Jeremy Irons and the rescue of Kilcoe Castle

 

FROM THE MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE

How Jeremy Irons Rescued and Restored a 15th-Century Irish Castle

 

In the midst of a creative crisis, the British actor impulsively purchased Kilcoe Castle, a long-abandoned fortress near the water. David Kamp learns how a magical retreat came to be.

 

BY DAVID KAMP

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SIMON UPTON

SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/09/inside-kilcoe-castle-jeremy-irons-irish-castle

 

Somewhere between Ballydehob and Skibbereen, the G.P.S. directed me down a narrow country road toward an indentation in the southwestern Irish coast called Roaringwater Bay. The castle I was looking for had been one of the last to fall to the English, in the early 1600s, in a coda to the historic Battle of Kinsale, which sealed Elizabethan England’s conquest of Gaelic Ireland. The Crown’s forces had approached on horseback and by sea, with muskets, swords, and malevolent intent. I was approaching by appointment, in a white Kia Sportage. The road meandered this way and that until suddenly, around the last bend, a spectacular sight presented itself: Kilcoe, a terra-cotta-colored edifice composed of two towers, a thick one and a thin one, rising from a small island tethered to the mainland by a short causeway.

 

I was detected even before I reached the island. Through a slit window some 50 feet in the air—the kind from which men in metal helmets used to shoot arrows—a small white dog peered quizzically at my vehicle. At the castle’s gates, I got out of the car and buzzed the buzzer. A disembodied voice dictated a numerical code to use on the keypad. I punched in the numbers, and the gates slowly opened.

 

Twenty years ago, this place had been a ruin. Old photos I had seen depicted a run-down structure of weathered gray stone, roofless, its uppermost surviving floor exposed to the elements and covered in a carpet of grass and wild shrubbery. But this morning, Kilcoe cut a mighty figure, its main tower standing 65 feet tall, and the turret, conjoined to its sibling at the northeast corner, 85 feet. The crenellations in the towers’ parapets had been reconstructed to approximate how they must have looked in the 15th century, when the castle was built by a chieftain of the Clan Dermot MacCarthy. A burgundy pennant emblazoned with the word KILCOE streamed northwesterly from the turret’s lookout.

 

In the courtyard, I walked up to an imposing arched door, its heavy elm panels dotted with iron studs. Above it, to the left, inlaid in the wall, was a pale stone slab. Etched into the slab were the following words:

 

MANY HEARTS LIE IN THESE WALLS.

FOUR YEARS WE WORKED, AND WE

JUST DID THE BEST WITH WHAT WE KNEW.

AND WHAT WE DID YOU SEE.

A.D. 2002

 

Just as I began to wonder if my knocks on the big door were being heard, a smaller, hitherto unnoticed cutout door within the big door popped open, and through the opening bent the lanky body and familiar face of Jeremy Irons. It was an entrance evocative of Gene Wilder’s halting, hobbled first appearance in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory: Irons looked ashen as he beckoned me in and led the way, with a conspicuous limp, up a flight of outdoor stairs. Had living in this remote locale turned the handsome actor into a rickety invalid?

 

No, false alarm. Irons informed me that he had only recently awoken and was in momentary foot pain from a flare-up of plantar fasciitis. Within minutes, having drunk a mugful of coffee and smoked the first of the many hand-rolled cigarettes he goes through in a day, he had, like Wonka, unfurled into his full, charismatic self, ready to expound on a magical world born of his imagination.

 

“I remember the very first night I spent here on my own,” he said. “It’s a very interesting building, because it’s very male and erect: a phallus. And yet, within, it’s a womb. Very strange like that. And I thought, I’m completely protected. I’m away from everything. It’s a wonderful feeling. And that’s what it gives me.”

 

Irons, I learned after two days at his side, is a man serenely comfortable in his own skin. He speaks without inhibition and does whatever he feels like doing, whether it’s sailing his yawl, the Willing Lass, heedlessly through the stiff gales of Roaringwater Bay, driving the local roads in his pony trap (his preferred, Anglo-Irish term for a horse-drawn carriage), or interrupting his houseguests’ sleep with theatrical wake-up announcements delivered through the intercom system that he rigged up to reach all the rooms in the castle. At the time of my visit, he had two friends staying over, both women. “Good morning, ladies!,” he intoned through the intercom, his plummy Jeremy Irons voice echoing throughout the ancient building. “It’s a lovely day. The sky is dry; the wind is low. Please come down to the smell of burning toast.”

 

His country uniform was a loose-weave three-button sweater worn over a Henley shirt, with baggy French workman’s trousers in a blue herringbone pattern and slip-on duck boots paired with red ragg-wool socks. Outdoors, he completed this ensemble with a backward-turned tweed cap. On any other human being save Samuel L. Jackson, this outfit would have looked ridiculous. On him, it looked smashing.

 

Kilcoe is at once stately-home beautiful and slightly mad—a 360-degree immersion in its owner’s eccentric psyche.

 

His body language, too, is something to behold. At 69, he has held on to his looks and still leans against walls and sprawls across sofas with the languid grace of Charles Ryder, the character he played in Brideshead Revisited, the 1981 British mini-series that sealed his stardom. What’s more, he has a dog, Smudge, who mimics his regal movements. A terrier mix procured by Irons from a shelter—it was she who first spotted me pulling up to the castle—Smudge accompanied Irons everywhere we went (with her master’s constant reinforcement: “There’s a good girl, Smudger!”) and followed his every cue: casting her glance pensively seaward when he did, matching him pace for pace as he bounded up Kilcoe’s steep staircases.

 

A man would need to be this self-assured in order to take on the daunting task of restoring a castle that had sat unoccupied for the better part of 400 years. And he would have to be especially trusting in his instincts—and, perhaps, a little reckless—to assume direct oversight of the project, as Irons did, with no credentialed architect, general contractor, or medievalist at his side.

 

“It was a load of amateurs setting to, following our noses,” Irons said. At any given moment, he told me, 30 to 40 people were puttering away on the premises—a motley assemblage of personal friends, Irish locals, and itinerant masons, woodworkers, and other craftsmen. “I told them all,” he said, “‘What you need to remember is that what we’re doing is a jazz theme on the medieval.’”

 

If that phrase conjures unwelcome images of suits of armor draped in animal-print throws while the music of Kenny G tootles faintly through hidden speakers, despair not. Kilcoe, while not remotely a faithful re-creation of what it was 600 years ago—it offers such modern features as hot and cold running water, electricity, and Wi-Fi—is a magnificent place: at once stately-home beautiful and slightly mad, a 360-degree immersion in its owner’s eccentric psyche.

 

The castle’s showpiece is its double-height main living area, located on the third of the main tower’s four floors and known in medieval manor-house terminology as the solar (in Irons’s pronunciation, the “so-lahr”).

 

Making use of the big tower’s full width and depth, roughly 32 feet by 40, the room is pleasingly busy, assimilating all manner of art, objets,and materials that Irons has collected, magpie-like, in his travels: carpets from Morocco, a Nepalese yoke for leading around a camel, an old Roman-style threshing board known as a tribulum, a fiddle he had made in Slovakia (he dabbles in playing), a life-size antique wooden horse that he found in the Cotswolds but believes to have originally come from an American tack shop.

 

The solar benefits from a surprising amount of natural light, given how monolithic and fortress-like Kilcoe appears from the outside. The room’s tall, oblong windows, refurbished by Irons but unchanged in their positioning, are aligned to offer views that look out, as confirmed by my iPhone’s compass, precisely to the north, south, east, and west.

 

At the center of the room, beneath a wrought-iron chandelier from France, is a conversation pit bounded by a large hearth and two sofas upholstered becomingly in celadon-colored cloth (“Liberty’s of London with the fabric on backwards”). Overlooking the solar on all four sides is a gallery, which supplies still more living space: on its western side, a library-cum-office for Irons, and, on its eastern side, an intimate den with a grand piano, a woodstove, and a TV nook (though Irons, not a big fan of television, keeps his flat-screen hidden behind a slide-up painting of the quarry in nearby Castlehaven, from which much of the stone for Kilcoe’s restoration was procured).

 

The castle sleeps 13 people, with most of the bedrooms and bathrooms tucked away in the five-story turret. Irons’s master suite is the exception, built atop the solar and gallery, a sort of deluxe captain’s quarters whose elaborate, arching wood roof—”I love it because it’s like being inside an upturned boat” he said—is inspired by the attic of a circa-A.D.-1100 farmhouse in which he spent some time while making the film The Man in the Iron Mask in France.

