Interview
‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl
Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse
Tim Adams
The brother of Diana, princess of Wales, talks about
his difficult decision to write about being physically and sexually abused and
the resistance he faced from members of his own class
Tim Adams
Sun 17 Mar
2024 14.00 CET
It was one
thing writing about the abuses of his childhood, Charles Spencer tells me, with
half an ironic laugh; it’s quite another talking about them with strangers.
When we meet in an office at his publisher, he is reeling a bit from this new
fact of his life. The more sensational chapters of his memoir of a deeply
traumatic five years at the Northamptonshire prep school Maidwell Hall had been
splashed all over the previous week’s Mail on Sunday. The following morning, he
had been a guest on Lorraine Kelly’s mid-morning TV sofa, raking over the
painful detail of that long-buried past for the viewers. As a result, he says,
apologising if he seems a bit strung out, he’s had two days of thumping
headaches followed by vivid nightmares.
The early
responses to his book about being sent away from home to be brutalised at
school at eight years old have been instructive. On the one hand he’s had a
mailbox of emails from fellow survivors, praising his courage in speaking up
for the generations of “privileged” schoolboys and girls who, like him,
suffered serial beatings and sexual assault in the closed world of boarding
schools well before puberty.
On the
other he’s experienced the default prurience of the tabloid press, which picked
over his book for clickbait (ever since Spencer stood up in the pulpit at
Westminster Abbey and blamed redtop journalists for hounding his sister, Diana,
to death, he seems to have been considered fair game). The Sun, for example,
thought the most appropriate headline for a book about the lasting harm of
childhood trauma to be “Di Bro’s sex at 12 with hooker”. The food writer
William Sitwell, a near contemporary of Spencer’s at Maidwell and Eton,
meanwhile, blithely dismissed the substance of the memoir in two columns in the
Telegraph. In the first, Sitwell branded Spencer a traitor to his class: “One
of their own – an earl, uncle to princes, seriously landed, stately housed,
replete with a deer park, fine furniture and fabulous paintings – is dishing
the dirt from within…” he wrote. In the second, he argued, bizarrely, that
“Spencer has not suggested that, beyond corporal punishment, he or anyone else
was a victim of abuse”.
While
professing to have long avoided any column bearing Sitwell’s byline, Spencer
shakes his head when I mention that sentiment. His book was written precisely
to challenge that stubborn, unhinged belief among his peers that school regimes
featuring daily beatings and endemic paedophilia “never did me any harm”.
(Reading Sitwell’s piece I was reminded of an observation by Alex Renton, the
journalist who has done much in recent years to shed light on the history of
abuse at many of Britain’s most exclusive private schools. Soon after Renton
revealed the worst of what had happened to him as a child, he ran into an old
school friend at a party: “Don’t stand near Alex,” the friend warned others
present, “he’ll put his hand down your trousers.”)
The
affecting power of Spencer’s account lies in its description of the way
predatory violence was entirely normalised in his school years. Maidwell Hall
was presented to wealthy parents as a kind of term-time paradise for young
boys; once the family had departed down the gravel drive, Spencer writes, it
became a hellish place. The awful wound of homesickness was preyed upon by
fearful teachers who bullied and thumped and caned vulnerable boys, or insisted
on “special” naked swimming lessons; that was exacerbated by a senior matron
obsessed with humiliating bedwetters, and a junior matron who molested
10-year-olds and had sex with 12-year-olds after lights out. “I realised very
early on that this was a horribly ugly subject,” Spencer says. “And I made a conscious
effort to make the book as smooth a read as possible. As a result every now and
then the reader might tread on a landmine and think: what the hell was that?”
The idea that such a thoroughly sweet boy has had to
live with that for the last 50 years is appalling to me
Ritual
beatings were a timetabled part of the day. Every evening after tea, a senior
boy would read out the names of small boys who had committed some minor
transgression of opaque rules. They would be sent to line up outside the
headmasters’ office, inside which he would require boys to drop their trousers
and then choose the implement with which to inflict punishment, slipper or cane
or switch. Some of the contemporaries who have shared their stories with
Spencer still have the physical scars on their backsides to this day, 50 years
on.
In the
book, he says he first started to properly reflect on the psychological damage
of those years in his 40s, after his second marriage had broken down, and he
was questioning, in therapy, the roots of his destructive behaviour. In talking
about his parents’ broken marriage and his abandonment issues, he mentioned in
passing his time at Maidwell Hall. The therapist asked Spencer to expand and he
found he couldn’t stop. He’s now approaching 60 and has just become a
grandfather for the first time. I had a sense, reading the book, I say, that
the impetus for telling this story was that it was now or never.
“I suppose
it was,” he says. “I started 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 half-smile, “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 two-year-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.”
People who went to these schools at that time simply
had to become desensitised in order to survive
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 Rolls-Royce,
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 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 the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
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