“Many of us left Maidwell with demons sewn into the seams of our souls.”
Teacher had ‘reverse harem’
When he was 11 he was moved to live in a pair of dormitories based within the school’s attics, known as “The Uppers”.
He said the woman, who he did not identify, would bring the boys illicit snacks at night before going on to sexually abuse them.
Earl Spencer said on one night she first “kissed me on the lips” before she “promoted me to the second rank of her reverse harem: those she intimately touched.”
“While we kissed, one night, she reached under my bedclothes, trailing her fingers in teasing, looping circles down my stomach until alighting on the little that an 11-year-old boy can muster,” he writes. “The first time she touched me there, she placed my hand on her breasts, and I could feel her pounding heart beneath.”
“There seemed to be an unofficial hierarchy among her prey... she chose one boy each term to share her bed and would use him for intercourse.”
Earl Spencer added: “Her control over mesmerised boys was total, for we were starved of feminine warmth, and desperate for attention and affection.”
He turned to self-harming when she told him she might take up a job with the Royal Navy instead.
“I was so fraught at the prospect of losing her that I started cutting at the inside of my arm with a penknife,” he said.
He said the woman would now be in her late 60s, he believed would have married at least twice but he suspects she now either lives abroad or is dead.
John Porch, the former headteacher of the prep school who died in 2002 aged 95, was also said to have brutally beaten pupils. Earl Spencer said the abuse seemed to give Porch sexual pleasure.
Maidwell Hall described the tales of abuse from Earl Spencer and former pupils as “sobering” and added: “’We are sorry that was their experience.
“It is difficult to read about practices which were, sadly, sometimes believed to be normal and acceptable at that time. Almost every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s. At the heart of the changes is the safeguarding of children and promotion of their welfare.”
