Who you gonna call? Meet the real ghostbusters
As far as the four-man ghost-hunting crew Paraletic Activities are concerned, ghosts have between the hours of 8pm and 11pm to make themselves known. “We’re getting too old for the paranormal all-nighters!” laughs Johnny Smith, 51, who by daylight hours is a commercial signwriter. At weekends he joins Neil, Luke and Nigel, three fellow 30- to 50-something Walsall Ghostbusters fans who have carried their childhood passion for the paranormal into middle age to form Paraletic Activities. They meet to drink real ale and explore the many reputedly haunted locations that litter the Midlands, from the ruins of Grace Dieu Priory in Leicestershire to spooky pubs such as The Four Crosses in Cannock.
The crew’s technology, honed over a decade in the ghost-hunting game, includes “Old Faithful”, a meter that measures fluctuations in the electromagnetic field, and “Carol Anne”, a 1970s portable television set that the team believes registers localised static interference. Carol Anne takes her name from the suburban child who became a conduit and target for supernatural entities in the 1980s Poltergeist trilogy.
“The best bit is the social side,” Johnny says of his crew, who share their encounters via YouTube videos and through the Paraletic Activities podcast. “We don’t take it all too seriously. It gets us out of the house and from under the wives’ feet.”
Ghost hunting is having a moment. “Have-a-go” ghost hunters are cropping up all over YouTube and TikTok, while organisations ranging from luxury hotel groups to English Heritage are latching on to the lucrative opportunities presented by the paranormal pound. English Heritage hosts regular nighttime ghost hunts at two of their properties: Dover Castle in Kent and Bolsover Castle south of Sheffield. London’s Langham Hotel, said to be haunted by the ghost of a German prince who fell to his death from a hotel window, allows curious spook sleuths to book its “most haunted room”, number 333.
It’s a pop-cultural juncture that’s accompanied by increased scientific enquiries into the nature of unexplained paranormal phenomena and parapsychology (the study of the psychological causes for claims of paranormal encounters).
Academic Dr Kate Cherrell lectures on Victorian Britain and the paranormal. She believes the current enthusiasm for ghost hunting shares features with that earlier era. “The love of the paranormal seen in the 19th century sprang from a fear of death in a time when people were turning away from the established church,” she explains. During Covid, she notes, it was our generation’s turn to confront the prospect of death. “It made many of us consider the afterlife at the same time as we were at home, noticing the bumps and squeaks in our own houses.”
Cherrell has a lot of time for new community ghostbusting teams such as Paraletic Activities, including those who dress up in 1980s Ghostbustersstyle boiler suits and backpacks. “It’s easy to laugh at the aesthetics: the cheesy team logo fleeces and the beeping and flashing boxes,” she says, “but these groups are rich and vibrant communities and a social lifeline for many people, including the recently bereaved.” The Church of England is not so keen, complaining of amateur ghost hunters who trespass in “haunted” church graveyards at night.
Dr Malcolm Schofield studies the psychological basis of paranormal belief at the University of Derby. He is also on the Spontaneous Cases committee at the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), founded in 1882 to “understand events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal”. SPR and fellow paranormal association The Ghost Club, which includes Charles Dickens, WB Yeats and Siegfried Sassoon among its illustrious former members, are seeing rising membership and increased reports of ghostly and unexplained phenomena. “We are getting a lot of reports of precognitive dreams and afterdeath communications,” Schofield says, “though reports of poltergeists are way down.”
While believers in broad-brush “spirituality” tend to be hard to categorise, according to Schofield, believers in the paranormal have certain traits. “They tend to have more open and intuitive thinking styles than people who believe in institutional religions, who tend to be more dogmatic.”
At 9pm on a dark night in Stoke on Trent, I’m hunkered down with the Paraletic Activities team in the city’s Stoke Haunted Museum (which bills itself as “the sixth most haunted location in the UK”). We’re armed with a pentagram, Carol Anne, and a noisy smartphone opened at an app called Necrophonic, which purportedly channels the voices of present spirits. For these believers it’s not solace in the afterlife but the physiological thrill of ghosthunting in company that’s the principal attraction: the rush of being spooked and spooking others in turn.
On arrival at the black-painted Victorian building, Nigel thinks he hears breathing by the loos and Johnny claims someone or something has touched the back of his neck. Yet it’s quickly clear that there are, excuse the pun, a lot of dead hours in the ghostbusting game. After 40 minutes at a motionless ouija board, which Johnny dislikes (“I can’t work ’em out to be honest”), we follow the sound of a distant thud to a room. Inside, Luke thinks he can feel a chill by his legs, the left of which is adorned in tattooed scenes from the Ghostbusters movie. “I’m getting f-in’ goose bumps,’’ Johnny hisses, face ashen white, but delighted. “Yes, that’s the draught there,” Luke replies, side-eyeing a velvet curtain covering a door.
