He was sent to Maidwell Hall at the age of 8, where the violence and sexual abuse he experienced scarred him for life. Earl Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother, talks to Rachel Sylvester at Althorp and reveals the shocking reality of Britain’s boarding schools in the Seventies.
Crows circle between ancient oak trees and geese hoot overhead as I walk down the track that weaves through the park of the Althorp estate. The gravel has been neatly raked and the box hedges smartly trimmed around the Northamptonshire stately home that has been owned by the Spencer family for more than 500 years. Two pet sheep, Lucky and Minty — orphan lambs that were reared in the house — graze peacefully by a wrought iron fence. It is a quintessentially English scene, a playground for the aristocracy.
Inside the 26-bedroom mansion, surrounded by 13,000 acres, the corridors are lined by marble busts and the walls are covered with family portraits. The extensive art collection includes paintings by Van Dyck, Gainsborough and Reynolds. There is a billiard room overlooking the deer park and a spectacular entrance hall that was once described as “the noblest Georgian room in the country”.
I am shown into the library, where the shelves are packed with leather-bound volumes and tulips are arranged in vases around the room. The clock ticks gently on a mantelpiece and coffee is served in a silver pot that glitters beneath the chandeliers. A photograph of Princes William and Harry as children with their cousins stands on a side table. Their mother, Diana, is buried on an island in the middle of the Althorp lake.
Charles, the ninth Earl Spencer, is Diana’s brother as well as a godson of Queen Elizabeth. He was christened in Westminster Abbey, went to Eton. His life appears to be the embodiment of inherited wealth and effortless privilege.
Yet, as we speak for almost two hours, he describes how his childhood was in fact marred by extraordinary cruelty, neglect and abuse — physical, emotional and sexual. His mother left when he was 2, and then, at the age of 8, he was sent away to a brutal boarding school presided over by a sadistic paedophile. Spencer compares the experience to being orphaned. “You can map the same damage to the emotional development of the brain in children who went to abusive boarding schools and children in care. It’s the same impact,” he says. “You feel cast out by your family.”
Spencer has now written a book, A Very Private School, in which he details the appalling things that he and many others suffered at Maidwell Hall, an elite prep school, in the Seventies. As he was working on the text, the migraines, sweats and nightmares that plagued him as a child returned. But he felt that he owed it to his contemporaries to expose the depth of nastiness and depravity at the school.
“I didn’t want this to be a whinge,” he says. “Of course, I’m in the book, but I really just see myself as a way into a collective trauma and denial of trauma, and survival and, sadly, not survival. People think, ‘Oh, he’s just written a book, and then he moves on.’ But it’s really grabbed me in a quite scary way.” He hopes it will ultimately be “redemptive”, a way of reclaiming his childhood and exposing what he sees as a “great conspiracy” by the upper classes. “We were like lambs led to the slaughter,” he says. “It became a construct of the imperial cause to cauterise the emotions of these very young boys, so that they could then serve the Empire wherever they were placed, without being homesick. There are always blithe parents who say, ‘Oh, I’ll do that because everyone else is doing it,’ but there were definitely others who knew, who got tear-stained letters, and thought, ‘Well, they’ve just got to get through that and grow up and it’ll do them good in the end.’ And it didn’t.”
As he researched the book, Spencer discovered that some of his friends, now men in their fifties, still have the physical scars of the beatings they received as children, and many more carry profound emotional wounds. “I’ve bored a lot of therapists for decades and I realised that this school was the root of a lot of the problems I’ve tried to process,” he says. “Then I started to meet people who had had terrible things happen as a result of going to that school. Truly awful. One bloke said he had been raped three times at the school. He told me how it had destroyed his life and how he had a breakdown when his son reached the age he was when he got raped. He was 9.”
Another man described how his brother had died of “self-neglect” after being abused at Maidwell. “This sweet little boy went at 8 to this school and was broken by it and never really had a life, never had a friend, never had a romantic partner, had very menial jobs. And the family, I think, quite rightly saw the roots of his adult life in that brutality.” A third, who was terminally ill, stipulated in his living will that he would not see his parents before he died because he could not forgive them for leaving him decades earlier to suffer at the school.
Spencer realised that the appalling culture went beyond a single institution. “Men have suddenly opened up about what happened to them at totally different schools. They’re terribly traumatised and their wives just sit there open-mouthed. They have never heard this stuff before. One was a boy who was terribly bullied and one day the bullies put him in a big cardboard box and took knives and punched all around. Luckily, they didn’t get him, but he was cowering at the bottom while blades were coming through the top of the cardboard box. There was monstrous treatment, particularly of intelligent, sensitive people.”