 

“It’s a very interesting building,” said Irons, “because it’s very male and erect: a phallus. And yet, within, it’s a womb.”

 

Fittingly for the adopted residence of an actor, Kilcoe comes inbuilt with drama. To reach the solar from the entry level, one must ascend the castle’s main staircase, which is long, narrow, and steeply pitched. Irons pointed out a series of holes notched in the walls on both sides, at about head height. These were for crossbeams from which wooden panels could swing down, impeding an invader’s progress up the steps. “You’d be coming up, wanting to get in,” Irons explained to me from the top landing, “and I’d have a lance or poker, which could push you in the eye from above.” Smudge, at his ankle, glared downward accordingly.

 

So, how did an Irish castle that had been both conquered and effectively abandoned by the English come to be restored to its former glory by, of all people, an Englishman?

 

Twenty years ago, Irons told me, he found himself restless, in need of a challenge. “I relish risk,” he said. “Risk is extra life.” For a long time, his acting work satisfied this need. He enjoyed working with the pervy, iconoclastic film directors David Cronenberg and Barbet Schroeder, playing twin gynecologists in the former’s Grand Guignol horror-thriller Dead Ringers and winning an Oscar for his portrayal of the aristocratic Claus von Bülow (who had been accused of trying to murder his wife, Sunny) in the latter’s Reversal of Fortune.

 

But by the late 1990s he had grown bored with film acting and felt he had plateaued career-wise, especially given his steadfast refusal to move to Los Angeles, a city he has no love for. A few years earlier, he and his wife, the actress Sinéad Cusack, had bought a modest getaway cottage that sits along the river Ilen, which winds through the western part of Ireland’s County Cork. They fixed up the cottage and named it Teach Iasc, Irish for Fish House. (The couple make their main home in Oxfordshire, England.) With their two young sons, Sam and Max, they spent many a day exploring nearby islands and waterways by boat. The ruin of Kilcoe, about 10 minutes away, became a favorite picnicking spot, where Irons and the boys enjoyed scampering up the walls to view the bay from perilous heights.

 

Around 1997 the thought occurred to him that he might look into buying Kilcoe and bringing it back to life. Doing so would present precisely the sort of challenge that he craved. Furthermore, he had just completed Lolita, Adrian Lyne’s film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s ever radioactive novel of a teacher’s affair with a pubescent girl, “so,” Irons dryly told me, “I knew things would be slower.”

 

The more he contemplated Kilcoe, the more urgent became the notion of owning it. The influx of foreign investment that was to make Ireland temporarily flush at the turn of the century—transforming it into the so-called Celtic Tiger—was newly under way, and Irons was fearful, he said, “that someone would come along with too much money and mess the place up.” Some discreet inquiries were made, and, before the year was out, Kilcoe was his.

 

In Cusack’s amused recollection, Irons had already bought the castle by the time he got around to telling her. “I was very shocked, and hyperventilated immediately,” she told me by phone from Oxfordshire. (She was not at Kilcoe when I visited.) “I’m still hyperventilating, to this day,” she said, “both at the beauty of what he’s done and because of the amount of breath it takes to get from the bottom of the stairs to the top.”

 

But she was supportive of her husband’s endeavor. It was no coincidence, Cusack noted, that Irons, who was born in 1948, was soon to turn 50. “I did see it very much as Jeremy’s midlife crisis, and that he should get on with it,” she said. “Also, I understood where the need came from. Jeremy can’t bear waste. He can’t throw things out. I think he saw that castle as a beautiful ruin that needed to be saved, that needed not to die.”

 

Irons furnished me with a three-page memoirette of his involvement with Kilcoe that provides useful context. There was a time, long ago, when he was young and not so self-confident: an accountant’s son from the Isle of Wight who, even after he took the audacious step in his teens of pursuing an actor’s life, still felt he needed someone “to draw me out from the cold, passionless Anglo-Saxon that I feared I was,” he writes.

 

That someone turned out to be a young woman from a celebrated family of Irish actors, “my girl from Dublin, wild, raucous, damaged, and quite quite lovely.” Cusack, to whom Irons has been married since 1978, succeeded in loosening him up, but even she, as a Dubliner, knew little of rural, distant West Cork. It was while visiting their friend David Puttnam, the English film producer and former head of Columbia Pictures, that they first laid eyes upon the dwelling that became Teach Iasc; Puttnam had just restored a farmhouse nearby.

 

As Irons relates, he came to understand that West Cork represents the end of the “hippie trail”: an informal pathway through the South of England, Wales, and Ireland that, for decades, has been hitchhiked, motorcycled, and camper-vanned (with a ferry ride thrown in) by European adventurers of bohemian proclivity. “Painters, carpenters, acupuncturists, songwriters, restaurateurs, stonemasons, mechanics, thatchers, weavers, jewelers,” he writes. “The list was endless for this group that was accepted with kind amusement by the indigenous farmers and fishermen, who gave us all the umbrella title of ‘blow-in.’”

 

Irons and Puttnam were posh versions of blow-ins, but blow-ins nonetheless. Through Puttnam, Irons became acquainted with another of their kind, a renowned English architect named Wycliffe Stutchbury, who lived in a nearby fishing village called Union Hall. Known as Winky, Stutchbury had overseen the renovation of Puttnam’s house, and, before long, was doing the same for Irons and Cusack. His work was not yet complete when, one fateful day while on vacation in the South of France, Winky Stutchbury stood up in a restaurant, declaimed, “I am now going to speak ex cathedra: The most important thing in the world is love!,” and promptly collapsed, dying instantly at the table at the age of 65.

 

Among those Stutchbury left behind was a daughter, Bena, whom he had taken on as a trainee, intending to teach her everything he knew about architectural draftsmanship. Bena dutifully wrote Irons a letter notifying him of her father’s passing and absolving him of any further obligation to be a client; she’d had all of 12 weeks’ training. But Irons admired Bena’s innate ability and personal style. She was a motorcyclist, as Irons is, and he insisted that she finish the cottage project. Which she did, much to Irons and Cusack’s liking.

 

When, a few years later, Irons confided to Bena Stutchbury his desire to buy Kilcoe, she informed him of a coincidence: the current owner of the castle and the island upon which it sat was a cousin of hers. As it turned out, this cousin, Mark Wycliffe Samuel, was an archaeologist who was in the process of completing a doctoral thesis, “The Tower Houses of West Cork,” rooted in his own deep affinity for Kilcoe. Samuel proved amenable to selling the castle to Irons.

 

The hard work of making Kilcoe habitable again began in 1998 and took six years, wrapping up in 2004. (Irons’s lyrical “Many hearts lie in these walls” paean to this process went up a couple of years before the job was truly complete.) Stutchbury, her slender résumé notwithstanding, was brought in as Irons’s de facto architect, H.R. department, and administrator. For the position of project foreman, Irons brought in Brian Hope, his go-to man since the 1980s for the upkeep of his Oxfordshire house.

 

An affable Englishman with the shaggy, mischievous mien of an old Led Zeppelin roadie with tales to tell, Hope told me that he was undaunted by Irons’s ambition. “I told Jeremy, ‘It’s a great idea—off we go!’” he said. Like Irons and Stutchbury, he, too, owed his qualifications to life experience rather than any accrediting organization. A blacksmith’s son and a photographer by training, Hope had picked up various trade skills while knocking around Europe and America as a young man—for example, working in the 70s with George Harrison’s longtime assistant, Terry Doran, to build a rock-band rehearsal studio in Los Angeles.

 

Still, Hope was shrewd enough to recognize that the scope of the Kilcoe project would require Irons to buy, rather than rent, their equipment and materials: tiers of scaffolding, a crane, a generator, a forklift. He also set up a work yard in the field that bordered the causeway. “We built a blacksmith’s workshop, a stonemason’s workshop, and a carpentry workshop, and had teams of guys working away,” Hope said. The land was leased by Irons from his new neighbor, a farmer who, according to the actor, soon “took to telling friends that he was ‘the most important man in Jeremy Irons’s life.’”

 

It didn’t take long for word to get out in West Cork that Jeremy Irons—yes, that one—was restoring a castle, and hiring, no less. A steady stream of visitors trekked their way to Kilcoe, some of them seasoned tradesmen, some of them hippie-trail pilgrims simply keen to earn some cash or become part of the scene. Hope was careful to hire licensed professionals to handle the plumbing and the wiring. But Irons, for all the specificity of his vision, was remarkably open-minded about giving the randos a chance to contribute. It was Stutchbury, whose office was a trailer parked at the causeway’s entrance, who served as Team Kilcoe’s first point of contact with the various characters who showed up.

