I watched my husband testify against the monster who tortured him

The recent publication of Earl Spencer’s horrific account of abuse, A Very Private School, which detailed the cruelties meted out at Maidwell Hall, his independent prep school in Northamptonshire, has once again shone a harsh spotlight into the darkest corners of the British boarding school system.

He is not the only high-profile person to have the courage to speak out about the humiliations they suffered as young boys in our most elite schools. The broadcaster Nicky Campbell’s revelations in 2022 that he had been abused, and witnessed abuse, at Edinburgh Academy in the 1970s triggered an avalanche of similar memories from other alumni. In fact, my husband, an erstwhile classmate of Campbell’s, was one of them.

I’ll never forget the day he opened up to me about what had happened. I shed tears for the sunny 10-year-old, who loved Airfix models and playing Ancient Romans in his friend’s back garden.

He, like dozens of other former pupils, remembers being physically abused – psychologically harmed, permanently damaged – by John Brownlee, a former teacher and sometimes housemaster. During a 20-year reign of terror, Brownlee regularly administered vicious beatings with a clacken, a heavy wooden sports bat. This would be brought down with a golfer’s swing on little boys’ bottoms, three, six, even 10 times for minor infractions. This was allied to a range of other punishments, such as kicking boys, shoving them down the stairs and even locking three boys up in a shed for two days. One child blacked out after being smashed over the head. A six-year-old had a garden hose pushed into his back passage by Brownlee as a punishment for bedwetting.

I can talk about this now because on Wednesday a three-week long procedure called “an examination of facts” was concluded at Edinburgh Sheriff Court. No trial could take place after Brownlee, 89, was formally excused due to his advanced dementia. The sheriff concluded that Brownlee had conducted a two-decade campaign of violence and torture against children as young as eight. My husband was among those who stood in the witness box for 45 minutes describing the hurt and fear he had endured. The sheriff described Brownlee’s behaviour as “extreme criminal bullying” and found he had committed 31 charges of assault and one charge of cruel and unnatural treatment.

Afterwards the Edinburgh Academy Survivors’ Group declared “justice has been done” and Campbell said: “Today, I have been a 10-year-old boy again, I have been weeping in my wife’s arms.”

My husband feels a sense of catharsis mixed with deflation that Brownlee will go unpunished. But he is relieved that decades of hurt were disinfected by sunlight. His healing can now finally begin.