ORDEAL Beatings, bullying and paedophile teachers .. just some elements of the potion the British elite has applied to its kids to prepare them for a role among ruling classes
ALEX Renton wept when he read the headlines on a newspaper story about allegations of sexual abuse at Boris Johnson’s former private school.
The Edinburgh journalist had been dropped off at £24,000 a-year prep school, Ashdown House in Sussex, when he was eight – and experienced first hand its brutality.
But like so many, he had accepted as normal the cruelty entrenched in such schools.
Alex, 56, is one of a million people in Britain who have passed through the boarding school system and now he has written a book, Stiff Upper Lip, chronicling the harsh, unpalatable truth of the institutions that have shaped our power brokers.
Alex said: “Beating, bullying, fagging, cold baths, vile food and paedophile teachers are just some of the elements of the potion the British elite has applied to its sons and daughters to prepare them for a role in the ruling classes.”
For hundreds of years, the rich have believed that the rod of the private school system has “made me what I am today”.
This may seem like a “toff ” problem that has little bearing on the rest of us but it runs far deeper than that.
Firstly, the victims were only children and, secondly, they make up a large number of our country’s leaders and influencers.
Has it bred in them a detachment, a Victorian intolerance and lack of empathy?
Social inequity ensures the country’s wealthy elite still run big business and institutions. They form our governments and judiciary, and by extension how they think affects how we all live.
Far from fading out, boarding schools are fashionable again, in part because of the Harry Potter effect.
Alex has heard about children begging parents to be allowed to board, and collusion in the Hogwarts fantasy is convenient for those who want to dump their kids with strangers.
Alex believes harmful boarding school culture fuels the conspiracy of silence around institutional abuse.
He said: “The automatic response of an institution when faced with a
No wonder institutions they went on to run were so prone to cover up ALEX RENTON
scandal is to push it under the carpet and not deal with it – and that could come from the boarding schools. People who grew up in these schools grew up seeing crimes covered up for the good of the institution.
“They were taught that what happens in school stays in school. No wonder that the public institutions of Britain that they went on to run, from the BBC to the NHS, seemed so careless, so arrogant, so prone to cover up.”
For 11 generations, Alex’s wealthy Ayrshire family sent their children to board but he and his siblings sent their offspring to local day schools.
He was sent to Ashdown House School in Sussex when he was eight, starting on the same day as the Queen’s nephew Viscount Linley and two years before Foreign Secretary Boris
Johnson. Homeland and Billions actor Damian Lewis is also a former pupil.
Alex’s book describes being dropped off at Ashdown in his new, grey corduroy shorts, jumper and knee-high woollen socks.
His initial excitement at embarking on a new adventure turned to anguish as the reality dawned.
While his mother sat with him in the car and coaxed him to have a “stiff upper lip”, a “lump of compounded fear and sorrow seemed to occupy the space where my lungs and stomach were supposed to be”.
That night he was put to bed with the stark warning from the dormitory captain that the belt would be used at the merest creak of a bed spring.
The school delivered on every grim fear and he suffered sexual abuse.
He said: “One afternoon when I was nine or 10, a hated and violent young teacher I will call Mr X slipped his hand into my corduroy shorts. This was a known hazard. In return Mr X gave you a Rowntree’s fruit gum.”
But Alex believes that it was separation from his family and the abandonment to the cold, violent regime that was most damaging.
He said: “The worst things that happened to me were legal – the sadness of being separated, the low-level fear, the bullying, neglect and psychological abuse.
“I am not diminishing sexual abuse but years of being ground down by fear and unhappiness also really marks people.”
It left with him a tendency to depression and recklessness. When he wrote about his school experiences for a Sunday newspaper, stories of victims filled his inbox.
He conducted a joint investigation into abuse at several boarding schools.
Research has shown that up to 50 per cent of paid-for childcare institutions have in recent years had either convictions or serious allegations of abuse against them. Alex said: “That is certainly as bad or worse than the council-run care homes in the 70s and 80s.”
Gordonstoun, near Elgin, attended by Prince Charles, and Fettes College in Edinburgh, where Tony Blair was a pupil, are among 100 locations in Scotland where historical abuse is alleged to have taken place.
A Freedom of Information request found files on police investigations into child abuse at Gordonstoun, which educated the Queen’s sons and Prince Philip, appear to have gone missing or been destroyed.
Prominent boarding schools that have been looked into include Loretto in Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, – Scotland’s oldest boarding School – the capital’s Merchiston Castle School, the former Keil School in Dumbarton and Morrison’s Academy in Crieff, Perthshire, when it was a boarding school. Two years ago, Alex contacted the English and Scottish child abuse inquiries offering to share evidence and testimonies he has gathered, including 340 allegations of criminal acts. He will attend the English inquiry next month but the Scottish one has yet to invite him. He said: “I have very specific things to tell the Scottish inquiry, including a number of historical allegations. Some of which say that police were called, that investigations were carried out and then dropped or parents were persuaded not to bring charges.”