 

“Anybody who wanted a job, I’d ask, ‘What can you do?’” she told me. “A lot of them couldn’t do anything. They were just . . . people. But, knowing Jeremy’s taste, I would ask, ‘Are you a motorcyclist or a musician?’ If you were, you’d be moved up on the list. Or if you had a silly name. There was a painter who came and said his name was Anthony Cumberbatch. Jeremy said, ‘I have to have him on my payroll. Hire him!’”

 

The least skilled of the new arrivals were given jobs sweeping the scaffolding, or, in the early days, simply pulling out the vegetation and earth lodged between the walls’ stones, a laborious process that needed to get done before repointing could begin. Some of the people who materialized turned out to be gifted artisans, if offbeat ones. There was the pair of Germans who happened along the road one day in stovepipe hats and tailcoats, observing an archaic rite known as Wanderjahr, in which apprentice craftsmen, upon completing their training, spend several years journeying and improving upon their craft, their costumes conveying to potential employers that they are not vagabonds. One of the Germans was a carpenter and the other a stonemason. “They carved all our figurative windows, and then, after six months, they were off,” said Irons.

 

There was an English sculptor-slash-flautist who, because he was a practicing Buddhist, carved the castle’s Sheela na gig—a gargoylish female figure with splayed legs and exaggeratedly large genitalia, often found above the entryways of medieval Irish buildings—in a style more Asian than Irish, with a Buddha-like potbelly. There was the emotionally unsteady but sublimely skilled Argentinean carpenter who did intricate, wavy woodwork on and around the toilet in Irons’s private bathroom—but worked so deliberately that he had to be let go. (And burst into tears upon receiving the news.)

 

For all the hiccups, the renovation process fell into a steady rhythm, sometimes to transportive effect. “I’d hear the tap-tap-tapping of people picking stone, and the sounds of giggles and people making jokes,” Stutchbury said, “and I thought, This must be very like living in medieval mode.” At many a workday’s end, Irons and Hope, both hobby guitarists, would join their fellow musician-workers for an acoustic jam session at the pub up the road.

 

Irons did sometimes exasperate the crew with his whims and demands. When he told the stonemasons that their first pass at the main tower’s crenellations was a bit off, the “teeth” too many in number, and too small—necessitating their demolition and a rebuild—one Irish mason looked him in the eye and said, “Jeremy, do you know what the problem with working for actors is? The feckin’ rehearsals.”

 

But generally his instincts proved sharp. Early on, Irons noticed twig-like striations in the mortar on the barrel-vaulted ceiling of the main tower’s second floor, which is now a game room occupied by a large snooker table. Doing some research, Irons learned that, in medieval times, builders formed arched ceilings by bending into place a series of large wicker panels made of pliant, weaving-friendly woods such as hazel and willow, and holding these panels aloft from below with strong timber posts. The builders would then lay stones and mortar above the panels. Once the mortar squeezed through the woven panels and dried, the arches would hold themselves, and the underlying timber posts were removed. This backstory warmed Irons to the idea of using wicker panels as a decorative element throughout Kilcoe. He found a German-born weaver based in Cork, Katrin Schwart, to make such panels for the game room’s ceiling, and the results proved so spectacular that Schwart’s ornate wickerwork is now a motif throughout the castle, appearing on guest-bedroom ceilings, in the headboard of Irons’s own bed, and even on the outer frame of his bathtub.

 

The castle’s color, too, was an Irons inspiration. The original thought was to leave Kilcoe’s exterior much as it appeared, as a fortress of gray stone. But no amount of pointing and repointing could keep the castle’s interior dry. Even though the walls are about five feet deep, the high winds that accompany the winter rains in Roaringwater Bay resulted in “a puddle the size of a car in the solar,” Stutchbury said. So the walls needed to be harled, to use the Scottish term: covered in a thick layer of lime mortar. On top of the harling went several coats of limewash, a mixture of water and calcium oxide. Irons first tried applying the limewash in a cream color, but it made the castle “look a bit like a vibrator,” he said. In the end, he had the outermost coats of limewash mixed with iron sulfate, a compound that goes on pale green but turns rust-colored with oxidation.

 

“Jeremy can’t bear waste,” said his wife, Sinéad Cusack. “I think he saw that castle as a beautiful ruin that needed to be saved.”

 

For a time in the early aughts, English and Irish newspapers made a scandal of Kilcoe’s new finish, with a Telegraph reporter claiming that the locals were angry at the castle’s “sudden transformation from weathered gray to warm pink.” Irons dismisses these stories as nonsense, and, besides, even at dusk, with the twilight sky working its spell, you’d have to be lysergically loaded to construe the building’s color as pink. In the years since, Irons’s ocher-rust-whatever-you-like-to-call-it version of Kilcoe has become a beloved West Cork landmark, its warm coloring and bayside positioning making it look as if it sits in a perpetual golden twilight.

 

For my second and final night at Kilcoe, Irons arranged a big dinner in the solar, with mussels harvested from the bay (the waters are scored with floats and longlines that hold ropes upon which the mollusks grow), a roaring fire, a large collection of guests, and an entertainer, the Irish fiddler Frankie Gavin.

 

Irons had exchanged his pullover for an embroidered, floor-skirting scarlet robe, which he wore with aplomb, as if it were the most normal thing in the world for an Englishman approaching 70 who lives in a medieval Irish castle to be wearing. (He has two such robes, the other one, in green, given to him by Hamid Karzai, the former president of Afghanistan, “after I congratulated him on being the only national leader who seemed to dress with any flair.”) Two of his guests were older Irish gents, veterans of Kilcoe’s restoration: Tim Collins, the project’s gregarious, worldly electrician, and James Whooley, a soft-spoken retired farmer who has spent his whole life in the area and took on a second career as Team Kilcoe’s crane operator—it was he who carefully maneuvered the piano and wooden horse up and over the castle’s roof, whereupon others in the crew lowered the objects through a hatchway in the floor of Irons’s bedroom. (“No margin for error on the horse job,” Collins told me. “It cost £14,000—sterling!”)

 

After we had finished eating, Irons asked his guests to gather around in the conversation pit, where Gavin played a couple of songs and told a few groaners. Irons jumped in to tell a few of his own. Collins stood up, pre-emptively apologized for his singing voice, and delivered a heartfelt a cappella version of “The Banks of My Own Lovely Lee,” Cork’s de facto county anthem. Even the slight, shy Whooley performed a set piece, a from-memory recitation of “The Priest’s Leap,” a 74-line Irish-nationalist poem held dear in Cork, about a defiant cleric who, on horseback, miraculously evades a pursuing battalion of nefarious English soldiers. Irons, in his flowing robe, took it all in mirthfully, having evidently banished forever the cold, passionless Anglo-Saxon part of himself.

 

Outside, it was a stormy night, with lashing rain and flattening winds. But you wouldn’t have known this inside Kilcoe, where the fire crackled, the hum of conversation drowned out the gusts, and the towers didn’t even sway. “There’s something about the castle that generates the most extraordinary energy,” Irons said to me. “Everybody stays up ‘til three, four in the morning—talking, listening to music, drinking. You just want to go on, go on. It takes a bit of getting used to, this place. Because it does somehow produce an energy. Have you felt it?”

 

David Kamp

David Kamp has been a Vanity Fair contributing editor since 1996, profiling such monumental figures of the arts as Johnny Cash, Lucian Freud, Sly Stone, and John Hughes. He has also been responsible for many of the magazine’s recurring humor features, such as the Rock, Film, and Food Snob’s Dictionaries (which have in turn been developed into books and Condé Nast Entertainment videos) and the Impossible Interview series. Kamp is also the author of the best-selling The United States of Arugula (Broadway Books, 2006), a chronicle of America’s evolving foodways. Before joining Vanity Fair, he was an editor and writer at GQ, and began his career at the satirical monthly Spy. He lives in New York City.

 

What Happened to Britain’s Aristocratic Families After They Lost Their Great Houses?

 

The Dark Story of Britain's Most Damned School: Gordonstoun

In the autumn of 1962, a thirteen year old boy stepped off a small aircraft at Lossiemouth on the cold north coast of Moray, climbed into a waiting car, and was driven through pine forest and farmland to a granite house on the Laich of Moray. He had pleaded with his mother not to send him. He had begged his grandmother, the Queen Mother, who quietly preferred Eton, to intervene. Neither could overrule his father. Prince Philip had decided, and Prince Philip would not be moved. For the next five years, from 1962 to 1967, the boy who is now King Charles III lived behind the high windows and cold dormitories of Gordonstoun School, a place his father praised as character building and which the boy himself would later describe, in lines preserved in Jonathan Dimbleby's authorised 1994 biography The Prince of Wales, as somewhere he hated and felt confined within. In a letter dated February 1964, also quoted in Dimbleby's authorised account, the young prince called the school "Colditz in kilts", a phrase that has clung to Gordonstoun ever since.

