun tomb being opened by Howard Carter in the 1920s. A hidden panel in a cupboard in a loft in Cambridge, prised open with a chisel to reveal some dusty boxes containing packet after packet of faded photographs. Shining a torch upon them, I realised I had stumbled upon the collection we had been seeking for so many months. My hands trembled as I thumbed through revealing image after image from the lost years of Nick Garnell!"


Amongst the treasures revealed are black and white images from his school days which reveal that far from sharing an Etonian background with Boris Johnson and David Cameron, Garnell did in fact 'suffer and serve' at an Essex boys' grammar. Over the next few hours, we will be revealing these shocking images which start to unpeel layers of this mystery.

Those school photos!

There he can be seen on the left, immaculately turned out, next to the goofy boy from Cornwall and one along from the one who already looks like a professor. This is believed to date from 1977. As a result of finding this genuine image, we have been able to bust the 'Eton' myth which Garnell had long perpetuated, as seen in this (now proven to be fake) photoshopped image which had previous circulated extensively.

No wonder he hid that haircut

Known for his suave, almost foppish image, Garnell has always been particularly careful of his golden locks. Some would say he suffers from 'samson complex' in his desire to keep that hair so neat and tidy, untouched by the scissors and razors of others. This extraordinary shot, discovered in the loft box and revealed by painstaking use of a magnifying glass shows just why he would not have wanted anyone to know about those Newport days...



Garnell is flanked in this shot by the other members of the glasses gang: Moore and Coates, as they were known.

We could have predicted this, however, as this very early shot (probably the earliest known image of Garnell) indicates.

More evidence and travels...

Garnell is known to have frequented Southwold since an early age. He can just be made out peering from a window of The Swan hotel in the postcard below.


He was also a known presence in both Cambridge and Brighton at the start of the 1980s as these startling images from the treasure trove reveal.




A closer look at both images reveals his penchant for giant spectacles, considered 'stylish' at the time. For Nick, his childhood years saw him torn between two heroes- Joe Mcclaine, aka the Gerry Anderson creation, Joe90, and that last clean cut cowboy, The Milky Bar Kid.

the curious incident of the upper lip hair

The most eagle-eyed of our readers may have spotted in the Cambridge photo from the previous post that not only was Garnell in 'Specky' mode, but also appeared to be sporting some kind of furry animal between nose and lip...

In this shot, taken in the grounds of his Stansted mansion, the aberration is clearer.



So to what do we ascribe this? A flirtation with fascism? an alternative way of displaying his hunting trophies or does the picture of Nick in Brighton point us in a different direction? Look at these two photos of Garnell with an old 'friend'. Maybe there's more to that moustache in a 'Freddie Mercury' way than we had hitherto suspected...





Suspicious? Well, when you add this to his penchant for pink pullovers and ties and his constant 'need' to be photographed with the 'ladies' or as below, cradling a newborn child in a 'new man father' kind of way, the phrase 'methinks he doth protest too much' comes to mind.

Man at C&A

Most of Nick's early career has been well documented- as a junior toy magnate, a Harrods trainee, his time at Leicester university reading beano (or was it History), a spell with Virgin...but photos have emerged which reveal a stint as a model for C&A, as in this shot.

Future posts

We hope to bring you more of our exclusive material over the coming months, but are keen to add more to the archive, so if any readers find any more photos from Nick garnell- the lost years, do drop us a line at petefrasers@googlemail.com and we'll be happy to add them to the blog.

Meanwhile, a final shot of our hero with the author.