Beatings by a ‘sadistic’ head and why the creator of Foyle’s War is at war with his old school
BY ANY measure, Foyle’s War creator Anthony Horowitz is at the top of his game. Two weeks after its launch, Trigger Mortis, his thrilling James Bond novel, sits at No 3 in the Sunday Times bestseller list and his new play, Dinner With Saddam, a dark comedy about the Iraqi dictator, has opened to warm reviews in the West End.
His Alex Rider children’s books, meanwhile, have sold 19 million copies worldwide, making him one of Britain’s most prolific — and wealthy — writers, worth an estimated £10 million.
As he is a polished public speaker, with strong views on education — he supports reform of the exam system, which, he says, places too much emphasis on grades — you would imagine he would be top of the list of former pupils to be a guest speaker at his old boarding school.
But it i s unlikely t hat Horowitz, awarded an OBE f or services to literature, will be invited back to Orley Farm School i n Harrow, North-West London, any time soon. For a row has been triggered by the author’s recurring cl ai ms t hat he was beaten by its headmaster from the age of eight.
At book signings, literary festivals and in interviews, Horowitz, now 60, has told of the abuse he endured at the fee-paying school he has labelled ‘ a hellhole of the very first order’, an institution which, he claims, ‘seemed almost purpose-built to screw me up’.
Going t here, he recalled, ‘ was an unbelievably brutal experience... I l ost count of the number of times I was beaten by the headmaster, Mr Ellis, who drew blood when he hit me.’
But while he says the school ‘filled me with self-loathing and a deep sense of being a failure’, he claims i t also pushed him i nto storytelling as he retreated into a make-believe world, often getting into trouble for telling stories to fellow pupils after lights- out.
For some time, Orley Farm, which sits on a 40-acre site not far from Harrow School, has chosen to ignore Horowitz’s criticisms. But against the backdrop of historic child abuse cases and multiple inquiries into abuse allegations at institutions across the country, the school has been f orced i nto defending itself.
This week, it broke its silence, challenging Horowitz to report the matter to the police or ‘desist’ from repeating his claims.
Orley Farm’s bursar, Tim Brand, says Horowitz has never taken up their invitation to help investigate the allegations, which refer to a time, in the Sixties, when corporal punishment was still a feature of school life in Britain.
‘We have also suggested that such matters could be investigated by the Harrow authorities, and if he wishes for that to happen he can also make a request directly to us,’ Brand told the Mail. ‘I would also say that the school is now very different from those establishments of the Sixties.
‘We believe that Orley Farm is a magnificent school. It does therefore disturb us to have our name associated with claims of caning and “blood being drawn”.
‘For this reason we would ask Mr Horowitz to desist from such remarks about t hese al l eged incidents, which are very difficult to substantiate so many years on from when they are said to have happened.’
John Ellis, the school’s headmaster i n Horowitz’s day, who retired in 1968 after 23 years in his job, has been dead for 24 years.
And today, Orley Farm — founded in 1850, and whose old boys include Lord (Robin) Butler, the civil servant and private secretary to five prime ministers, and the TV presenter Dale Winton — is unrecognisable from the ‘grim little boarding school’ Anthony Horowitz remembers.
For a start, it is now a day school. Boarding was phased out in the Eighties and the dormitories were converted into classrooms. And it is no longer a boys’ school — girls were admitted in 1994 and now make up more than a third of the 491 pupils aged between four and 13, paying fees of up to £4,935 a term.
Corporal punishment ended ‘years ago’, according to Mr Brand, long before it was outlawed by Parliament. The school’s most recent inspection, carried out by the Independent Schools Inspectorate, was laudatory, describing the its academic achievements and learning as ‘excellent’ and noting the high quality of its teaching.
Pastoral care was especially singled out for its meticulous progress in the ‘spiritual, moral, social and cultural’ development of pupils, who were said to feel ‘safe’ and ‘happy’.
Pupil well- being was not a feature of the curriculum when Horowitz arrived as an eight-yearold, however.
‘I used to scream and cry every time I had to go back,’ he later wrote, admitting he had no idea why his parents ‘put me through it’.
Horowitz, who is married to TV producer Jill Green and has two grown- up sons, did, however, manage to put such memories behind him on the only occasion he returned to the school as an established writer — in the mid-Nineties — to give a talk.
