The recent publication of Earl Spencer’s horrific account of abuse, A Very Private School, which detailed the quotidian cruelties meted out at Maidwell Hall, his independent prep school in Northamptonshire, has once again shone a harsh spotlight into the darkest corners of the British boarding school system.
He is not the only high profile person to have the courage to speak out about the beatings and sickening humiliations they suffered as young boys in our most elite educational establishments.
The broadcaster Nicky Campbell’s revelations in 2022 that he had been abused and witnessed abuse at Edinburgh Academy in the 1970s triggered an avalanche of similar memories from fellow former pupils of the prestigious Scottish school.
I know this because my husband, an erstwhile classmate of Campbell, was one of them.
I’ll never forget the day he opened up to me about what had happened and I shed tears for the sunny 10-year-old boy in short trousers, who loved Airfix models and playing Ancient Romans in his friend’s back garden.
He, like dozens of other former pupils, remembers being physically abused – psychologically harmed, permanently damaged – by John Brownlee, a former teacher and sometimes housemaster at Edinburgh Academy.
During a 20-year reign of terror, Brownlee regularly administered vicious beatings with a clacken, a heavy wooden sports bat not dissimilar to a giant spoon. This would be brought down with a golfer’s swing on little boys’ bottoms, three, six, even 10 times for infractions such as whispering in class, poor homework. Or at random. For no reason at all.
This was allied to a range of other means of terrorising the boys such as kicking them, shoving them down the stairs and even locking three boys up in a shed for two days. One child blacked out after being smashed over the head. A six-year-old had a garden hose pushed into his back passage by Brownlee as a punishment for bedwetting.
I can talk about this now because on Wednesday a three-week long procedure called an examination of facts, which took place at Edinburgh Sheriff Court, came to its conclusion.
No trial could take place after Brownlee, 89, was formally excused due to his advanced dementia. Instead, a sheriff presided, and concluded that Brownlee had conducted a systematic campaign of violence and torture against children as young as eight over two decades.
My husband was among those who stood in the witness box for 45 minutes telling the hearing about the hurt and fear he had endured in his six years at the school. The sheriff described Brownlee’s behaviour as “extreme criminal bullying” and found he had committed 31 charges of assault and one charge of cruel and unnatural treatment.
Afterwards the Edinburgh Academy Survivors’ Group declared “justice has been done” and Campbell said: “Today, I have been a 10-year-old boy again, I have been weeping in my wife’s arms. Those memories of him are still with me, they come to me in the night. They are with others too.”
My husband feels a sense of catharsis mixed with deflation that Brownlee will go unpunished. But he is relieved that decades of hurt and shame were disinfected by sunlight.
His healing can now finally begin. But at least five other former Edinburgh Academy staff are facing charges in connection with historical abuse at the school.
This harrowing story of gratuitous violence and vicious sadism in our schools is far from over.
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