Spencer is convinced that there are wider political ramifications too. While those who grow up in care disproportionately end up in prison, those who go to expensive boarding schools are more likely to end up running the country. “I think it would be impossible for there not to have been a social impact on this country because of this sort of school,” he says. “I’m sure several people who have got to the top in politics have been to benign schools where they’ve just had a good education. But a lot of them won’t have had that and they will have been brutalised on some level. Logically, it has to scar them and their outlook on life and the world — what matters and what doesn’t matter; who doesn’t matter. The dog-eat-dog world of these schools probably makes a lot of these leading figures in our society quite cruel about their judgment of what’s right and wrong, losing a core integrity and sensitivity. That must have an impact on decisions.”
We were like lambs led to the slaughter.
Spencer may be the “lord of the manor”, who grew up with butlers, nannies and cooks, but there is no pomposity. Dressed in a neutral grey suit and blue shirt with no tie, he is open, honest, self-aware and often vulnerable as he tells his horrific story. Despite the traditional grandeur of his surroundings, he is surprisingly modern. The former television journalist has a social media manager and, at 59, is a hands-on dad. As a child he would always eat separately to his own father, with his supper brought to him by the butler on a tray, but now he does the school run, dropping off his 11-year-old daughter, Charlotte, every day. “It’s such a fun time. She’s got the same sense of humour, which probably says rather more about me than her,” he says. “She’s so bored of me saying, ‘Is everyone nice to you at school?’ And, ‘Are there any teachers who make you uncomfortable in any way?’ She just says, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’ But you’re on guard when it’s happened to you.”
Charlotte (whose middle name is Diana) is like the “sparky, happy” child Charles was before he went to Maidwell. His book is dedicated to “Buzz”, the nickname his mother gave him when he was little because he had the happy effervescence of a bee. “Buzz was energetic, carefree, with lots of friends running around,” he says, but that “uncompromised” happiness did not last. The cover of the book shows a small boy, dressed in a suit looking at the camera with fear in his eyes.
The first shadow to cloud his sunny disposition came when his mother, Frances, ran off with the heir to a wallpaper fortune, Peter Shand Kydd. Charles only discovered that she had gone when she sent a postcard from Australia. The housekeeper told him she was on holiday and would be back soon but somehow he knew that was not true. “Diana looked after me because she was nearly three years older than me,” he says. “She said that the worst part was hearing me cry down the hall because she was terrified of the dark and couldn’t come to me.”
Divorce was frowned upon in his parents’ social circle — “It would have had them banished from the Royal Enclosure at Ascot” — but Spencer says he and his siblings accepted the situation. “There was a difficulty in that my parents didn’t like each other at all and didn’t talk, but that was for the adults. We did feel we were going between enemy camps and that was tricky, but overall the home environment that my father provided, even though he was quite reclusive and, I believe, clinically depressed and undiagnosed and untreated, and there were occasionally very unpleasant nannies, was really a very happy childhood. I suppose I was abandoned by my mum, technically, but it didn’t feel like that. I saw her once a month in term time, and I saw her for half the holidays.”
Diana looked after me because she was nearly three years older than me.
The prospect of going to boarding school terrified him, however. “I think probably the impact of my mother leaving made home even more important as a point of stability. I had resurrected a shattered world and the fact that I was going to be cast out from that shattered world was beyond my understanding.”
For six months before being sent to Maidwell he woke up every night. “I developed this nightmare of going through what looked like an old-fashioned zoo, walking beside my father. He was, as ever, charming, very well turned out with a tweed suit and tie. He was talking calmly to me but I sensed that I was in danger. When I looked behind me, there was a male wolf, who was slathering ready to devour me. It had a telescopic arm and it pulled me away without him hearing or seeing. And he carried on just walking into the distance while I was hauled in.” Charles sobbed for days before the start of his first term, but on the day his father drove him to school, he says, “I wasn’t crying. I was just crumpled. I was in this state of disbelief.”
Arriving at Maidwell, Spencer knew immediately that it was a “dangerous” place. “It was very obvious. You saw after tea from the first day boys being taken down to be beaten.” This elite institution for just 75 boys from some of the country’s wealthiest and most aristocratic families had freezing dormitories, hard beds and disgusting food. Innocence, trust and joy were “trampled on and diminished in that outdated, snobbish, vicious little world that English high society constructed”.
There were bizarre militaristic rituals — daily exercise sessions called “drill”, after which the masters took turns to watch the boys naked in the shower, as well as something known as “ragging”, during which the pupils had to wrestle with each other every afternoon. “And we all had knives,” Spencer says. “Obviously it’s mad when I look back on it. There were boys with very short fuses who had six-inch blades on their hips. I had a commando dagger one year and it was totally normal.” It was a Lord of the Flies environment and if it had been a state school, Spencer says, it would have been “closed down”.
