Boarding schools can do tremendous harm. Charles Spencer’s bleak memoir proves it

Charles Spencer being interviewed on ITV’s Lorraine show, 11 March 2024. Photograph: Ken McKay/ITV/Shutterstock

Charles Spencer was just eight when he was sent away from home. Even before being packed off to boarding school, he was largely raised by nannies, in the remote aristocratic manner of the time. Lonely and vulnerable at his prep school, Maidwell Hall, which he describes as rife with schoolboy bullying and savage ritual beatings from masters, he was easy prey for the false comfort offered by a matron who he says sexually abused him from the age of 11. Later, he lost his virginity at 12 to a sex worker.

It’s the kind of story that if he’d been born to a struggling single mother on a council estate would arguably have prompted a speedy referral to social services, and when the now Earl Spencer started writing out these memories he suffered a breakdown. But the resulting memoir, A Very Private School, is about more than one personal tragedy or one school. This bleak educational culture, he argues, was the petri dish in which so much of Britain’s current ruling class grew during the 1970s and 80s; a regime originally designed to cauterise young men’s emotions before sending them off to exercise power over far-flung corners of the British empire, and whose influence seemingly lingered well after the empire itself was gone.

“Logically, it has to scar them and their outlook on life and the world – what matters and what doesn’t matter; who doesn’t matter,” he told the Times, adding that growing up in a dog-eat-dog world “probably makes a lot of these leading figures in our society quite cruel about their judgment of what’s right and wrong”. Though some former pupils did thrive under benevolent headmasters, he writes, others emerged damaged or even potentially damaging.

Spencer has ducked questions about which camp Boris Johnson, his good friend at Eton, falls into. No interviewer has been so impertinent, meanwhile, as to ask about the implications for the family his sister, Lady Diana Spencer, famously married into, though the current king is known to have been bullied so badly at Gordonstoun – where he was reportedly sent in hopes of toughening him up – that Prince Harry in his own memoir describes his father murmuring ominously that “I nearly didn’t survive”. (Prince Harry and Prince William were nonetheless still packed off at seven to prep school and then to Eton, where Harry struggled academically and a teenage William had to ride out the mortification of his mother telling all to Panorama.) Still, the broader point remains troubling.

Boarding school syndrome – the idea that being sent away to school at a young age can trigger emotional problems long into adulthood, from depression or difficulty forming relationships to addiction and eating disorders – is still a relatively new concept, and arguably fuzzy round the edges. Setting aside the question of historical abuse, recent research from Profs Penny Cavenagh at the University of Suffolk and Susan McPherson at the University of Essex suggests that parenting styles and a family’s capacity for “emotional expression” may be more influential than the school itself – which may help explain why some boarders seemingly thrive and others don’t. Feeling fundamentally loved and secure, in other words, probably helps children cope even when apart from their parents.

Schools, including Maidwell Hall, say the kind of abuse Spencer describes is a thing of the past. Even if that is true and Cavenagh and McPherson are right that so-called boarding school syndrome actually has a lot to do with home, it’s hard not to wonder whether it’s prone to run in families, as a certain kind of emotional stiffness learned young is unwittingly handed down from one generation to the next.

Despite the horrific abuse Spencer describes, some may still struggle to muster much sympathy for boarding school survivors – at least not compared with other victims of historical scandals in institutional care, or with children separated from their parents by war and conflict. It’s easier to think of overgrown public schoolboys at Westminster or in the City as gilded wrecking balls, the carelessly overconfident products of a system whose greatest gift to its pupils “is that of shamelessness”, as the poet Musa Okwonga – who got into Eton on a scholarship – writes.

Yet it is possible to be both damaged and damaging; for awful childhoods to produce adults who have sadly learned not to feel too much, or not to show those feelings, and who may then – if they are already wrapped in privilege – be able to rise up through the ranks of public life oddly desensitised to their impact on other people. Damaged people, as the novelist Josephine Hart famously put it, are dangerous: they know how to survive. But at whose expense, exactly?

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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