 

Beyond the famous and the royal, Gordonstoun was held together for decades by servants whose names appear only in pay books, parish registers, and the loose ledgers of the school bursar. Margaret Forbes served as head matron from 1958 until her retirement in 1975. She came from a fishing family in Buckie, never married, and ran the sanatorium with what former pupils remembered as a brisk kindness, dispensing aspirin, cocoa, and a careful silence. William Anderson was head groundsman from 1960 to 1990, thirty years of cutting the running tracks, marking the rugby pitches, and keeping the boats fit for the sea training that Hahn believed mattered more than Latin. He lived in a tied cottage on the estate edge with his wife and three children and was known to every boy who passed through. Anna Stewart, the laundress, worked at Gordonstoun from 1962 to 1985.

 

The Wizard Laird story is not a Victorian invention. Sir Robert Gordon of Gordonstoun, third baronet, lived from 1647 to 1704. He was a serious natural philosopher, an early Fellow of the Royal Society, and a man who corresponded with Isaac Newton.

 

Kurt Hahn's own story matters too, because Gordonstoun cannot be understood without it. Hahn was born in Berlin in 1886, into a prosperous Jewish industrial family. He studied at Oxford before the First World War, served as a private secretary to Prince Max of Baden, and helped draft the German armistice request of 1918.

 

British Manors is a channel devoted to the deep, careful history of the buildings that shaped this country. Not the polished tourist brochure version, but the long shadows behind the great halls, the names of the people who scrubbed the steps, the founders who arrived as refugees, the children sent against their will, the laird who was rumoured to have signed in blood. We work through estate records, parish registers, authorised biographies, court transcripts, public inquiry reports, and contemporary newspaper coverage to reconstruct what really happened inside the country houses, castles, schools, and estates of Britain. Gordonstoun sits at a strange crossroads of that story.

Can These Students Survive Gordonstoun? | E2 | Our Stories

 

KURT HAHN and Gordonstoun School

KURT HAHN

Kurt Matthias Robert Martin Hahn CBE (5 June 1886, Berlin – 14 December 1974, Hermannsberg) was a German Jewish educator. He founded Schule Schloss Salem, Gordonstoun, Outward Bound and the United World Colleges.

Early life

Born in Berlin to Jewish parents, Hahn attended school in Berlin, then universities at Oxford, Heidelberg, Freiburg and Göttingen. During World War I, Hahn worked in the German Department for Foreign Affairs, analyzing British newspapers and advising the Foreign Office. He had been private secretary to Prince Max von Baden, the last Imperial Chancellor of Germany.[3] In 1920, Hahn and Prince Max founded Schule Schloss Salem, a private boarding school, where Hahn served as headmaster until 1933.

Hahn was raised as a Jew and served as the Salem School's headmaster during Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Hahn began his fierce criticism of the Nazi regime after Hitler's storm troopers killed a young communist in the presence of his mother. When he spoke out against the storm troopers, who had received no punishment, Hahn spoke against Hitler publicly. He asked the students, faculty and alumni of the Salem school to choose between Salem and Hitler. As a result, he was imprisoned for five days (from 11 to 16 March 1933). After an appeal by British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, Hahn was released, and in July 1933 he was forced to leave Germany and moved to Britain.

United Kingdom

Hahn settled in Scotland, where he founded Gordonstoun with Sir Lawrence Holt on similar principles to the school in Salem. Later, Hahn converted to Christianity and became a communicant member of the Church of England in 1945 and preached in the Church of Scotland. He also started an international organisation of schools, now called Round Square. Hahn was also involved in the foundation of the Outward Bound Organisation, Atlantic College in Wales and the wider United World College movement, and the Duke of Edinburgh's Award.

Return to Germany

Hahn divided his time between Britain and Germany after the war. He founded several new boarding schools based on the principles of Salem and Gordonstoun: Anavryta, Greece (1949); Louisenlund, Germany (1949); Battisborough, England (1955); Rannoch School, Scotland (1959); Box Hill, England (1959); International School Ibadan, Nigeria (1963); The Athenian School, USA (1965). He resigned from the headship of Gordonstoun on health grounds and returned to Hermannsberg near Salem in 1953. He died there on 14 December 1974 and was buried in Salem.

Philosophy

Hahn's educational philosophy was based on respect for adolescents, whom he believed to possess an innate decency and moral sense, but who were, he believed, corrupted by society as they aged. He believed that education could prevent this corruption, if students were given opportunities for personal leadership and to see the results of their own actions. This is one reason for the focus on outdoor adventure in his philosophy. Hahn relied here on Dr. Bernhard Zimmermann, the former Director of the Göttingen University Physical Education Department, who had to leave Germany in 1938 as he did not want to divorce his Jewish wife. Hahn's educational thinking was crystallized by World War I, which he viewed as proof of the corruption of society and a promise of later doom if people, Europeans particularly, could not be taught differently. At the Schule Schloss Salem, in addition to acting as headmaster, he taught history, politics, ancient Greek, Shakespeare, and Schiller. He was deeply influenced by Plato's thought. Gordonstoun is based less on Eton than on Salem. Hahn's prefects are called Colour Bearers, and traditionally they are promoted according to Hahn's values: concern and compassion for others, the willingness to accept responsibility, and concern and tenacity in pursuit of the truth. Punishment of any kind is viewed as a last resort.

Hahn also emphasized what he called "Samaritan service", having students give service to others. He formulated this as focusing on finding Christian purpose in life. It has however been adopted by the IB program and secularized.

Gordonstoun School

Gordonstoun School is a co-educational independent school for boarding and day pupils in Moray, Scotland. It is named after the 150-acre (61 ha) estate originally owned by Sir Robert Gordon in the 17th century; the school now uses this estate as its campus. It is located in Duffus to the north-west of Elgin. It is a "public school" in the English usage of the term as defined by the Public Schools Act 1868. The school follows certain practices such as usage of the Common Entrance Exam for the 13+ entry age.

Founded in 1934 by German educator Kurt Hahn, Gordonstoun has an enrolment of around 500 full boarders as well as about 100 day pupils between the ages of 6 and 18. With the number of teaching staff exceeding 100, there is a low student-teacher ratio compared to the average in the United Kingdom. There are eight boarding houses, formerly nine prior to the closure of Altyre house in summer 2016, including two 17th-century buildings that were part of the original estate. The other houses have been built or modified since the school was established.

Gordonstoun has a few notable alumni. Three generations of British royalty were educated at Gordonstoun, including the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales.Due to Dr. Hahn's influence, the school has had a strong connection with Germany. It is part of the Round Square Conference of Schools, a group of more than 80 schools across the globe based on the teaching of Hahn. Around 30% of students attending Gordonstoun come from abroad.

History

The British Salem School of Gordonstoun was established in 1934 by Kurt Hahn after he was asked by friends to give a demonstration in the UK of his "Salem system".He was born in Berlin in 1886 and studied at the University of Oxford.[8] After reading Plato's The Republic as a young man, Hahn conceived the idea of a modern school. With the help of Prince Max of Baden, he set up the Schule Schloss Salem in 1919.After the First World War, both men decided that education was key in influencing the future. They developed Salem in order to develop its students as community leaders. By the 1930s Salem had already become a renowned school throughout Europe. In 1932 Hahn spoke out against the Nazis and was arrested in March 1933.

He was released and exiled to Britain in the same year through the influence of the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who was familiar with Hahn's work.[10] At the urging of British friends, Hahn decided to start a new school in Morayshire.

Gordonstoun was started in a small way and had financial difficulties in its early years. After the death in 1930 of Sir William Gordon-Cumming, 4th Baronet, his house at Gordonstoun was obtained by Kurt Hahn, whose offer for the lease was accepted on 14 March 1934. The buildings needed repair and renovation, and at the start of the first academic year, the school had only two enrolled pupils. Hahn expected Gordonstoun to operate for only a few years, as an example of his vision. The number of pupils steadily increased, and some additional pupils transferred from Salem, including Prince Philip of Greece, now the Duke of Edinburgh. By the start of the Second World War, 135 boys were attending.