Jaden Darnell, 21, is among a younger generation of ghosthunters. He says he was turned on to the paranormal by 2020-launched British indie gaming hit Phasmophobia. In it, a ghost hunter works with up to three other players to identify one of 24 types of ghosts, including poltergeists (from the German “loud spirit”) and yūrei (or Japanese “faint spirits”). But the trainee teacher traces his own personal enthusiasm to his sightings of a ghostly apparition stalking the grounds of his childhood home. “I would see this lady wearing black walking down our path towards the living-room door, then I would blink and she would be gone,” he recalls. “My mum would see her, too.”
Darnell joined The Ghost Club on his 18th birthday and has since conducted his own nocturnal searches with friends. He often attends The Ghost Club’s monthly paranormal lectures in London – events attended by hundreds of curious souls and with subjects including the history of ghosthunting technology and the celebrity working-class female mediums of the 1800s. “People are replacing religion with spirituality,” says Darnell, “but we are just as fascinated by whether there is life after death. I think that ghosts hold the answer to this mystery.”
According to Dr Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of a new book called The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal, ghost believers, however sceptical they claim to be, do not in fact want their experiences to be explained away by scientific, or non-paranormal explanations. “None of us like the prospect of simply ceasing to be when our physical body dies, or, even more so, the thought that when our loved ones die, we will never have contact with them again. So any kind of evidence that seems to support the possibility that part of us lives on beyond physical death is welcome, no matter how flimsy that evidence may be.”
There are downsides for those who believe in life after death anyway, adds French. “Those who believe in an afterlife are potentially open to exploitation by con artists claiming to be able to speak to dead loved ones.” Perhaps humanists have got it right. “They do not believe in an afterlife,” says French, “and therefore focus their efforts on living the one life we have in the most fulfilling way possible rather than hoping for some reward after they pass away.” That’s as may be, but in a 2017 Ipsos Mori poll 38% of people classified themselves as believers in ghosts, with a similar number reporting having seen one. The same survey revealed that women were more likely than men to believe in guardian angels and premonitions.
Dr Neil Dagnall studies our fascination with life and death at Manchester Metropolitan University. He says that ghost fanciers are looking for meaning and reassurance: “They want
to know that there is more than mere lived mortality. Psychologically speaking it’s a double whammy: it provides a sense of meaning but also appeases anxieties and concerns about death.”
Russ Bevin, 49, a sales manager for a Midlands utilities provider, is the founder of ghost-hunting collective Wednesbury Paranormal. Bevin’s childhood nickname was “the cellar dweller”. “I would creep into spooky places and hang out there all night,” he tells me. “It got so I wasn’t bothered a bit by taps and knocks.” Bevin, like many paranormal investigators, describes himself as “an open-minded sceptic” when it comes to the supernatural. He leads both paid-for and free nightfall investigations with Wednesbury Paranormal at allegedly haunted locations, including The Rising Sun pub in Tipton (said to be haunted by the spirit of drowned publican Eliza Whitehouse) and the ruins of Dudley Castle. Bevin favours Georgian devices over the jazzy modern ghostsensing technology many groups go in for. “We use scrying, which is an old method of channelling spirits with mirrors and pentagrams and sometimes incantations, though not everyone goes in for that gloomy occult stuff.”
Shows such as British reality TV programme Most Haunted, The UnXplained with William Shatner, and comedian Danny Robins’ series Uncanny on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Two have all captured audience imaginations with their strange mixtures of spooky bravura and debunking. Most Haunted ran on Living TV from 2002 to 2010 and provoked a raft of Ofcom complaints for suspected staging of paranormal encounters. These have since been superseded by darker and more niche strands of ghost media, such as the US’s Paranormal TV, which routinely explores malevolent demon attachments, and YouTube’s Alehouse Haunts, which investigates ghost hauntings of British boozers.
One ghost fan who entered via the TV fandom pipeline was Jayne Mortimore,
45, a paranormal investigator based in Liskeard, Cornwall. She fell, she tells me, for the “thrilling” world of the paranormal in the early 2000s heyday of Most Haunted, and believes that radiation from the bedrock granite and quartz in her native Cornwall make it a hotspot for paranormal sightings. Mortimore’s most spectacular encounter to date was last year, when she, along with other witnesses, saw a lingering matt black figure in the hallway of a haunted Victorian home, though she says her ghostly encounters are few and far between. “There’s loads of waiting around in this game,” she says. Mortimore stages ghost-hunting evenings and dinners at Bodmin Jail and Jamaica Inn, the famous smugglers’ haunt immortalised in Daphne du Maurier’s novel, whose periphery is said to be stalked by a “demon dog”.
