‘Bullies beat me until I bled’, reveals Penny

Tearful model tells of her school torment in video to launch campaign to stamp out attacks on pupils

PENNY LANCASTER, the model and wife of Sir Rod Stewart, has revealed that she was assaulted by school bullies until she bled.

Ms Lancaster broke down in tears as she recalled the bullying at her secondary school, which culminated in her being pelted with eggs and flour by a gang of girls on her last day.

In the most vicious attack, two girls followed her home from school with a boy who they spurred on to ram his bike up the back of her legs until they bled. “I ran home to my mum crying. I thought I was strong enough to deal with the bullies,” she said.

Ms Lancaster, right, is one of more than 25 celebrities who have relived their childhood torment at the hands of bullies in videos to encourage today’s pupils to speak out and seek help.

The campaign, launching tomorrow by the charity The Diana Award and backed by the Duke of Cambridge, includes new data on the vast scale of bullying that pupils say is forcing them to change school, skip lessons or even contemplate suicide.

Figures show half of the 10million children returning to school this week will be affected by bullying despite efforts by headteachers to tackle the problem.

Ms Lancaster, ncaster, 48, a mother of two sons with Sir Rod, wells wel up in the video as she looks at a picture of herself starting out ou at her Essex secondary school.

“I didn’t did think I was going to cry today, certainly not as early as a this,” she says. “The bullying b started with just name-calling. nam I was different because b I was taller than not just the girls but the boys – Penny Pe long legs.” She was wa also picked on because she wore her hair scraped back bac neatly in a bundle for her ballet. balle “A boy grabbed a big chunk of my hair out of the neat bun to make it scruffy and untidy,” she said. “They used to come up and slap me on the head and call me spam head.”

She countered the bullies by walking into school one day having written the word “spam” on her forehead “as if to say, I know you will stop now, and they did.

“It seemed every time I was able to be strong enough to stand up to them, it did stop.”

Looking straight at the camera, she discloses she suffers hyperhidrosis, a condition where hands sweat profusely under stress. She holds them up to show that simply recalling the events had caused an outbreak. “Just talking about the bullying, my hands are dripping right now. It is like I have just run them under a tap,” she says

The Diana Award campaigns for every school to have anti-bullying ambassadors, older pupils who can counsel younger potential victims.

Ms Lancaster said: “If there was an ambassador who had been through it themselves, could comfort you and reassure you that it is something you can get through if you talk about it and share it, that would alleviate a lot of pain. That would be wonderful.”