In June 1940 the school was evacuated and the Gordonstoun estate was taken over by the army for use as barracks. The school was relocated temporarily to quarters in Montgomeryshire in Mid Wales when Lord Davies, a parent of two pupils, allowed the school to use one of his houses. The buildings were insufficient, and finances and pupil numbers began to drop. The school survived the war, pupil numbers increased again, and the school became well known throughout Wales and the Midlands. Once the war had ended, the school returned to the Gordonstoun estate.

By the end of the 1940s, the school achieved its primary target of 250 pupils and continued growing in size. It built dormitories on the estate, removing the need of maintaining a house in Altyre, Forres, many miles away from the main campus. Gordonstoun also developed its academic offerings. It arranged to admit poorer children from the surrounding areas, and to deepen the "Outward Bound"-type activities that were central to Hahn's system. Skills in mountaineering and seamanship were always taught at the school. The introduction of the Moray Badge, from which the Duke of Edinburgh's Award was borrowed, expanded the types of physical challenges for students to conquer.

From the 1950s onwards, the school administration concentrated on improving the facilities and expanding the curriculum. Major changes since then include: the founding of Round Square in 1966,[6] an international community of schools sharing Hahn's educational ideals; the school becoming co-educational in 1972; and the moving of Aberlour House, Gordonstoun's preparatory school, from Speyside to a purpose-built Junior Schoola[›] on campus in 2004.

Ethos

In the beginning, Hahn blended a traditional private school ethos, modelled on his experiences at Eton and Oxford, with a philosophy inspired by Plato's The Republic and other elements of ancient Greek history. This is seen in the title "Guardian", denoting the head boy and girl, the adoption of a Greek trireme as the school's emblem, and a routine that could be described as Spartan. Outdoor activities and skills such as seamanship and mountaineering are emphasized. The school had a reputation for harsh conditions, with cold showers and morning runs as a matter of routine. It also used physical punishments, known as "penalty drill" or PD, in the form of supervised runs around one's house (dormitory) or the south lawn of Gordonstoun House (pictured). Physical education and challenging outdoor activities are still practised, but cold showers and punishment runs have been dropped.

Hahn's views on education centred on the ability to understand different cultures. Gordonstoun incorporates this in a number of ways including its association with Round Square and in offering pupil exchanges to the different schools within the association. Additionally there is a chance to join one of the annual international service projects which take pupils abroad to help a foreign community, for instance there have been projects to build schools in Africa, build wells in Thailand and help orphans in Romania. Hahn believed that an important part of education was to challenge a person and take them out of their areas of familiarity and comfort, improving a person's ability to deal with difficult situations. The school requires that every pupil takes part in a series of outdoor programmes particularly expeditions in the Cairngorms and sailing training on the school's 80-foot vessel, Ocean Spirit.

Hahn believed that "The Platonic view of education is that a nation must do all it can to make the individual citizen discover his own power and further more that the individual becomes a cripple in his or her point of view if he is not qualified by education to serve the community."[29] The idea of service at the school is thought to encourage students to gain a feeling of responsibility to aid other people and is implemented in creating an array of services to the community which every student becomes involved in.

Gordonstoun offers a series of grants, drawing on its investments and other funds from which the school can draw upon in order to support pupils who are unable to pay the full fees.[30] In the academic year 2009/10 the school provided financial support for 163 pupils including 11 with 100% fee coverage and 95 with 50% fee reduction.The school is a registered charity: Scottish charity number SC037867.

Flannelled Fool: A Slice of a Life in the Thirties

Flannelled Fool: A Slice of a Life in the Thirties is an autobiography by T. C. Worsley, published in 1967. It takes its title from a phrase in "The Islanders", a poem by Rudyard Kipling.

Though Flannelled Fool is subtitled A Slice of a Life in the Thirties, much of it treats the author's childhood and education at Marlborough College before he began a schoolmastering career at Wellington College in 1929.

The frank accounts of many of its personages, only thinly disguised by false names, led, according to Alan Ross, the book's eventual publisher, to several rejections:

At least three leading publishers turned it down on legal advice, and Cuthbert Worsley himself admitted that he had been warned it was folly to expect publication. Re-reading it now I feel there were good reasons for anxiety, but at the time, with little to lose, it seemed worth the risk. Worsley had assured me that all the 'college' [Wellington] masters likely to cause trouble were dead, and Kurt Hahn, whose possible reaction had done most to scare off the others, was, safely, we hoped, back in Germany.

In the event, nothing happened. Far from bankrupting us or putting Cuthbert and me in gaol, the book both sold well and received a wonderful press.

Flannelled fool: A slice of life in the Thirties (1967)

by Thomas Cuthbert Worsley

REVIEW by jbarnabasl

3.0 out of 5 starsIs he a fool?

19 December 2006

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Flannelled-fool-slice-life-Thirties/dp/B0000CNFRJ

T. C. Worsley is disarmingly -self-deprecating, in a way that is rather out of fashion now. He was brought up in what would now be considered a dysfunctional family. His father, the Dean of Llandaff, abandoned his senior post in the Church of England, his house and his family, and spent most of his time playing golf. For Worsley, his father's life and character represents the kind of ineffectuality that he desperately wants to avoid in his own life, but fears he will ineluctably become.

Worsley is clearly good at some things, particularly cricket. At his public school, Marlborough, he takes on the character of a "hearty", one who loves games and despises learning. When he goes up to Cambridge, though, he eventually comes to love English literature and spends his early adulthood trying to find a balance between the various things he loves.

He repeatedly makes it clear that he is a late maturer in many ways. He is sexually repressed, but comes to recognize that his preference is for boys. Nowadays, this would earn him nothing but obloquy, but in the less censorious 1930s, when he was a young master at "College", it was believed by some that men who are paederastically inclined sometimes make the best teachers of boys. As far as we can tell from the book, he did not have any kind of sexual contact with the boys he taught, although he was subject to insinuations of inappropriate behaviour by "the old guard", the older masters at "College".

I recognized "College" (which is how Worsley refers to the school at which he taught) as Wellington College, my alma mater. Worsley's description of the buildings would be recognized by any Old Wellingtonian (and I am one), as would the name of the Master (the head master), Malim, and one of the outstanding teachers (in a Mr Chips kind of way), Talboys.

Worsley suffered from the illusion that he had to write a novel and left his post at Wellington to dedicate himself to writing. He encountered Kurt Hahn, the founder of Gordonstoun (the boarding school in the north of Scotland where Prince Charles was sent). Hahn invites him to spend a term at Gordonstoun, where he could live and write in return for advising Hahn about how the school was developing - it was a new school in those days. Worsley very soon realizes that Hahn, a Jew who had left Hitler's Germany to escape persecution, is as much an elitist as the Nazis whose attentions he had fled from. Worsley neatly undermines the Hahn myth and shows Hahn himself to be rather an unpleasant, if charismatic, character.

Just before the Second World War starts, Worsley finds a niche at the New Statesman, work he's able to resume after grappling with the stupidities of bureaucracy and the Services during the War (all amusingly described); he has a breakdown and is invalided out of the RAF, returns to the New Statesman and in due course becomes the Literary Editor and Drama Critic.

The book is subtly written, easy to read, but not one of great or universal significance. I enjoyed it, partly because Worsley had been a teacher at my old school, Wellington and partly because I recognize Worsley's fear of falling into the kind of ineffectual life his father (despite his promotion to a senior post in the Church) had lived and the kind of character his father had been. In fact, Worsley cannot have been as ineffectual as he feared, far from it. He fought many battles with those whose views he found repellant and found subtle ways to deal with the bullying of senior officers to which he and others were subject during the War. Clearly he is a good writer, but I was left with a sense of a man who yearned to have had a loving and strong father - the failure of his father to form a strong emotional bond with him seems to have stunted his (Worsley's) capacity to form strong, lasting and healthy relationships with others.

In 1934, through his lectures in London to the New Education Fellowship, Hahn met the educationalist T. C. Worsley and persuaded him to spend a summer term at the newly founded Gordonstoun in the capacity of consultant.In his memoir Flannelled Fool: A Slice of a Life in the Thirties, Worsley records his impressions of Hahn's penetrating character analysis, and his energy and commitment in the cause of human development, but as time went on he became critical of Hahn's "despotic, overpowering personality":

He revealed himself as having a fierce temper, a strong hand with the cane, and a temperament which hated being crossed. Especially damaging to my very English view, was his dislike of being defeated at any game. Hahn was an avid tennis player. But was it an easily forgiveable weakness that his opponents had to be chosen for being his inferiors or else, if their form was unknown, instructed not to let themselves win?

