Horrific record of abuse
Earl Spencer’s grim revelations that he was groomed by a school matron at the age of 11, and subjected to the paedophilic sadism of his late headmaster, John Porch, have grabbed headlines ahead of the publication of this book.
What a heartbreaking read it is. Charles Spencer, historian and brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, provides a stark account of his time at the Northamptonshire boarding school Maidwell Hall in the 70s and the emotional, physical and sexual abuse he suffered there due to a culture of bullying and secrecy.
There have been harrumphing articles implying that such tough schooling was merely characterforming. This book is a resounding rebuttal of that view – it would be hard to read it and not feel disgust, and fury, on behalf of the children put through such a system.
This is not a one-man crusade: alongside his own calm but vivid first-person account, Earl Spencer presents testimony from many fellow pupils. The Maidwell scars are long-lasting – several former pupils speak of how their time there decimated their confidence or sense of joy, or prevented them from being able to love as adults. Several also report that their buttocks still show signs of caning, four or five decades on.
Reading the gruesome details, all this is hardly surprising. Porch would be visibly aroused while caning boys, and would grope his favourites while beating them. Another teacher hit one child so hard he fell unconscious, and forced another boy to swim for so long he almost drowned. The same teacher forced a pupil to use his naked body and erect penis as a “human slide” when entering the pool.
Earl Spencer partly coped by turning on himself: he would make himself sick, considered shooting himself in the foot. When the abusive matron told him she was leaving Maidwell, he cut himself with a penknife.
While that may sound surprising, the earl is admirably honest about the complexities of his feelings for this 20-year-old woman who kissed and molested her pre-teen charges: he believed himself in love, and only later realised he was the victim of “a voracious paedophile”.
A Very Private School makes it clear that such schools were explicitly designed to “populate and replenish the ranks” of the British Empire. A homesick child would have “his stiff upper lip cast in the furnace of English boarding school life, where his emotions were cauterised. The resultant, desensitised functionary could be reliably deployed far from home – whether in Calcutta, Cape Town or Calgary.”
The earl also touches upon the vexed question of why more children didn’t tell their parents what was happening at school, and why so many parents continued to perpetuate the boarding school tradition. “I suspect a simple reflex,” is the main theory presented – it was just the done thing, he suggests.
Our sympathy for aristos moaning about their upbringing can be a little thin. But that really shouldn’t be our reaction here: while the practices at Maidwell sound Victorian, they were happening in the 70s.
This is our recent history – and, as with child abuses in institutions such as the church or children’s homes, they must be brought into the light. The fact that parents paid handsomely for their children to be brutalised should not diminish the horror of it.