The Cornwall businesses are not alone in turning a profit from the paranormal. Enthusiasts can enjoy ghost-hunting walks of storied rural spots and guided sleepovers in abandoned hospitals or workhouses, while tourism aggregators such as hauntedrooms.co.uk allow guests to book beds in supposedly haunted hotels for BBBs (or bed, breakfast, plus bumps in the night). In 2023 I spent the night at Eastwell Manor in Kent, a neo-Elizabethan pile that regularly tops UK most-haunted hotels lists for the lady in white and galloping horsemen apparitions said to stalk its halls and grounds. Sadly there were no spectral sightings for me, although its spooky reputation added a certain frisson to my midlife insomnia. Community venues occupying historic buildings, meanwhile, such as Warmley Clock Tower in South Bristol, an atmospheric former 18th-century pin factory, have found that they can keep the lights on with the income provided by paranormal nights. “There’s money in paranormal events, but some castles and hotels keep it quiet as it can affect wedding-venue bookings,” Mortimore says.
Back in Stoke, the Paraletic Activities team are steadying their frayed nerves, as they do at the end of most ghosthunting investigations, with a paranormal “brew review” at the pub (they call some of their group investigations “Boos and Booze”).
On balance, they say, it was a typical night’s ghosthunting. “A few bumps and bangs,” says Johnny, “the usual, really.” When the team later reviewed their audio recordings of Stoke, they told me they caught a voice whispering to them in the room that had the rogue draught. I say I struggle to make out any whispering on the hissing clip they sent me. Johnny responds: “It’s all good fun though, innit?”
We don’t take it all too seriously. It gets us out of the house and from under the wives’ feet
beyond. The last of his bands was a rock outfit called Shere Khan, which dispersed in 2012. (There are still videos on YouTube and they’re absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.) “I was in some OK bands, some terrible ones,” he recalls. “But I had a decent enough crack at it that I think I made the right choice. Because I would have failed.”
After university – philosophy at Nottingham – James trained at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Professionally, and personally, this turned out well. He met his now-wife Ruth Kearney, an Irish actor, and the couple have two young children and split their time between north London and Venice Beach in Los Angeles. And work-wise, James graduated and immediately started landing small but visible roles: in Woody Allen’s 2010 film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Strangerand as a grating club rep in TheInbetweeners Movie in 2011.
It’s not exactly four years of bit parts in Casualty and The Bill. “Yeah, totally, and I was very lucky,” says James. “But you’re still hustling and trying to find your space in the industry. And it continues to be a hustle: any career will have constant ups and downs. The idea of just being constantly upward and upward and upward until existential ecstasy-slash-orgasm, I’m not sure that exists.”
James’s big break came when he was cast in Divergent, a dystopian sci-fi film based on a bestselling YA novel: released in 2014, it grossed nearly $300m, against its budget of just $85m. He suddenly had legions of young fans. “There is a specific fervour around that type of movie, and it becomes quite intense for a minute and then it cools off,” says James. “But at that time, I wasn’t prepared for it. I was a boy from Aylesbury… The first Comic-Con I did, my brothers came with me. But that was quite a grounding thing anyway, because they were just taking the piss out of me and we made it a bit of a ride. But it’s a difficult place to understand yourself.”
Initially, James responded by turning against anything that wasn’t acting: he found industry parties “frivolous” and didn’t much enjoy doing press. “I’m quite a private person,” he says, “and you’re expected to give a piece of yourself now. That’s OK, but you need to understand that that is part of a deal one must do with the devil, as it were, whoever the devil may be. But that was my defence mechanism for being nervous.”
All this probably makes James sound much more serious and intense than he is. He is very easy and thoughtful company: I’ve never interviewed anyone who has asked so many questions in return. Part of this might be deflection, but he also clearly has an engaged, restless mind. During the Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, he had an “existential crisis” and started wondering whether he would continue acting full-time. Before doing philosophy at university, he had thought about studying marine science. James started looking into whether he could do a postgraduate course in California, so as to not entirely sever his links with Hollywood.
“We had our first child, our daughter, during Covid, like the deep lockdown,” says James. “So it was a strange time, but a blessing in a way, because you kind of recalibrated. And how do I put this? Sometimes I’m like, ‘Do I need to do something to help society in some way?’” He laughs, “Especially when life is pretty short. Acting is… it’s fun. And in its best way, there’s artistry to it, but also, are you furthering mankind in any way? I don’t know. Sometimes I think about it.”