Hahn's behaviour came to seem to Worsley "so ineffably, so Germanically silly" that he was unable to share the clear adulation of the teaching staff:

We were going through the classrooms when, in one, he suddenly stopped, gripped my arm, raised his nostrils in the air, and then, in his marked German accent, he solemnly pronounced:

'Somevon has been talking dirt in this room. I can smell it.'

Hahn's views on Shakespeare led to an open disagreement:

He had what I have since learned to be a common German belief that Shakespeare was better in German than in English. I refused to allow this. I argued that the German translation might indeed be very good, but that the English original must be better. No, he assured me, the German was better; and as I didn't know German and he did know English, he must be right. We grew absurdly heated.

 This is the story of Worsley’s acquaintanceship (ending badly) with Kurt Hahn, the forceful German exile who founded Gordonstoun School in Scotland in 1934. Having met him twice, Worsley was invited to spend a summer term observing Gordonstoun without being enrolled as a teacher.

He [Hahn] took me over one day to show me this coastguard watch in action. As we walked towards it there came, trotting towards us away from it, one of the duty boys, dressed in the shirt and shorts which all Gordonstoun boys sensibly wore. The lad trotted by, and Hahn stopped me and in that familiar gesture of his gripped my arm:

‘Did you notice that boy?’

I had noticed him only because he was well known as the school tart; but I wasn’t sure whether Hahn would have been aware of that so I replied non-committally:

‘Not particularly.’

‘You didn’t,’ said Hahn, ‘notice his eyes?’ I admitted that I hadn’t.

‘Ah!’ Hahn said sadly. ‘You should have noticed that. That’s what coastguard watching does for a boy. His eyes were crystalline and pure. You only see such eyes in two kinds of people,’ and with immense emphasis, ‘ze hunter home from ze hill and ze sailor home from ze sea.’

This remark, and the other in the classroom seemed to me so ineffably, so Germanically silly, that I couldn’t take Hahn completely seriously from then on.

The Lonely Heir: Inside the Isolating Boarding School Days of Prince Charles

Growing up, Prince Charles struggled to please his parents and to fill a role that was against his nature. In an adaptation from her new book, Sally Bedell Smith chronicles the brutal bullying the heir endured at school, and the unlikely place in which he found solace.

by SALLY BEDELL SMITH

APRIL 2017

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/03/the-isolating-boarding-school-days-of-prince-charles

I. A SENSITIVE BOY

Before the stroke of midnight on November 14, 1948, Prince Charles Philip Arthur George officially became public property. While his 22-year-old mother, Princess Elizabeth, rested in her bedroom suite in Buckingham Palace, her newborn heir was brought to the vast gilded ballroom by the royal midwife, Sister Helen Rowe. Under the 46-foot-high ceilings—juxtaposed with the monarch’s massive throne draped in red-and-gold embroidered velvet—the infant was swaddled in white blankets and placed in a simple cot for viewing by the royal courtiers who served his grandfather King George VI and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth.

“Just a plasticine head,” observed Major Thomas Harvey, the Queen’s private secretary. “Poor little chap, two and a half hours after being born, he was being looked at by outsiders—but with great affection and good will.”

Charles was hemmed in by high expectations and scrutiny from the start—unlike his mother, who had 10 relatively carefree years of childhood. It was only when her father unexpectedly took the throne, in 1936, on the abdication of his older brother, King Edward VIII, that Princess Elizabeth assumed her position as next in line.

In December, four-week-old Charles was christened beneath the ornate dome of the Music Room at Buckingham Palace. The Archbishop of Canterbury doused the little prince with water from the river Jordan that had been poured into the gold Lily Font, designed by Prince Albert and used for all of his and Queen Victoria’s children. Delighted with her firstborn, Elizabeth breast-fed him for two months, until she contracted measles and was forced to stop. Yet she was often away from Charles in his infancy, spending as much time as she could with her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, an officer in the Royal Navy, who was posted to Malta in October 1949. She managed to celebrate her son’s first birthday, but afterward she was abroad, and separated from her son, for long intervals.

Prince Philip scarcely knew his son for the first two years of the boy’s life, though on his return from overseas duty he did take the time to teach Charles to shoot and fish, and to swim in the Buckingham Palace pool. When Prince Charles hit bottom after his separation from Diana, in 1992, he unburdened himself about the miseries of his youth to Jonathan Dimbleby, who was writing an authorized biography. Dimbleby noted that, as a little boy, Charles was “easily cowed by the forceful personality of his father,” whose rebukes for “a deficiency in behaviour or attitude . . . easily drew tears.” While brusque, Philip was “well-meaning but unimaginative.” Friends who spoke with Charles’s permission described the duke’s “belittling” and even “bullying” his son. Charles was less harsh about his mother, but his opinion had a bitter edge. She was “not indifferent so much as detached.”

Nearly two decades later, in 2012, Charles tried to make amends in a TV documentary tribute to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee. Home movies depicted an idyllic childhood at the family’s country estates at Sandringham, in Norfolk, and Balmoral, in Scotland. Footage of Prince Philip teetering on a tricycle and zooming down a slide on the Royal Yacht Britannia contradicted his reputation as a tetchy martinet, and scenes of the Queen romping with her children were meant to dispel the notion of her being distant and unaffectionate.

Charles was sensitive from the start, and his finely tuned antennae were susceptible to slights and rebukes. During one luncheon at Broadlands, the home of Philip’s uncle Louis Mountbatten, the guests were served wild strawberries. Charles, aged eight, methodically began removing the stems from the berries on his plate. “Don’t take the little stems out,” Edwina Mountbatten said. “Look, you can pick them up by the stems and dip them in sugar.” Moments later, his cousin Pamela Hicks noticed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back on. That was so sad, and so typical of how sensitive he was.”

As Philip watched these traits emerging, he worried that Charles could become weak and vulnerable, so he set about toughening him up. Asked in an interview when he was 20 years old whether his father had been a “tough disciplinarian” and whether he had been told “to sit down and shut up,” Charles answered without hesitation: “The whole time, yes.”

More often than not, the duke was a blunt instrument, unable to resist personal remarks. He was sarcastic with his daughter, Anne, as well. But Charles’s younger sister, a confident extrovert, could push back, while the young prince wilted, retreating farther into his shell.

When Elizabeth became Queen, her dedication to her duties meant even less time for her children. She relied increasingly on her husband to make the major family decisions. Neither parent was physically demonstrative. That lack of tactile connection was achingly apparent in May 1954, when the Queen and Prince Philip greeted five-year-old Charles and three-year-old Anne with handshakes after an absence of nearly six months on a tour of Commonwealth nations. Martin Charteris, Elizabeth’s onetime private secretary, observed that Charles “must have been baffled by what a natural mother-son relationship was meant to be like.”

Charles was indulged by his maternal grandmother, the Queen Mother, and visited her frequently at Royal Lodge, her pale-pink home in Windsor Great Park, when his parents were away. As early as age two, he would sit on her bed playing with her lipsticks, rattling the tops, marveling at the colors. When he was five, she let him explore Shaw Farm, in the Windsor Home Park. She also opened up a world of music and art that Charles felt his parents didn’t adequately appreciate. “My grandmother was the person who taught me to look at things,” he recalled.

As heir to the throne, he made an inviting target for school-mates, who ridiculed his protruding ears.

She never hesitated to give her grandson the hugs he craved. She encouraged his kind and gentle nature—the eagerness to share his candy with other children, and, when choosing sides for games, to select the weakest first for his team. “Her protective side clocked in on his behalf,” said her longtime lady-in-waiting, Dame Frances Campbell-Preston. At the same time, with the best intentions, she fueled the young prince’s tendency to self-pity, which fed one of his strongest traits, known as “whinging”—the more pointed British word for whining.

II. “OUT FOR A DUCK”

Charles’s early home-schooling was supervised by Catherine Peebles, his sensible Glaswegian governess, nicknamed “Mispy,” who felt compassion for his insecurities and his tendency to “draw back” at the hint of a raised voice. Eager to please, he plodded diligently through his lessons but was easily distracted and dreamy. “He is young to think so much,” Winston Churchill remarked after observing Charles shortly before his fourth birthday.

One book that caught the prince’s eye and helped hone his sense of humor was Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, a volume of poetry about the consequences of bad behavior. It brimmed with quirkiness and bizarre characters—a precursor to the sketches by the Goons and Monty Python comedy troupes, two happily subversive influences in his life. But by the time he was eight, the Queen and Prince Philip had decided that he needed the company of children in a classroom, making him the first heir to the throne to be educated outside the palace.

