Beaten, bullied, betrayed
Their parents sent them away for the best education, but generations of boys left boarding school traumatised for life
UNDEtERRED by a well-nigh unbroken litany of sex abuse scandals over the years, the British still pack more children off to boarding schools than any other country on Earth.
Amazon tribesmen who routinely scald their children with hot water, or scratch their skin with shark’s teeth in order to prepare them for the rigours of life, wouldn’t dream of doing anything as drastic as sending them away from home for up to eight months a year.
As far as Alex Renton is concerned — himself a ‘boarding school survivor’, as it’s rather ludicrously become known — this enforced separation has had a catastrophic effect on the mental health of former pupils.
time and again in Stiff upper Lip, there are accounts of middle-aged men who have never been able to form loving relationships, express their feelings, or even experience happiness because at a very early age they effectively walled themselves up for their own protection.
they had learned a terrible lesson — that ‘love is not reliable, that trust may be betrayed’.
Emotionally stunted, physically and often sexually brutalised, they’ve stumbled through life with a nagging sense of being incomplete, of having left some vital part of themselves behind with which they can never be reunited.
But the effects of such an education are far more wide-ranging, Renton believes. With so many ex-boarders going on to become pillars of the Establishment, it’s no wonder institutions such as Westminster, the BBC and the NHS have traditionally turned blind eyes to sex abuse. When faced with anything embarrassing, anything grubby, their instinct has been to brush it under the carpet.
As a boarding school survivor myself — I was sent to prep school aged eight in the Sixties where, with wearisome predictability, I was sexually abused, not by a master, but by the head boy — I found myself nodding along with many of Renton’s points.
I, too, learned to keep secrets as a child. to bottle up my emotions and screw on the top as tightly as possible. Certainly, I never felt I could tell my parents what had happened. And telling any of the masters was unthinkable — even then, I had a pretty good inkling whose side they were likely to be on.
the first person I ever told was my wife, and I was 50 at the time. Periodically, I still wonder how it has affected me. these things are hard to quantify, of course, but like a lot of the people who Renton interviewed, I’ve always had a sense that my childhood came shuddering to a premature close — and that nothing has ever been quite the same since.
Even the Victorians recognised that sending their children off to boarding school had a very peculiar effect on them.
Around 1850, many parents noticed their sons had stopped crying. Prior to this, gentlemen — or those aspiring to be gentlemen — had no qualms about bursting into tears.
Prime ministers Pitt, Fox and Wellington wept buckets without feeling remotely embarrassed, while poet laureate Alfred tennyson would blub uncontrollably as he read out his own verses.
But then, all at once, boys
stopped crying. Had their tear ducts suddenly run dry?
Renton’s explanation is that, sent off in ever-increasing numbers to boarding schools, they learned to bottle up their feelings.
So why did the Victorians start sending their children away to be educated? In part, they wanted them to become upstanding Christian soldiers. But there were other, less exalted motives.
Parents had grown increasingly concerned that if their children stayed at home, little Hector or Augustus might be faced with an irresistible temptation — wanting to have sex with the servants.
The big problem — as we now know — is that a great many of the men who worked in these new boarding schools were mad, bad, or both.
Sadists, pederasts, tinpot tyrants . . . all were enthusiastically welcomed aboard. In 1860, a pupil at a ‘private school of the highest class in Eastbourne’ was beaten to death by the headmaster.
Most of the stories in Stiff Upper Lip are less drastic than that, but still memorably awful: the persistent bed-wetter recalling how the matron at his school would rub his nose into his urine-soaked sheets every morning; the girl with a dairy allergy who was forced, again by the matron, to drink a glass of milk, then to clear up the mess after she vomited.
Renton himself was sent — aged eight — to Ashdown House in Sussex, where on his first day he saw a ‘short woman in a checked coat presenting a curly-haired boy even smaller than me to the headmaster’.
This turned out to be Princess Margaret and her son, David.
Renton’s mother commented about the headmaster: ‘He seems very nice.’ In fact, he turned out to be a sadistic drunk who beat boys so severely that they had purple welts for weeks afterwards. But while Renton convincingly argues the case against boarding schools, he has overlooked one key element — its absurdity.
Rightly, he doffs his cap to George Orwell, whose essay about his own prep school days, Such, Such Were The Joys, is ‘savage’ in its criticisms.
But however savage, Orwell’s essay is also extremely funny, and it’s the absurdity of boarding school life — most notably its idiotic rituals and traditions — that helped make it so sinister.
THE playwright David Hare remembers how at his public school, Lancing College, boys were ordered to swim naked ‘on the unlikely pretext that if we wore trunks, the fibres from our garments would clog up the filters’.
You can huff away with shock and indignation at this, of course, but you’d need to have had a complete sense of humour bypass not to crack a wry smile at the same time.
Ah, but everything has changed now. At least that’s what parents tell themselves as they pack their children off to boarding schools.
Certainly, some things have changed. These days, fees have increased so much that schools can afford to be far more selective about who they employ. Partly as a result, the beatings, the bullying, the sexual abuse are largely things of the past.
Nor is there any doubt that a lot of the children who go off to board aged 13 — rather than at eight — find it a rewarding and enjoyable experience. They have their own rooms, can go home at weekends and may call their parents whenever they want.
Yet none of this is enough to persuade me to send my children — aged ten and nine — away to school.
Some things haven’t changed. For instance, headmasters have no more legal obligation to report instances of sexual abuse to the police now than they did 50 years ago.
And, as Renton concludes at the end of this grimly depressing, often lumpily written yet enormously valuable book: there’s one thing that can never change — ‘they are still boarding schools’.