Of course, when the lockdowns ended, there was more demand for TV and film than ever: The White Lotus led into The Gentlemen. But James appears to still be unresolved. He is sometimes listed in the running to be the new James Bond: as auditions go, you could believe his performance in The Gentlemen might easily catch the eye of Barbara Broccoli, the producer who oversees the 007 film franchise.
“Oh, Barbara Brocs…” says James, with a smirk. “I say that as if I know her: never met her, know nothing about it. But I’ll give her a nickname. Everyone’s interested in that because it’s a big part of British cultural identity, but that probably wouldn’t be me. I do think there are better people for that job. And, honestly, it would be terrifying: if you do that, there’s no going back. You’re opening Pandora’s box there. You have got to be willing to live a very different life and have a different life for your family. And that would be pretty tricky. Plus, my mates would take the piss out of me. Because they always say, ‘Bondopoulos – the Greek Bond.’”
Is the speculation flattering or annoying? “It’s flattering, but it’s also every male actor within a certain age,” James answers. “It’s not like it’s two dudes. It’s 50 guys, literally 50 people. So no… I’d like to play a seminal British figure in a different historical period. I know it’s been done so many times, but I’ve always liked the idea of exploring Henry VIII in a way that isn’t defined by the maniacal sociopath. Because he was that, but then there’s also the journey to become that man. And he shaped Britain and our sense of social understanding of what it is to be British.”
Since 2019 James has had his own production company, Untapped, so watch this space. When we meet, though, he is about to go to Vancouver to shoot The Monkey, a horror film based on a Stephen King story about twin brothers (both played by James). Kearney and their two children, the youngest of whom is a little over six months old, will base themselves in LA while James shoots and they will meet up at weekends. James is clear that becoming a parent has changed his priorities and maybe even taken the edge off his competitive streak. “You soften a little bit, don’t you?” he says. “I think I just always wanted to win and you can’t always win in this industry. It’s completely wasted energy.”
James has to get home: bedtime (presumably his children’s) is calling. Having a partner who’s an actor helps with the juggle. “Because they can be a sounding board for everything you do and vice versa,” says James. “I’d understand for her and she me perhaps, if something was very important career wise you might have to make a sacrifice. But, at the same time, you’re able to say, ‘Don’t do that. That’s a piece of shit. We’re not leaving the country for that.’”
It’s funny that I chose this industry because I am a bit allergic to talking about myself
considering writing it when I was 54. I’d been accumulating memories from the school as my own therapy, but then I started to hear from other people who had gone through much worse than me [fellow pupils he met by chance, or contacted specifically] and that activated a form of survivor’s guilt. I had been quite mainstream in the school, academically OK and decent at sports. But it was a ruthless place, very Lord of the Flies. And these people who were truly brutalised were the quiet blokes who weren’t in the sports team and were sitting at the back of the class. It sounds ridiculous – I was a very small child – but I felt guilty that I hadn’t defended them more.”
The identities of his fellow pupils are protected in the book (the historian in him has given each of them the name of one of King Charles I’s regicides). He names the teachers he knows to have died, including Jack Porch, the headteacher who “retired early” at 51 for unspecified reasons.
“He was a fascinating case of a very intelligent paedophile sadist,” he says, “because he’d constructed a system that fed him little boys’ buttocks every night. He had this ability to present to parents a sort of charm and humour. But he was deeply deviant. A chilling presence. I received the audiobook [of A Very Private School] today and I listened to the first bit again. The preface is about this incredibly sweet kid being systematically made to feel like nothing every day. I started crying, actually. The idea that such a thoroughly sweet boy has had to live with that for the last 50 years is appalling to me.”
* * *
In among the pictures in the book, there is one of the moment his life shifted, as he waits to be driven to Maidwell for the first time. He stands in the stiffest possible jacket, a mini-me of his father, the eighth earl, behind a large trunk with his name written on it. His big sister Diana sits on the trunk smiling – she is not to return to boarding school until tomorrow. Their nanny stands by looking anxious. Before he went away Charles acquired the nickname Buzz, from his estranged mother, because he had “all the happy effervescence of a bee”. His book is dedicated “to Buzz”, the boy he believed to have died at the moment he was handed over to the care of Porch.
One question the book raises is: what can the parents who sent their seven- and eight-year-old sons to these institutions have been thinking? One answer is that they bought into in that curiously British notion that young boys, particularly the children of privilege, must get used to pain and suffering, must break their attachment to their mothers and homes in order to mature – to embark on their destiny as leaders of men. Another is that the parents wanted them out of the way to pursue their social lives (the priorities of some are described here as “horses, dogs, children”, in that order). Spencer’s book dwells on the choices of his own parents, without condemning them. Why is that?
