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.