‘The whole place had been modernised apart from one corridor, which was exactly as it was when I was there,’ he recalled. ‘When I went to walk down this corridor, something strange happened — I froze and began to shake.
‘Until that moment I knew I had bad memories of the school, but it was only after having this extraordinary physical reaction that I began to realise just how traumatised I had been.’
Only the other day, Horowitz drew upon his miserable schooldays at a launch event for Trigger Mortis at Waterstones bookshop in London’s Piccadilly. The author, who had a prosperous upbringing in Stanmore, Middlesex, with cooks, butlers and housemaids, told his audience of fans that watching James Bond films provided him with an escape.
‘ I was stuck in a really nasty school,’ he said, without mentioning it by name. ‘I was not having a nice time.
‘I did not have a very high opinion of myself. I was a plump child. I was told over and over again that I was an unsuccessful child and that I would go nowhere.
‘All my reports were bad. With maths — I will never forget it — it said “Anthony cannot multiply or divide and will add up to very little”. It’s true. And all these years later I can still quote it. Isn’t that sad?’
On previous occasions Horowitz has been even more direct. ‘Preparatory schools in 1963 were filled with teachers who were either fearsome, drunk, sadists or paedophiles,’ he has said. ‘There were some good teachers there, but many more monsters.
‘Mr Ellis, the headmaster, beat me lots of times and he was an expert at drawing blood... it seems to me he sought to crush you to make you a better man, rather than ever
‘I used to scream and cry every time I had to go back’ ‘Teachers were either drunks or paedophiles’
attempt to draw out what was good in you.’
So how do Horowitz’s memories compare with t hose of his contemporaries? Revealingly, there is much agreement.
Other former pupils, including Dale Winton, have said that they, too, received beatings from Mr Ellis at the school in the Sixties.
Winton, who is the same age as Horowitz, wrote in his 2002 autobiography: ‘I was caned regularly... and lived in fear of the next punishment... When I think about it now, I can see it was barbaric — the canings were really painful. But corporal punishment was standard practice then and not something for which parents removed a child from school.’
David Booker, now 62 and living in Whitby, North Yorkshire, was caned twice by Mr Ellis. He told us: ‘On [the second occasion] I remember he drew blood. In fact, I think he even took a run-up when he caned me. On both occasions it was not “six of the best” but three strong hits with the cane.’
James Askwith, 60, from Ealing, West London, was reprimanded for missing a music lesson and caned by Mr Ellis. ‘It was on the backside and he hit me bloody hard,’ he told us. ‘But that was the way punishments were meted out back then.
‘At the end of the caning you would even turn round and maybe shake hands and say something along the lines of, “Thank you very much, Sir,”, then walk out of his study.’
So obsessed with his prep school days i s Horowitz that he has spoken of visiting his tormentor Ellis on his deathbed at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow when he was a teenager, ‘to exorcise the memory of him and the power he had over me’.
He wrote: ‘He looked incredibly pathetic and old — just a wrinkled man dying in his bed — and I remember thinking, this is the man who caused me so much fear and misery — and now look at him.’
In fact, as the Mail discovered, Mr Ellis actually died in a care home in Harrow in 1991, when Horowitz would have been around 36.
Mr Ellis’s surviving relatives say they remember their grandfather not as the monster he is made out to be by former pupils but as ‘a kind and loving man’.
His grandson Malcolm Priestman, 54, from Combe Martin, Devon, says he has fond memories of his grandfather taking him plane-spotting. ‘When I first read the things Horowitz was saying I found it quite shocking. It didn’t make any sense to me,’ he says.
‘He said he would cry before going back to boarding school each term, but doesn’t everyone? I think he was exaggerating. I don’t think he was particularly hard done by. My grandfather was quite strict, but not nasty strict.
‘I try to dismiss it, as it’s all a load of rubbish.
‘I don’t know why Horowitz is saying these things. I read that he said he would tell the kids at school stories, and that’s where he got his gift for writing — maybe this is all publicity for that.’
Another of the headmaster’s grandchildren, Caroline Hollinghurst, a retired graphic artist, says: ‘I don’t think what Mr Horowitz is saying about my grandfather is fair at all. I have very fond memories of him — he was a kind man.’
For his part, Anthony Horowitz says he has ‘ no i nterest’ in contacting the school. Of his hospital visit to his old headmaster, he adds: ‘I did visit Mr Ellis at Northwick Park Hospital and thought he had died soon after. Clearly, I was mistaken.’