Early in 1957, he arrived in a royal limousine at Hill House School, in Knightsbridge, London. For all his parents’ efforts to put Charles in a normal environment—taking the bus to the playing fields and sweeping the classroom floors—he had difficulty mixing with the other boys. A newsreel of the school’s “field day” of sports competitions that spring showed a solemn prince introducing his parents to his classmates, who obediently bowed.

Charles had ability in reading and writing, although he struggled with mathematics. His first-term report noted that “he simply loves drawing and painting” and showed musical aptitude as well. But after a mere six months, his father transferred him to Cheam School, in Hampshire, where Philip himself had been sent at the age of eight. Although it was founded in 1645, the school had a progressive tilt, avoiding the exclusive atmosphere of other preparatory boarding schools.

Charles was just shy of his ninth birthday but considerably more vulnerable than his father. He suffered from acute homesickness, clutching his teddy bear and weeping frequently in private. “I’ve always preferred my own company or just a one to one,” he has said. As heir to the throne, he made an inviting target for school-mates, who ridiculed his protruding ears and called the pudgy prince “fatty.” He fell into a routine that included weekly letters home—the beginning of his passion for written correspondence. In the tradition of the time, he braved beatings from two different headmasters for flouting the rules. “I am one of those for whom corporal punishment actually worked,” he grimly recalled.

Charles lacked his father’s resilient temperament, and he lacked the physical prowess to command respect.

Charles had a fragile constitution. He suffered from chronic sinus infections and was hospitalized for a tonsillectomy in May 1957. Later that year, when he was bed-ridden at school with Asian flu, his parents didn’t visit him. (Both had been inoculated, so there was no fear of contagion.) Instead, before leaving for a royal tour of Canada, in October, the Queen sent him a farewell letter. The Queen and Prince Philip were again on tour, in India, when Charles came down with measles, at age 12.

Physically uncoordinated and slow as well as overweight, Charles had no talent for Rugby, cricket, or soccer—the prestige schoolboy sports. During vacations he joined local boys who lived near Balmoral for cricket matches. “I would invariably walk boldly out to the crease,” he recalled, “only to return, ignominiously, a few minutes later when I was out for a duck”—that is, having failed to score any runs. Elizabeth had taught Charles to ride, starting at age four. He was timorous on horseback, while his sister, Anne, was bold. Mostly he feared jumping. Anne’s equine prowess pleased her mother, and Philip saw a kindred spirit in her confidence and fearlessness.

Charles’s loneliness and unhappiness at Cheam were painfully obvious to his family. In a letter to Prime Minister Anthony Eden at the beginning of 1958, the Queen wrote, “Charles is just beginning to dread the return to school next week—so much worse for the second term.” She knew that Cheam was “a misery” to her son, according to a biography of Charles by Dermot Morrah, which was sanctioned by the royal family. Morrah observed that the Queen thought her son was “a slow developer.”

Asked as he was approaching his 21st birthday to describe the moment he first realized as a little boy that he was heir to the throne, Charles replied, “I think it’s something that dawns on you with the most ghastly inexorable sense . . . and slowly you get the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility.” He did, however, experience an unanticipated jolt in the summer of 1958 while watching the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, Wales, on television with some school-mates in the headmaster’s study at Cheam. Suddenly he heard his mother declare in a recorded speech that she was naming him the Prince of Wales—a mortifying moment for a shy nine-year-old boy who wanted desperately to be seen as normal and already carried the burden of his six other titles. Even as a very young boy, he was marked out as different.

The most important experience at Cheam was Charles’s discovery that he felt at home on a stage—a helpful skill for a public figure. For his role in a play about King Richard III, called The Last Baron, he spent hours listening to a recording of Laurence Olivier in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III. It was November 1961, and once again his parents were abroad, this time in Ghana. In their place, the Queen Mother and Princess Anne watched the heir to the throne perform as Richard, the 15th-century monarch famous for his deformity.

“After a few minutes on to the stage shambled a most horrible looking creature,” the Queen Mother wrote to her daughter, “a leering vulgarian, with a dreadful expression on his twisted mouth; & to my horror I began to realize that this was my dear grandson!” She added that “he acted his part very well” and that “in fact he made the part quite revolting!”

Charles formed no lasting friendships during his five years at Cheam. The Queen Mother made a strong pitch to his parents for him to continue his education at Eton College, the ancient boarding school near Windsor Castle. She knew that Philip had been pushing for his own alma mater, Gordonstoun, located in an isolated part of northeastern Scotland. In a letter to the Queen in May 1961, the Queen Mother described Eton as “ideal . . . for one of his character & temperament.” If he went to Gordonstoun, “he might as well be at school abroad.” She pointed out, quite reasonably, that the children of the Queen’s friends were at Eton.

But Philip doubled down on the value of a rough-and-tumble education, arguing that Gordonstoun would be the best place for his timorous son. The Queen sided with Philip, sealing Charles’s fate.

III. THE PRISON OF PRIVILEGE

The Queen did not accompany her husband in May 1962, when he delivered Charles to Gordonstoun. A certified pilot, Philip flew Charles to a Royal Air Force base in Scotland and drove him the rest of the way. With a 17th-century gray stone building at its center (built in a circular design, according to legend, by Sir Robert Gordon so that no devils could fly into corners), the campus had an undistinguished collection of seven pre-fabricated wooden residences that had previously been used as R.A.F. barracks. The prince was assigned to Windmill Lodge with 13 other boys, the start of an ordeal that he viewed as nothing less than a “prison sentence.”

The school’s founder, Kurt Hahn, was a progressive educator who had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and ran a school in southern Germany called Salem. Hahn, who was Jewish, fled to Britain after Hitler came to power. He established Gordonstoun in 1934, with Prince Philip among the first students. The school’s motto: “There is more in you.”

Hahn sought to develop character along with intellect. He promoted Plato’s idealistic vision in The Republic of a world where “philosophers become kings . . . , or till those we now call kings and rulers truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.” Contemplating his future reign, Charles would identify with the philosopher king, a notion later encouraged by well-meaning advisers who championed the idea of an “activist” monarch who would impose his wide-ranging worldview on his subjects.

Physical challenges at Gordonstoun were at the heart of building character. The testing began with the boys’ attire (short trousers throughout the year) and the living conditions (open windows at all times in the grim dormitories). The day began with a run before breakfast, followed by a frigid shower. “It was a memorable experience, especially during the winter,” recalled Somerset Waters, a school-mate of Charles’s. The prince nevertheless became so accustomed to the morning ritual that as an adult he continued to take a cold shower each day, in addition to the hot bath drawn by his valet.

Hahn aimed to create an egalitarian society where “the sons of the powerful can be emancipated from the prison of privilege,” an ethos that suited Philip when he was there. His assertive personality and Teutonic sensibility helped him adjust to the school’s demands. He was also a natural athlete who served as captain of both the cricket and hockey teams. Charles had neither his father’s resilient temperament nor his relative anonymity, and he lacked the physical prowess to command respect. Encumbered by his titles and his status as heir to the throne, he was singled out as a victim from his first day. “Bullying was virtually institutionalized and very rough,” said John Stonborough, a classmate of Charles’s.

The housemaster at Charles’s dorm was Robert Whitby, “a truly nasty piece of work,” recalled Stonborough. “He was vicious, a classic bully, a weak man. If he didn’t like you, he took it out on you. He was wrong for Charles.” Whitby, like the other housemasters, handed over the running of the houses to senior boys, who imposed a form of martial law, with ritualized psychological and physical abuse that included tying boys up in laundry baskets under a cold shower. Few students would walk with Charles to meals or class. Those boys who tried to befriend the prince were derided with “slurping” noises. Many years later Charles complained, with evident anguish, that since his schooldays people were always “moving away from me, because they don’t want to be seen as sucking up.”

As at Cheam, he was taunted for his jug ears, which his great-uncle Earl Mountbatten unavailingly urged his parents to have surgically pinned back. During intra-house Rugby matches, teammates and opponents alike pummeled Charles in the scrum. “I never saw him react at all,” recalled Stonborough. “He was very stoic. He never fought back.” At night in the dormitory, the bullies tormented Charles, who detailed the abuse in anguished letters to friends and relatives.

Charles found one escape at the nearby home of Captain Iain Tennant and his wife, Lady Margaret. She was the sister of a childhood friend of the Queen’s, David Airlie (the 13th earl). Tennant was chairman of Gordonstoun, so he could extend the privilege of weekend visits, when Charles would “cry his eyes out,” said Sir Malcolm Ross, who served as one of the Queen’s longtime senior advisers. “Iain and Margy really saved him from complete misery,” said David Airlie’s wife, Virginia.

