‘Sadists and perverts’ – stories of abuse in the dark history of boarding schools

We have grown sadly familiar with accounts of child abuse and paedophilia, such as Tomás Hardiman’s memories of abuse by Irish Christian Brothers in The Days of Trees, now in the cinema. In Britain, Charles Spencer’s personal story of sexual and physical abuse at his posh Northamptonshire prep school is a bestseller – only partly because he is Princess Diana’s brother.

But it certainly lifts the lid on boarding school culture as he experienced it in the 1970s, when beatings were common and masters took sadistic and paedophilic pleasure – as he describes it – in leathering boys’ naked buttocks, sometimes drawing blood, frequently bruising, sometimes accompanied by sexual arousal.

One young boy, who only got 44pc in his maths exam, was given eight strokes of the cane each day over the course of a week to represent the 56pc he had missed.

Because Spencer’s prep school, Maidwell Hall, was deemed private, there were, unbelievably, no inspections. And if there were outrages – such as a boy sustaining a serious head wound from a teacher’s assault – they were hushed up or settled secretly.

Boys were never praised or encouraged. A stout boy would be called “jellybelly”; a tall lad “Mountain man”. “Blithering idiot” or “insignificant worm” were usual epithets. There was “no compassion” even to a boy in pain – the school mission was to toughen up the kids. The headmaster was a sadist, said Spencer; other teachers knew what was going on, but they were either too cowardly, or too much part of the system, to speak out.

In a shocking passage in his memoir, A Very Private School, Spencer describes being groomed and seduced by a female assistant matron when he was just 11. She would come into the boys’ dorm at night, bring them sweets and then start kissing them and fondling their private parts. Because of this confusing experience, he embarked on his early sex life with a sense of shame and disgust.

Spencer felt abandoned in boarding school. His parents’ separation, when he was two years old – his mother, Frances, left Earl Spencer to marry Peter Shand Kydd – made him emotionally vulnerable. Yet it was thought that a boarding school, from the age of eight, would bring the child stability. His siblings were also dispatched as boarders.

At one point, his father considered having him home-schooled, but he was talked out of it, as it was considered eccentric. Charles hugely regrets this decision, because he spent all his childhood desperately longing for home. Strangely, the woeful upbringing of this aristocrat has some echoes of accounts of Irish institutionalised children, such as in John Cameron’s affecting story Boy 11963 or Paddy Doyle’s classic The God Squad – where abandonment and yearning for a family connection is the overwhelming theme.

Spencer is just one of a number of contemporary British writers who have described awful childhood boarding school experiences. The literary critic and biographer AN Wilson described in his memoir Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises, his life as a boarder at Hillstone in Worcestershire; the headmaster, also a sadist and a pervert, would masturbate while caning the boys. Boys were raped and sustained injuries, and cases were never brought to court.

Dozens of former pupils and families contacted Wilson to describe the horrors they had been put through at Hillstone, with consequences of depression, suicide attempts, alcoholism and drug addiction. What was especially distressing was that the offending headmaster was aided and abetted by his wife.

Similarly, the novelist Louis de Bernieres has bitterly denounced the boarding school experience as “child abuse” and recalled a “culture of extreme physical and mental cruelty” at Grenham House in Kent.

He waited until his parents were dead before he wrote about the ordeal of his childhood: they believed they were doing their best in paying for a private education. And yet “I have never quite managed to forgive them”, he wrote.

Although the number of boarding schools is declining, the institution still survives: there are over 20 in Ireland and 236 in Britain. They have changed greatly and are subject to stringent inspections. One parent said they’re now “more like a country club” (with fees to match).

Yet Spencer doesn’t believe they can change completely – because of the enclosed atmosphere and because of “human nature”. And anyway, children should be at home.

He does signal one positive outcome: the sense of comradeship with other inmates. Like many of my generation, I attended boarding school, and while there were failings (snobbery, mediocre teaching, petty censorship), I never witnessed cruelty or perversion. And there is still a real bond with “the girls” who were my fellows back in that time.