The head teacher, John Porch, known as Alec to the staff and Jack to the boys, was “an openly sadistic presence in the school”, Spencer says. “He enjoyed hurting the boys. He was clearly aroused doing really unbelievably painful punishments. There was blood; he was cutting buttocks several times with a cane and carrying on. These were small children. Upstairs I’ve got my dressing gown from Maidwell and it’s tiny, because I was tiny. The idea of structuring the school so that the teaching staff and the senior boys would get a scattering of blessings from the head teacher for providing him with naked buttocks is beyond my comprehension. He was a sadist and a pervert.” There is no doubt in Spencer’s mind that there was a sexual undercurrent. “One of my friends turned around and saw him obviously aroused and [he steered] another boy by the scrotum when he was about to be beaten. The spanking and then rubbing, it’s a very strange process, unless you’re getting sexual gratification out of it.”
He [head teacher John Porch] was a sadist and a pervert.
The head would take time to choose his weapon — sometimes he would flick his slipper from a foot to deliver a beating. On other occasions, he would choose between two canes called “the Flick” and “the Swish”. For the most severe “whackings”, he would cut a bamboo cane from the garden for a “one-off” punishment. “It was all about making the boys as frightened as possible. The whole process of being punished was ritualistic and barbaric. When a boy lost bowel and bladder control and had to go and clean himself up, one of my friends who was there as a witness was taken in and beaten in his place. He hadn’t done anything. That shows to me a perverted need to inflict pain.”
The headmaster devised a game called “Toe Beetles”, which involved tickling the boys, starting with their feet. “Obviously I get what it is now — it’s a perversion. But at the time, to have this terrifying figure laughing in a sort of frenzy of playfulness with us while his fingers went everywhere was thrilling, because we could giggle and think, oh my God, you know, maybe he’s nice underneath.”
The other staff were “enablers, allies or mute”, Spencer says. One particularly violent teacher hit him so hard across the head that he drew blood. Another boy was knocked unconscious during a Latin class by the same man, who also introduced naked Sunday morning swimming sessions in the lake at the school for the most handsome, athletic pupils. “Although he had four children, he was clearly very attracted to 12, 13-year-old boys. There was a rage in there and, my God, he was frightening. He really hurt us, twisting arms and twisting ears when we were naked in the showers. He was hideously terrifying.”
Spencer was so miserable that he used to make himself sick at night. “I think that was probably bulimia, a cry for help. I thought if I presented my vomit in a bowl that somebody would be maternal towards me and look after me. But, of course, I was just rejected as a time-wasting little hypochondriac.” There was no comforting female presence at the school. Boys who had “already been shorn of our mothers and sisters” had nobody to give them a hug. Bizarrely, any women who were on the staff had to be addressed as “Please”. “The reason given was that it would teach us good manners,” Spencer says. “But it was dehumanising, very misogynistic, very belittling of women.”
Then, when he was 11, Spencer was sexually abused by a female assistant matron. He recalls how the 20-year-old woman groomed him and the other boys by offering them late-night snacks after the lights were turned out. Then one night she came to his bed when the rest of his dormitory were asleep. “It started with French kissing for ages, for minutes at a time. It was all very bizarre. Then it progressed to mutual masturbation, not that I was capable of anything at 11.” He was not the only one to be targeted and with older boys she progressed to full sexual intercourse. Spencer says that sometimes when he tells men about his experience, they give a “laddish thumbs-up”. But he asks them, “What would you say if the genders were reversed?”
The whole experience of having his sexuality awakened so young “was incredibly traumatising”, he says. “This was such an overload of impossible feelings, emotionally and physically. She was very emotionally abusive. She wrapped us all into this world. It was an escape. She knew how grim a lot of the school life was and how awful some of the teachers were, and she presented as the sort of saviour who could take us into a different world.”
Entranced by his abuser, he became increasingly frightened that she would leave. “With one of my many knives I used to secretly cut myself in the belief that, if I hurt myself enough, then God would let her stay. One of the terrifying parts of child abuse is you think that you have some connection, which is totally bogus. You’re just being abused. But I thought she meant the lovely things she said.” Aged 12, he visited a prostitute while on holiday in Italy with his mother and stepfather. He believes it was his way of dealing with the abuse. It was “finishing her grooming”, he says. “The perversion was being seen to its conclusion.”