A crucial day-to-day support for Charles was Donald Green, the royal bodyguard who, in time, became a father figure. Green stood six feet five, dressed well, drove a Land Rover, and seemed “slightly James Bond-ish” to the other boys. Green was Charles’s one constant friend, although there was little he could do about the abuse that occurred within the dormitories. This friendship, more readily made than with Charles’s peers, set the prince’s lifelong pattern of seeking company with his elders.

In June 1963, during Charles’s second year, he was sailing on the school ketch, the Pinta, to the Isle of Lewis. The boys were taken to a pub in the village at Stornoway Harbor, where the 14-year-old prince ordered a cherry brandy. “I said the first drink that came into my head,” he recalled, “because I’d drunk it before, when it was cold, out shooting.” Unbeknownst to Charles, a tabloid reporter was present, and his foray into under-age drinking became banner headlines in the tabloids as “the whole world exploded around my ears.” Afterward, the Metropolitan Police fired Don Green, robbing Charles of an ally and confidant. Charles was devastated, saying later that “I have never been able to forgive them for doing that. . . . I thought it was the end of the world.”

Charles had middling success in his coursework—with the exception of his declamatory ability—but he found a creative refuge in the art room presided over by a kind and somewhat effete master in his 20s named Robert Waddell. The prince gravitated toward pottery rather than painting—“like an idiot,” he later said. Classical music served as a balm as well. His grandmother had taken him to see a concert by cellist Jacqueline du Pré, inspiring him to take up the instrument at age 14. “It had such a rich deep sound,” he recalled. “I’d never heard sounds like it.”

Gordonstoun nearly extinguished Charles’s budding interest in Shakespeare, as he and his classmates “ground our way” through Julius Caesar for standardized tests. The Bard came alive only after the arrival in 1964 of a new English master, Eric Anderson—like the art teacher Waddell, also in his 20s—who encouraged Charles to act in several of Shakespeare’s dramas. In November 1965 he played the lead in Macbeth. His interpretation, said Anderson, evoked “a sensitive soul who is behaving in a way that is really uncharacteristic of him because of other forces.” Charles was excited about the prospect of his parents’ coming to see a performance. But as he “lay there and thrashed about” onstage, he wrote in a letter, “all I could hear was my father and ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ ” Afterward, he asked Prince Philip, “Why did you laugh?” “It sounds like the Goons,” said his father—a dagger to the heart of a young man so eager to please.

He similarly disappointed Philip in team sports, although he did develop considerable skill in the more solitary pursuit of fishing, along with traditional upper-crust shooting. At 13, Charles shot his first stag, steeling himself to the sight of the beast being eviscerated by servants on the hillside at Balmoral.

In 1961, he took up polo, eager to follow his father. “I was all for it,” said Charles. “At least you stay on the ground”—as opposed to jumping over fences in fox-hunting. By 1964, Charles was applying himself to the sport more seriously. That year, he also started playing practice matches with Philip at the Household Brigade Polo Club, on Smith’s Lawn, at Windsor Great Park. Still a censorious figure, Philip nevertheless was idolized by Charles. The young prince began to mimic his mannerisms—walking with one arm behind his back, gesturing with his right forefinger, clasping his hands for emphasis, and pushing up the sleeve of his left arm.

IV. “POMMIE BASTARD”

With renewed determination to give his son backbone, Philip made the unusual decision to send him to Australia at age 17 for two terms in the outback at Timbertop, the wilderness branch of the Geelong Church of England Grammar School, in Melbourne. Other than a trip on the Britannia to Libya, at age five, it was Charles’s first time leaving Europe.

Philip assigned David Checketts, his equerry—an aide-de-camp entrusted with logistics—to supervise his son’s stay Down Under. Unlike other royal advisers, the 36-year-old Checketts was decidedly middle-class. The product of a state-run grammar school, he had served in the Royal Air Force. His down-to-earth manner put the uncertain prince at ease.

Charles and Checketts arrived in Australia in early February 1966. They were greeted by a daunting contingent of more than 300 reporters and photographers that the prince endured with gritted teeth. At Timbertop he shared a bedroom and sitting room with a handpicked roommate, Geelong’s head boy.

The prince was liberated by the informality of a country where, as he quickly discerned, “there is no such thing as aristocracy or anything like it.” For the first time, he was judged on “how people see you, and feel about you.” Students and masters treated him as one of them, and to his surprise he felt little homesickness. He was mildly teased as a “Pommie,” Australian slang for Englishman, but faced none of the sadistic hazing endemic at Gordonstoun.

The boys did only a modicum of studying. Timbertop was all about physical challenges, which Charles now embraced with surprising success. He undertook cross-country expeditions in blistering heat, logging as many as 70 miles in three days—climbing five peaks along the way—and spending nights freezing in a sleeping bag. He proudly relayed his accomplishments in his letters home.

He encountered leeches, snakes, bull ants, and funnel-web spiders, and joined the other students in chopping and splitting wood, feeding pigs, picking up litter, and cleaning out fly traps—“revolting glass bowls seething with flies and very ancient meat.” It was a more physically testing experience than Gordonstoun, “but it was jolly good for the character and, in many ways, I loved it and learnt a lot from it.” On his own terms, in the right circumstances, he showed his toughness and proved to his father that he was not, in fact, a weakling.

On weekends he relished ordinary life with David Checketts’s family at the farm they rented near the small town of Lillydale. He indulged his passion for fishing, helped David’s wife, Leila, in the kitchen, played with their three children, and watched television in his pajamas. In completely relaxed surroundings he perfected his talent for mimicry by performing routines from his favorite characters on The Goon Show, which to his “profound regret” had ended its run on the radio in 1960. One of his best efforts was Peter Sellers’s falsetto “Bluebottle.”

Charles reveled in the sheer Goons silliness. (Seagoon: “Wait! I’ve got a hunch!” Grytpype-Thynne: “It suits you!”) Later in life he would rely on a sense of absurdity as an antidote to his oppressive surroundings. Goons humor, typically British, was all about breaking the rules, which carried an extra frisson of pleasure for the heir to the throne.

Charles enjoyed his six months in Australia “mainly because it was such a contrast to everything he couldn’t stand about Gordonstoun,” said one of his advisers, recalling the bullying that had so tormented him. He also showed his mettle during some 50 official engagements—his first exposure to crowds on his own. “I took the plunge and went over and talked to people,” he recalled. “That suddenly unlocked a completely different feeling, and I was then able to communicate and talk to people so much more.” The Australians, in turn, discovered “a friendly, intelligent, natural boy with a good sense of humor,” said Thomas Garnett, the headmaster of Timbertop, “someone who by no means has an easy task ahead of him in life.” When he left, in July 1966, his mates gave him a rousing “three cheers for Prince Charles—a real Pommie bastard!”

After an extended summertime stay at Balmoral, Charles returned to Gordonstoun in the autumn of 1966 for his final year. Headmaster Robert Chew named him head boy, known by the Platonic term “Guardian.” Among the prince’s privileges as Guardian was his own bedroom in the apartment assigned to Robert Waddell, “the quiet alter ego of Gordonstoun,” in the view of Charles’s cousin and godson Timothy Knatchbull, who later attended the school. “With his tittle-tattle and his mini-snobbery . . . [Waddell] had the sort of mind of a Victorian matron. He was a wonderful other pole of Gordonstoun, away from the sort of knobby-kneed brigade.” Charles’s only lasting friendships from his five years on the shores of the Moray Firth were with his older masters, Anderson and Waddell.

After he left with his parents for Balmoral at the end of July 1967, Charles obediently said that Gordonstoun had taught him self-control and self-discipline, and had given “shape and form and tidiness” to his life, although in fact he was personally disorganized. Always a correct, dutiful, and seemingly mature figure in the public eye, Charles nevertheless remained socially awkward and emotionally immature, even as he appeared old before his time. Surprisingly, his parents acknowledged to authorized royal biographer Dermot Morrah that the Gordonstoun experiment had fallen short of their hopes, and that Charles was “a square peg in a round hole.” Morrah wrote in To Be a King, his 1968 book about Charles’s early life, that the school had driven the prince only “further in upon himself.” Well into his 60s, Charles continued to complain about the unhappiness he had felt at Gordonstoun. And as his cousin Pamela Hicks observed, “he can never leave anything behind him.”

Adapted from Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life, by Sally Bedell Smith, to be published this month by Random House; © 2017 by the author.