Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen, left, and in the arms of his father Trefor (Image: WireImage / Collect)
The flamboyant style guru, 54, who worked on interiors for the Queen and Prince Philip, revealed the “huge impact” of his father’s death, ahead of his appointment as official ambassador of the national Make Blood Cancer Visible campaign, to be announced tomorrow. Llewelyn-Bowen, a father of two who lives in a 17th-century manor house in Siddington, Gloucestershire, said his father, Trefor, a highly respected Harley Street surgeon, was virtually removed from his family after he fell ill one Christmas. He died just seven months later in July 1974 aged 42 after spending his last months either in a hospital or a hospice.
Mr Llewelyn-Bowen and his brother and sister only saw him twice again before he died.
The former Changing Rooms presenter said his late mother, Patricia, a former teacher, who died in 2002, who was already battling with multiple sclerosis, subsequently had to fight to keep the family together.
The former judge on ITV show Popstar to Operastar said: “I remember the Christmas when his cancer started to take hold. He had become very short-tempered, very quick in his responses – yet also very slow. I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t spending time with us, why he was unwell and in bed. It was an awful Christmas.
“He felt appalling and it wasn’t talked about. I just didn’t understand why he had to withdraw and why he didn’t want to see all of his family.
“He lost interest in the things we had in common and the interests we shared. I wanted to share things with him that we both liked such as history, going to castles, old buildings, churches and heraldry, but he started dwindling.
“He wanted to be left alone and be quiet. I felt disappointed and particularly disappointed that my last memories of him were about him disappearing and not sharing.
“Not long after, he was admitted to hospital and my mother explained he was really ill. He just disappeared. He came home for about a week in Easter after that and it was terribly shocking to see him. He had no hair, and as they did then, he had a rather improbable wig.
“He didn’t look like the father I remember. He slowly just evaporated from our lives. It is so odd. The impact of my father’s death was huge, and it was all so quick. He was ill at Christmas and dead by July. When people were brave enough to ask what my father died of, and I would say leukaemia, people didn’t know what that was.
“I deliberately didn’t want to be analytical or pathological about it. But I remember a real sense of there being an absolute gap at home. It was 1974. We were expected to go into a corner and accept our fate.
“My mother, who was a teacher, had also been very unwell with MS. In her mind as a family we were very vulnerable after my father’s death. She was afraid we would be taken into care. She fought furiously to keep us and got bursaries to help with school fees and she managed to do it.”
However, he says looking back his “complicated childhood” experiences helped him forge his career.
“Children who have to cope with something very big in their childhood can get on in life quickly and grab the bull by the horns. My siblings and I became focused on achieving what we wanted to do very quickly partly as a legacy of my father’s death.
“After he died I gorged on all the books in his library. My father was interested in mythology, heraldry, history and castles, and in the weeks after his death I started reading every book of his that I could. It somehow informed and shaped the way my life evolved.
“He had a collection of children’s encyclopaedias from the 1930s which he had bound himself. I still have them and they are a strange insight into another arcane time, and laced too with historical trivia, the exact cut of a ruff, the technical term for a doublet which captured my imagination.”
He said that despite advances giving patients access to effective and more personalised treatments – in contrast to his father’s “brutal regime” of chemotherapy and radiotherapy – many cases are still missed or diagnosed too late.
“People need to go to a GP as soon as they suspect they may have a sign of blood cancer. In our society in general we think we can’t make time to go to a doctor.
And if you don’t get the illness early enough it is more difficult to treat. Today we can do much more for blood cancer, but it needs to be caught in time.
“And if your GP doesn’t seem to be very interested or is overstretched you just have to keep going and voice your concerns.
“I am supporting the Make Blood Cancer Visible campaign because the earlier you catch blood cancer the better your chances are of surviving it. I wouldn’t want any other child to go through what me and my family went through.”