“Well,” he says, again with that halfsmile, “among the plethora of psychotherapies that I’ve undergone, one of them has been understanding your parents and letting go of any blame. So that probably comes across. My mother had a very tricky mother herself. No doubt these things can get passed down generationally. And she was so young. She went straight from being head girl of a private school to marrying this very eligible chap, and a mother at 19. And she couldn’t navigate the demands of that.”
Frances Spencer’s response was to divorce her husband to marry Peter Shand-Kydd and – having lost custody of her four children – including twoyear-old Charles, to divide her time between the Scottish island of Seil and a sheep station in New South Wales. He recalls visits to Scotland to stay with her in the holidays, where he’d help out in the newsagents she owned in Oban. “She wasn’t at all a mollycoddling mother, but she was fun at parties,” he says. “Her life ended with intense Catholicism; she spent her time helping children visit Lourdes every year. And at the same time, I think, there was massive guilt, which manifested itself through alcoholism. She died young, at 68, and the last decade of her life was one of sadness. So, no, I’m not angry with her.”
There is a sad moment in the book when the young Spencer escapes from some of the attentions of his schoolmasters to be alone in a favourite place in a wooded part of the school grounds; he sees his father drive past in his RollsRoyce, returning from some lunch or other. The ludicrously large family seat at Althorp was only a few miles from Maidwell, but he felt like it could have been on another planet. Once he seriously considered shooting himself in the foot at the end of a holiday, to avoid returning to school. Could he not have told his father how desperately unhappy he was?
“It never occurred to me,” he says. “And I have to say, it never occurred to any of the people I spoke to.” He supposes they didn’t want to disappoint their fathers. “At the end of the term, I’d come home with a report, and he read it with me. And that was our 15 minutes talking about school. He was very much a product of his class.”
With his own seven children, Spencer has tried to be far more present in their education. They all went to day schools, though his two sons boarded at their own choice in their late teens. He does the school run when he can with his youngest daughter, Charlotte, who is 11, chatting with her in the car, “trying to keep tabs on what’s happening,” the stuff he feels he missed out on.
For all these efforts at normality, there are, inevitably, several moments in the book when you recognise him still to be imprisoned by his class, as much as his memories of school. He is at pains throughout to say he is well aware of his privilege, and that children in other circumstances clearly suffered far worse than anything he experienced or can imagine. Still, for example, he includes without much of a caveat the comment by one of his teachers to the idea that he would be better off in a “normal” school: “You are too precious a flower” for that (the implication being that you may live in daily terror of being assaulted by various members of staff here, but that clearly pales beside the horrors of being educated by the state). ***
The ground rules of our interview are that Spencer will not answer any questions about the royal family – knowing of old that any quote he gives will be immediately stripped of the context and beamed around the world. I don’t therefore get to find out, for example, whether he sees this book as a companion volume to his nephew Prince Harry’s Spare – a cry for help from within the walls of inherited privilege, a demand that things are done differently. In his book’s preface he includes this: “It’s a fact that many of the leading figures in British public life today – from prime ministers to royalty – have received just such a private, boarding school education. While some thrived under benevolent headteachers, others have been wounded by wretched treatment during formative years. Some of that poisonous legacy they have unwittingly passed on to society.”
He was a contemporary, among others, of Boris Johnson, whose schooling followed a similar path. Does he see these traits, for example, in him? “I can’t actually drill down on specific individuals,” he says. “But I think it has to be a logical fact that people who went to these schools at that time, of which Maidwell was one, simply had to become desensitised in order to survive.”
He casts his comments in the book mostly in the past tense – things have undoubtedly improved since the 1970s, but of course 70,000 families still make the choice to send their kids away at a young age.
“I do know a few people who have been through this more recently,” he says. “One who is only now 25 or so. He’s a wreck and he told me his life was destroyed by having to go to one of these schools at seven. He writes to his father saying just please apologise, but the father cannot apologise because that choice was part of his entire code. A lot of families ‘with an old name’ might be on their financial uppers these days, but still for them to say, my son goes to a very smart school, gives them social validation; they are prepared to put up with whatever their child is putting up with, to be able to drop that at a dinner party.”
I wonder, when he was writing his book, whether any part of him felt like a “class traitor”, as some have suggested?
“One thing,” he says, “is that school was very, very clever at inculcating thoughts. One was that telling tales was a capital offence. And there were times when my schoolboy conscience felt that strongly when I was writing. Of course, logically, that’s ridiculous. But it goes deep. Quite a lot of people, most of whom didn’t go to Maidwell, have sidled up and said: ‘You should drop this book, because you’re feeding the enemy, giving ammunition to people who are against what we do.’”
