A teacher in the showers – and why Camilla’s son won’t send his 7-year-old to boarding school
SCHOOL days are often said to be the happiest of your life. But for Tom Parker Bowles, being packed off to board at the age of seven is not an experience he wishes to repeat for his own children.
The Duchess of Cornwall’s son yesterday claimed his prep school was ‘a hotbed of the sorts of things that are coming out now’, and reportedly revealed that one master would join naked boys in the shower.
In a candid interview, he said of Summer Fields school in Oxford: ‘It was just certain things that weren’t right and I’d say to my dad and he’d say, “Well, you tell me if anything happens”, and it never did. So perhaps I’m speaking totally out of turn.’
It is understood the unnamed master was not himself naked in the shower.
But the anecdote is bound to raise questions about what is acceptable for a teacher acting ‘in loco parentis’.
The food writer and Mail on Sunday restaurant critic, 39, was a pupil at the school – motto ‘mens sana in corpore sano’ or ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’ – in the early 1980s before going to Eton.
Last night Nigel Talbot Rice, 76, who was headmaster of Summer Fields when Mr Parker Bowles was there, before retiring from the post in 1997, dismissed any suggestion of impropriety, and said no official complaints were received.
Asked about Mr Parker Bowles’s comments, Mr Talbot Rice added: ‘It is complete rubbish. He was a very happy little boy.’
The school, where boarding fees are currently £25,953 a year, is one of the main feeder schools for Eton.
After being contacted yesterday by the Mail about Mr Parker Bowles’s comments in The Times, a Summer Fields spokesman said: ‘There is no one available to talk about it and the school does not wish to comment.’
Mr Parker Bowles and his wife Sara Buys, a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, send their children Lola, seven, and Freddy, four, to London day schools.
He told how his mother Camilla regretted sending him away to board so young. After Lola’s seventh birthday earlier this month, he said to his mother: ‘You sent me away eight months after this.’
He continued: ‘My mother was slightly appalled, saying she’d never do it again, but it was the thing you did, you know.’
In the wide-ranging interview to promote his new cookbook, Let’s Eat Meat, Mr Parker Bowles also spoke of his reaction to his mother’s long affair with Prince Charles, and her divorce from his father Andrew Parker Bowles, who was Commanding Officer of the Household Cavalry Mounted Regiment.
TOM ON: CHARLES AND THE ‘CAMILLAGATE’ TAPE
Prince Charles had a highly intimate late-night mobile phone conversation with Camilla in 1989. A transcript of the ‘Camillagate’ call was made public in 1992, weeks after news had broken about the ‘ Squidgygate’ tapes i nvolving Diana and her lover James Gilbey.
It caused huge embarrassment to the Royal Family because it included details of how the prince had told his lover that he wanted to be her ‘tampon’.
Yesterday Mr Parker Bowles said: ‘I sort of remember not looking at the paper because you know, Jesus, the things that we’ve all said to people that we love or girlfriends or boyfriends that you wouldn’t want the world reading!
‘I just felt pissed off. I wasn’t going to read that sort of stuff about my mother, just as much as she wouldn’t want to read it about me, or my kids certainly wouldn’t want to read it about me. I don’t think I’ve ever listened to it.’
TOM ON: HIS PARENTS’ DOOMED MARRIAGE
Asked if he felt his parents got on while he was growing up, Mr Parker Bowles said: ‘Perfectly well. I mean, I think as a boy when you’re away a lot you see less, but always.’ He added: ‘They divorced when I was 18. I think you had a sort of inkling perhaps but I always felt that it was just a normal way of things happening.
‘God knows my mother has been called every name under the sun. I suppose we have as well. We’ve never really cared.
‘My mum’s got an iPad now and I was like, “Don’t read the belowthe- l i ne stuff,” and, of course she’s [saying], “You’re not going to believe what they j ust said here! Check this out.”
TOM ON: BEING CAUGHT IN TABLOID DRUG STING
Mr Parker Bowles was caught bragging about taking cocaine by the now closed News Of The World at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999 when he was a junior ‘fixer’ in showbusiness publicity circles. But yesterday he said he bears no grudge.
He told The Times: ‘ That was entirely my fault. I wasn’t moaning and groaning about an intrusion of privacy. You know the position you’re in and if you muck up you pay the consequences and that was the end of that.’
Mr Parker Bowles said t he incident stopped him using the Class A drug.
He added: ‘If a few toffs get caught taking coke and that’s the price you pay for press freedom, well bring it on. I cannot tell you how strongly I believe that one of the cornerstones of democracy is a free Press.’