Spencer told no one about what was happening to him at the school, nor did any of his friends. “We were terribly young; we had no context. We didn’t know how bad it was because that was our life. There was a feeling that my parents wouldn’t have sent me there unless they thought this was OK.” Upper-class children lived separate lives to adults in those days. “We didn’t have conversations with our parents, such as are normal now. In fact, one of my classmates told me that the strangest thing about his first day of going to this school was the fact that his father took him and they had a conversation. He’d never had a conversation with him alone before.”
Even now, Spencer says some former pupils are reluctant to accept the full horror of what happened to them. “It’s very difficult for victims of this sort of abuse to fully come to terms with it until their parents are dead, because they have to in some way blame their parents for sending them there,” he says. “One of my friends still has scars on his buttocks and he tries to maintain to me that he doesn’t have any residue emotionally from that school. But I know that’s not true. His wife tells me how unwell he gets when he’s near here… As soon as he sees the sign for Northamptonshire, he gets the shakes and the sweats and when he is going past the school he gets major palpitations. He’s 59.”
There must be an impact on the boys’ adult relationships with women, he suggests. Spencer has been married three times. “I do think the single-sex boarding schools of those days can be very damaging,” he says. “I think I was looking to save people. And I’m not sure my values were entirely correct as to what I was looking for emotionally.”
Things are different with Karen, whom he married in 2011. She is a Canadian who founded a charity helping abandoned and orphaned children. “I do remember when I met her — she happens to be very beautiful, but the most interesting thing was what she did. That definitely resonated with me. I suppose my childhood was very privileged but very bumpy, emotionally.” She once told him that if he had not worked so hard to understand the damage caused by his unhappy early years then she would have “run a mile”. He has seven children. The two boys chose, as teenagers, to go to boarding school, but he says, “I would never send a child to boarding school.”
In his eulogy at Diana’s funeral, Spencer said that his sister had explained to him how “it was her innermost feelings of suffering that made it possible for her to connect with her constituency of the rejected”. Clearly furious, he pledged to protect the young princes, William and Harry from their mother’s fate. “We your blood family will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition, but can sing openly as you planned,” he said. The revelations about his own childhood traumas put that defiant declaration in a new light. I wonder whether being abandoned and betrayed so many times by the adults who were supposed to care for him had contributed to the anger he felt that Diana had been cut loose by the royal family.
“I think with Diana I took a view very early on,” he replies. “I remember going to a dinner soon after she’d become what she became, given by sort of friends in a private room in a restaurant in Fulham. I remember thinking, ‘Crikey, they’re all sucking up to her like crazy.’ I realised that my job was to be absolutely solid as a brother and just remain the same. That was sometimes difficult, because I’d say things that people weren’t saying to her in a loving way, a constructive way, and I think it was tricky for her to hear anything except how marvellous life was — but I thought that was my duty. I was her little brother. We grew up together.” Her death seemed to him the inevitable culmination of “the victimisation of her and misogyny, actually. So I was pretty angry but mainly devastated.” He will not discuss his now estranged nephews, who must themselves be suffering the lifelong emotional consequences of losing their mother.
Everyone has stuff in their life; it doesn’t matter what their social background is.
At Althorp, there is no escape from the past. As a boy Spencer found the house “cold and frightening”. Now he says, “I see it as family HQ, I suppose.”
So would he swap all this — the stately home, the title — for a normal middle-class life with a happy childhood? “I did want to go to a normal school when I was at Maidwell, but I was told I was too precious a flower,” he says. “Everyone has stuff in their life; it doesn’t matter what their social background is. I have had incredible advantages in life, which I’m very aware of. It’s just unfortunate I got caught up in a particularly bad period in a school run by a sadist.”
There is, he says, a strength and a resilience that comes from enduring such pain. “You could put me into pretty much any environment and I would have a good chance of surviving, if not prospering in it.” But he says this adaptability “is bought at an incredible price”.
Although he has tried hard to deal with his discombobulating early years, he admits, “There are times when I realise I’m still stuck in that beginning of my life. When I look back, I think I was really undone by this experience actually, and I didn’t realise it because the whole ethos of my background is just carry on and don’t complain and you’ll get used to it.”
The impact of his childhood is “very profound”, he says. “We had demons sewn into the lining of our souls. You can carry on, but they are always there. It killed a part of me; it killed the gentler part of me. For us to survive in that environment, a small but important part of us had to die. I think that is the essence of it. Sensitivity, empathy, those sort of things must suffer, because otherwise it’s too raw. You can choose to make the most of it, which I think is admirable if you can do it, but the damage is still inside.”
- A Very Private School by Charles Spencer (HarperCollins) is published on March 14
Written by: Rachel Sylvester
© The Times of London