He welcomes the fact that the current Maidwell Hall – where boarding fees can exceed £30,000 a year – has in light of his book opened an investigation of its past and invited former pupils to come forward. It is not alone. Renton has compiled a database of abuse allegations against 490 independent schools and more than 300 named teachers.
I wonder if Spencer had qualms about naming the teachers who had died. Did he expect to hear from their families?
“I thought long and hard about that,” he says. “And in the end I thought, actually, they deserve to be named. Nobody’s going to pin the crimes of the father on the children or the grandchildren. The point is, very sadly, their fathers did terrible things.”
One of the teachers who singled him out at nine years old for particular violence – a man he used to fantasise about meeting up with later in life in order to return a beating – is still alive. He calls him Goffie in the book (another of Charles I’s regicides). He has sent him a copy: “He’s very old now. But I just want him to know.”
At one point he thought of bringing a legal case against the assistant matron who molested him and other boys in her care. Why did he decide not to do that?
“I thought about it when all the cases against Catholic priests happened in America,” he says. “But I think what she did was so troubling to me that it’s sort of beyond me to cope with it.” Those disturbing assaults on his innocence, interactions he found impossible to process or understand, led to him using saved pocket money to visit a prostitute while on holiday in Italy with his family when he was 12. He believes those experiences damaged for ever his subsequent capacity to form mature relationships.
“I got a private detective involved at one point, to find her,” he says. “She’s been quite careful to stay off the internet, married a couple of times, had a kid. There is nothing that the law could do that would make it OK for me. Having said that, if others now come forward, I would certainly validate what they say.”
***
He has been married to his third wife, Canadian-born Karen Villeneuve, the chief executive of a charity that protects
The idea that such a thoroughly sweet boy has had to live with that for the last 50 years is appalling to me
vulnerable children, for 13 years. Does he now look back and see the damage of his childhood as a factor in his catalogue of earlier failed marriages and relationships?
“Put it this way,” he says, “I don’t think I developed emotionally in those early years as would have been the case in a loving home with actively loving adults.” Many of those contemporaries, who like him “have demons sewn into the seams of our souls” as a result of their experiences at schools like Maidwell, bear out that belief, he says. “There is a lot of addiction and depression. The wife of a great friend of mine at Eton – who surprisingly emigrated to Australia – got in touch with me when news of the book came out to say: ‘I just want you to know, he went to a place like Maidwell and had the most appalling time. He’s had terrible depression over the years but I’ve never seen him so happy as when he heard you were bringing a book out about all this stuff.’ Someone else I know,” he says, “was a guy who was terribly bullied, three years older than me. And he wrote to me a while ago and said: ‘You writing this book has let me tell my wife for the first time what I went through at Maidwell. We’ve been married for 30 years – and we just spent the last hour crying together.’”
For himself he suggests that the catharsis has probably been delayed. He has found the experience of revisiting all this history for publication “quite nightmarish”, but is proud that it is done.
“Like many of my contemporaries, I used to drink way too much,” he says. “Not on a dangerous level, but certainly to anaesthetise things. I haven’t had a drink since January.”
I mention to him something that Billy Connolly once told me in an interview about coming to terms with the memory of sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his father: “It’s not called emotional baggage for nothing – it means you can put it down if you want to.”
“I totally agree with that,” he says. “I do feel I might put it down now.” You sense he believes he owes it to long-lost Buzz, to at least do that for him.
A Very Private School by Charles Spencer is published by William Collins (£25). To support theGuardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Like hundreds of rural counties across the US, Orangeburg is ignored by commercial broadband service providers who think it’s not profitable to lay fiber optic lines in the area.
In the absence of service from companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Charter, counties and small towns in rural America could build broadband networks for their residents themselves, which can make the difference between prosperity and poverty. But large telecom corporations have also successfully lobbied at least 20 states to block municipalities from competing.
The problem of rural internet access pits one democracy against another: local governments against state power. It also addresses information equity – the idea that someone in the rural US should have the same ability to participate in the country’s digital economy as someone in a big city. A digital democracy cannot abide unequal digital citizenship.
A historic provision in the 2021 infrastructure act upholds this tenet of digital democracy: $65bn under the broadband equity, access and deployment – or Bead – program to connect rural America to the world.
Orangeburg – mostly rural, Black, and poor – started waging war against state regulations earlier than most rural communities, aided by one hardheaded local engineer and a congressman who has spent the last two decades trying to convince Congress that rural America is worth it.