TOM ON: SMOKING, ONLY THING I DID WELL AT ETON
Despite his reservations about boarding at prep school, Mr Parker Bowles enjoyed his time at Eton and intends to send his son there when he is 13. But yesterday he claimed he didn’t work very hard at the top school until his father threatened to send him to a comprehensive.
He said: ‘My mother couldn’t care. When I had bad reports, she’d be by the window making f aces behind my f ather going, “You’re going to comprehensive if this happens again”, and he meant it. “I’m not going to spend all this money on you if you’re not going to pull your f***ing finger out.”
‘He drove me past Corsham comprehensive [in Wiltshire] and I remember thinking how many pretty girls there were but also tough-looking boys – not like the sort of boys at Eton. And so, third year, GCSEs, that’s when I bucked up and did some work.’ But he added: ‘I was rubbish at everything. I was good at smoking. We knew a couple of pubs where you could drink underage, but apart from a couple of English prizes I moved like a ghost through that school.’
TOM ON: THE BRILLIANT GRANNY WE CALL ‘GAGA’
Mr Parker Bowles yesterday described his mother Camilla, called ‘Gaga’ by his children, as ‘a brilliant grandmother’.
‘I mean, she works incredibly hard. She’d be the first to say that she didn’t really have a job apart from being our mother, which she was very good at, and suddenly age 55 she is working,’ he said. ‘She’s worked incredibly hard, really, really, really hard.’
Asked if she would be queen one day, he said: ‘I don’t know. I have no idea. That is one for far greater minds and constitutionalists than me.’
Mr Parker Bowles said he is a monarchist, but asked if he felt royal himself, he said: ‘Christ, no! I’m a good old pleb.’
Whenever I find myself worrying about how having a politician for a father and an outspoken old bat for a mother might affect the lives of our children, I can console myself with one thought.
At least neither of them have been packed off to boarding school at the tender age of seven like the Duchess of Cornwall’s son, Tom Parker Bowles.
In Tom’s case, it was Summer Fields Prep in Oxford which, as he put it in an interview, was ‘a hotbed of the sorts of things that are coming out now’. One master apparently delighted in taking his morning shower with the boys.
When Tom pointed out to his mother that her seven-year-old granddaughter, Lola, had reached the age at which he was sent away, she was, he says ‘slightly appalled’.
In her defence, she said: ‘It was the sort of thing you did, you know.’
I’m sure it was. In my father’s day, it was customary for masters to beat little boys with canes; that doesn’t make any it less cruel.
This is one of the things that most baffles me about the english upper classes: what on earth possesses them to entrust their children to complete strangers at such a vulnerable age?
AS it happens, Tom is an old friend. he is also one of the kindest, most thoughtful and humblest of men, someone who has always been acutely conscious of his great good fortune. But if boarding school at seven is the price of being upper class, I’d rather travel steerage any day.
For a child of seven still needs its mother — even if she is having bread rolls chucked at her in Waitrose on account of her relationship with the Prince of Wales.
In fact it’s possibly the worst age to remove a child from the security of home and pitch them into an unfamiliar, often hostile, institutional environment. Aged 13 or 14 is fine: by then they’re more than ready for separation (as, most likely, are their parents). But not at seven.
At that age, significant physical and mental changes are taking place. In anthropological circles, this phase is known as ‘middle childhood’.
It begins around the age of six and ends with puberty. It is characterised by the release of powerful hormones — and the growth of the brain to almost full size. As they become more and more capable of rational and analytical thought, children this age start to question authority. Suddenly that small person, once so sweet and adoring, begins to get a few ideas of their own.
In short, kids this age are tricky — which is perhaps why the Countess of Granthams of this world have always preferred to have them removed from view, rather like a troublesome puppy sent to live with the head gardener until properly house-trained.
But a child is not a dog, however similar their table manners. And while the average seven-year-old may be challenging, it’s also an age ripe with potential. My two are now 11 and nine, and I can honestly say that the past few years have been the best yet.
Far better than when they were babies, when, adorable as they were, their dinner party conversation left something to be desired.
These years are some of the most precious a parent has with their child, a short but action-packed window of opportunity before they reach puberty and never want to speak to you again, let alone spend the evenings watching silly films together.
Or, most delicious of all, creeping into your bed in the dead of night for a sleepy cuddle.
I’ll leave the final world to my mother, who as an Army child was sent oceans away from her parents, and who would never have dreamt of doing to the same to me: ‘What’s the point of having a child if you don’t want to spend any time with it? Save yourself the hassle and get a cat instead …’