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The story of $65bn in federal money for rural broadband in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act begins more than 20 years ago, with Serena Williams and the Confederate flag.
James Clyburn, venerable Democratic congressman from South Carolina, recounts his friendship with Williams’ manager Larry Bailey. In 2000, Williams was honoring an NAACP boycott of South Carolina over its continued official display of the Confederate battle flag.
“So, Larry calls me and says, ‘I got a real problem. I need your help,’” Clyburn said.
Clyburn, wide awake with an opportunity before him, asked Bailey to donate 100 tickets to a tournament for local kids and a couple hundred laptops he could give to students in rural Clarendon county, near Orangeburg. Bailey agreed, and Clyburn worked with the NAACP and boycott activists, allowing Williams to play in the 2002 Family Circle Cup without drawing condemnation.
Clyburn said he called the superintendent, eager to tell her the great news about the laptops. “There was silence on the phone,” Clyburn said. “I thought: ‘She didn’t hear me, and so I’ve got to repeat it.’”
The laptops aren’t any use to kids who can’t get internet service at home, the superintendent said.
“And that’s when it hit me,” Clyburn said. “That’s what got me involved with the problem.”
Clyburn started hearing examples from other congressmen. Sanford Bishop, who represents rural south Georgia, told him about football players taking the team bus to McDonald’s after practice because they could get wifi in the parking lot, Clyburn said.
Clyburn formed a committee of rural representatives and began looking for ways to fund rural broadband access. “I told Nancy Pelosi we need to treat the information superhighway the same way we treat the interstate superhighways,” he said.
Rural broadband shouldhave wide bipartisan support. After all, most rural voters are Republicans. A serious effort hasn’t emerged until recently because the scale of the problem defies small measures and because of the lobbying power of large telecom firms.
Bits and bobs of funding for rural broadband have found their way into federal legislation before. The US agriculture department (USDA) has a program to provide internet service. Communities could use pandemic funding to provide internet service, particularly for children doing distance learning. But nothing has ever reached the scale of the Internet for All initiative, which combines $42.5bn in funding in the 2021 infrastructure act with FCC programs, grant programs from the commerce department and other sources.
Supporters often compare it with the New Deal push for rural electrification that started with the Tennessee Valley Authority and continued with the Rural Electrification Administration.
When Franklin Roosevelt created the REA in 1935, the program had a oneyear budget of $100m. That’s $2.3bn today.
The Bead program, along with other measures in the infrastructure bill, drops $65bn on rural America in one whack.
The law provides local leaders proposing municipal broadband projects with a legal wedge to employ against big telecom firms who would otherwise fight them: an explicit requirement for state laws to give way in order to receive funding.
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William Metts, 60, grew up in Branchville, South Carolina, and still lives on his family land. After working for 10 years for Department of Defense companies, he came home to Orangeburg county, population 85,000 or so, launched a telecom engineering company in 2001 and started irrigating a digital desert.
“We’d been trying to figure out how to get internet in our community, so we wrote grants during the week for this phone company in Virginia, and then would come in here and write a grant on the weekends for this area,” Metts said.
Metts thought he could get to a deal with the local electrical co-op at one point, and with the Palmetto Rural Telephone Cooperative at another. Both fell through.
“They were 70-year-old farmers who didn’t understand the value of the internet,” Metts said. “I don’t say that as criticism. This was 2010 or so. The internet was not what it is today.”
So Metts went straight to the county and found a receptive audience. In 2009, Congress used the stimulus to unlock money for rural broadband under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The USDA funded $1.8bn in projects, and Orangeburg won $18.6m in federal grants to cover about a quarter of the county’s rural population a year later.
AT&T and other telecoms reacted to this by raining money on the South Carolina legislature.
Lobbyists donated about $150,000 to friendly legislators, who responded with H3508, intended to regulate municipal broadband to death. The legislation required any municipality to stop service if the public service commission found 10% of a public provider’s community could get service of 190 kilobits or better from a private service provider – an absurdly slow speed, even then.
Barriers in South Carolina resemble those in at least 16 other states today, which, in the name of a “level playing field” – a term coopted by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec) in draft language – keeps government entities from competing with private carriers, even in rural broadband deserts.
A town without decent internet service today is like one without electricity in the 30s, said Jim Stritzinger, director of South Carolina’s office of broadband, formed in 2022 with $400m allocated from federal grants.
South Carolina hired Stritzinger away from running Revolution D, a rural broadband consultancy with a legacy of using real-world data to puncture questionable coverage maps promoted by internet carriers.
If a map of rural territory shows property has broadband access, but in reality it’s in a broadband desert, then the state will miss out on federal funds, said Virginia Bring, press secretary for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
Orangeburg’s then county administrator, Bill Clark, wrote a letter to legislators in 2011, telling them that the “level playing field” the bill would create was anything but. “The private providers like AT&T and others have the ability to ‘cherry pick’ service areas without restriction in order to maximize profit potential. This is done at the expense of rural areas and is demonstrated by the lack of service options that presently exist in rural communities.”
Nonetheless, where telecom companies cannot sow their seeds, they salt the fields.
“We were experimenting on something that would work,” said Harry S Wimberly, 77, who was on the county commission as the county fought off the state. “I’m proud to have been part of a team that had enough gumption to go after this and get it done.”
The bill passed anyway, with one caveat: if a county had already gotten started on a project, it would be exempt. In a country full of laws blocking municipalities from building highspeed internet service, Orangeburg was carved out as an exception.
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Broadband is plainly valuable. Stritzinger doesn’t have a hard figure on how much broadband changes property values. His back-ofthe-envelope guess is that it’s worth the same as adding a bedroom to someone’s house.
But people in Orangeburg don’t value broadband because they can stream old episodes of The Office. It’s fundamental to questions about whether they can raise a family, get a job, or survive at all.
William E O’Quinn has been a family doctor in Orangeburg for almost 50 years. Broadband access, to O’Quinn, can be measured in amputations.
About 15% of adults in the county are diagnosed as diabetic, compared with 12% in South Carolina and 9% nationally. He said the county had a high rate of amputations due to the disease.
“Healthcare is not as accessible for some of these people as it is in the city,” O’Quinn said. “They can’t just get on the bus and ride around the corner to go to see the doctor.”
O’Quinn spoke between sessions of telemedicine. Medicare requires physicians to have a face-to-face encounter with patients before giving them medical equipment like a wheelchair, he said, and video visits require a fast internet connection.
So does distance learning.
Dr Shawn Foster, superintendent of the Orangeburg county school district, measures broadband’s value in the number of poor children he can keep from falling behind.
Foster has more than 10,000 students in his care. Three out of four are people of color. Five out of six are poor enough to get free or reducedprice lunch. And more than three quarters still can’t get high speed internet service at home, according to a state assessment.
The school system uses Waterford, an online preschool alternative for parents who can’t afford brick-and-mortar instruction. It works for Orangeburg, Foster said. “We’ve gone from 18% of our students enter kindergarten ready to learn to now 37%.”
But Waterford’s personalized program of instruction is largely useless if parents can’t get a broadband connection.
The pandemic threw the digital divide into stark relief in Orangeburg. Administrators found they needed a detailed heat map of wireless service coverage so that they could provide wifi hotspots to families that live in phone coverage areas. “We learned not only where people had access and the speed of access, we also learned what providers were where,” he said.
Functioning broadband is also an economic development tool for poor, rural parents, Foster said. Parents can’t work from home with internet access. Even job applications might be out of reach without a decent connection. “The days are gone when you can walk into the grocery store and fill out a paper application,” he said.
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Every state has to submit a five-year plan to the federal government describing what it will do with money from the Bead program. Crucially, the plan has to explain how the state will reduce or eliminate barriers for municipalities to use the money when they are not being served by large incumbent carriers.
The law was written to encourage new entrants, said Bring of the NTIA. “The law says that they can’t exclude municipal government from applying for grants, and making them ineligible for the grant. As part of our rules, we ask for states to either avoid passing new laws that restrict municipal broadband networks, or grant or waive some of those laws.”
South Carolina is no exception. Stritzinger’s initial plan plainly laid out the barriers for the small towns and rural counties that don’t have Orangeburg’s baked-in exemption.
It warns legislators that the broadband office may raise concerns with the South Carolina legislature “if existing state laws … limit the participation of nontraditional applicants and to disclose any unsuccessful applications for grant funding that may have been impacted by such laws”.
That’s a warning shot. The money goes away if municipalities are shut out.
So far, Maine and Louisiana have had their plans approved by NTIA. Maine’s legislature repealed laws blocking municipal broadband last year.
South Carolina is doling out grants incrementally to measure reactions rather than make one big investment, Stritzinger said. Those grants are going out to any entity he thinks can use the money effectively. As an experiment and demonstration, Metts and Charter Communications are working together to wire one Orangeburg county town center - Norway, population 337 – like it’s a Manhattan Starbucks.
“We’ve been able to reach every part of the state,” Strizinger said. “We’re going to chronicle these main street areas over the next couple years to see if putting digital infrastructure in does all of the stuff that I think it’s gonna do. We’re looking to unlock the magic.”