Boys of Harrow School. (John Downing/Getty Images)
When I was a student at Harrow a little over 20 years ago, the other boys and I would gather each autumn for “Churchill Songs”. Held amid stained glass and gilded pillars in the school’s main hall, and named after the most famous Old Harrovian, the event was a programme of hymns to Harrow legend. Most famous is “Forty Years On”, a premonition of nostalgia for long-lost school days. But the one I remember best is “Stet Fortuna Domus” (“May the fortune of the house endure”):
“Pray, charge your glasses, gentlemen
And drink to Harrow’s honour!
May fortune still attend the Hill
And glory rest upon her!
The world outside is wondrous wide
But here the world is narrow
One magic thrall unites us all:
The name and fame of HARROW.”
By the time I first heard those words I could already see that the “name and fame” of the school concealed a grimmer reality. Its boarding houses, in which 60 or 70 boys lived away from their parents with barely any adult supervision, seemed to me cauldrons of dysfunction. At the state comprehensives I’d attended before going to Harrow on a scholarship, its rigidly hierarchical culture — in which older boys were allowed to discipline (or, in practice, simply bully) younger boys — would have been unimaginable. Few ever sought official protection against their tormentors, either because they accepted their predicament as normal or feared the consequences of being branded a “grass”. In one case during my time at Harrow, a group of boys in my boarding house dared to report a particularly vicious senior pupil for acts of appalling abuse. Rather than involving the police, the school — possibly mindful of press attention — simply expelled him, leaving him free to find victims elsewhere.
And yet, if at 16 I had been capable of absolute self-honesty, I would have admitted to myself an awkward fact: that whenever I heard “Stet Fortuna Domus”, with its rousing tune like the anthem of a Right-wing military junta, a part of me felt precisely the “magic thrall” it invoked. I may have decided, shortly after arriving at Harrow, that I was a socialist who’d like nothing better than to see the whole place burn down. But when I considered that every day I walked the same cobbled pavestones as Byron, Churchill, Peel and Palmerston, I couldn’t quite suppress a throb of pride.
But then, one of the remarkable things about schools like Harrow is their ability to command the loyalty of students they make thoroughly miserable. Just ask Charles Spencer, whose new memoir A Very Private School details the chilling physical and sexual abuse he endured at an exclusive “prep” school called Maidwell in the Seventies. Spencer portrays Maidwell — overseen by a cane-wielding headmaster and staffed by a sinister crew of paedophiles and predators — as akin to something from the darkest tales of that other graduate of boarding school trauma, Roald Dahl. When Spencer says that he and his contemporaries were scarred for life, it’s not just a metaphor: one of them, he reports, can still see the wounds from his headmaster’s cane on his 50-something-year-old backside.
However, perhaps the most startling line in the book comes in the epilogue where — having spent 270 pages detailing his memories of flogging, sexual assault and other “unfathomable sadistic rituals” — Spencer admits that when Maidwell opened a co-ed pre-school in the early Nineties, he promptly enrolled his daughters there. True, this was before he had an “epiphany” about how his school experiences had affected him and decided to emigrate with his children to “spare [them] a classically English upbringing”. Still, it may seem puzzling that it took entering therapy for Spencer to see just how deeply his time at Maidwell had damaged him.
Then again, the 9th Earl Spencer was merely continuing a centuries-long English custom whereby members of the ruling class suffer bitterly through their education only later to expose their own children to similar experiences. He can trace his own lineage of “forced abandonment” all the way back to 1716, when an eight-year-old John Spencer was sent away to Eton. “These psychologically hobbled victims would invariably perpetuate the madness,” writes Spencer of his ancestors, “sending them to the same schools they had hated in their time.”
What can explain this endless recycling of generational trauma? A clue may lie in psychological studies of “hazing” rituals in US campus fraternities, which have shown that the more upsetting and degrading they are, the more group loyalty they inspire. Victims are forced to rationalise their experience as meaningful trials imposed by a benevolent community. In the context of English boarding schools such cognitive dissonance can become a powerful catalyst for class solidarity.
This may help explain why, even after what he survived, Spencer flirts with the notion that it is not the practice of sending children away from home to sink or swim at boarding school that is damaging, but certain badly run institutions. The culture of bullying I witnessed at Harrow in the early 2000s belies his breezy claim that the system “evolved significantly” after he left. Even George Orwell, who nobody can lightly call naïve, ended his classic account of boarding school horror — written some 30 years before Spencer went to Maidwell — by claiming that “the present-day attitude towards education is enormously more humane”. Both Spencer and Orwell succumb to a comforting thought: surely, surely things can no longer be allowed to go on the way they used to?
And of course, since your childhood defines your sense of what’s normal, it’s extraordinarily difficult to see clearly how it may have (to quote a certain poet) fucked you up — particularly if virtually everyone else in your social world had the same experience. Neither your own upbringing nor your child’s is an experiment that can be run twice. And if there are negative outcomes, who’s to say they wouldn’t have occurred in different circumstances? If they had gone to a different school, would the boys who were abused in my boarding house have suffered the ordeal they did? Would the boy from my year who, in a tragic case that became national news, picked up a knife during a psychotic episode still be in Broadmoor, and would the teacher’s daughter he attacked with it be dead?
I’m not aware of any similar stories concerning my former peers at Cedars Upper School in Leighton Buzzard, who by comparison to the boys at Harrow struck me as paragons of mental wellbeing. But neither did any of them go on to become a prime minister or canonised poet, or to achieve the kind of distinction (if that is the word) enjoyed by more recent Old Harrovians like disgraced financier Crispin Odey or culture wars influencer Laurence Fox.
And this points to the simplest reason for the perpetuation of a system that, generation after English generation, has succeeded in producing one emotionally stunted winner after another: by some very obvious measures, it works. Some psychiatrists have come to speak of “boarding-school syndrome”, but none seems to have considered that the problems with intimacy and vulnerability it involves are symptoms not of the system’s failure but of its success. The traumatic lesson taught by these schools — that the world is divided into the strong who dominate and the weak who are dominated — is part of the syllabus.
One individual who came to feel nostalgic for school days he once hated was Winston Churchill, who during the Blitz in 1940 returned to Harrow, where the boys eulogised him with a specially composed verse of “Stet Fortuna Domus”:
“Nor less we praise in sterner days
The leader of our nation
And CHURCHILL’s name shall win acclaim
In each new generation
For in your fight to guard the Right
Your country you defend, Sir
Here grim and gay we mean to stay
And stick it to the end, Sir!”
I admit I am still moved by the story that, with the Luftwaffe circling overhead, the war leader wiped away a tear at those words. And I have always been impressed that, in a wonderfully Churchillian touch, the prime minister himself asked to amend the first line from “darker” to “sterner days”. What I didn’t notice until I looked up the words to quote them was the double meaning in that capitalised “Right”. It seems to me now that in these lines you can find the whole essence of the system Harrow belongs to. It’s all there: the stern spirit that impelled Churchill to stand firm against Hitler, and that has helped countless boarding school boys stick out their smaller ordeals; the identification of a new generation’s elite with the greatness of the past; and the elision of the school, the country, the “right” and the “Right”. Stet fortuna domus, indeed.
Harrovians still sing those words at the event that has been rechristened for Churchill every year, just as we did 20 years ago, and just as I have no doubt they will to the last syllable of recorded time. But can conditions in these schools possibly be as awful as they were in my day, or in Charles Spencer’s, or George Orwell’s? When, 40 years on, today’s pupils write their memoirs of boarding school, will they too reveal the scars the system imprinted on them? A part of me struggles to believe it. I am told that the top British private schools — booming, despite Labour’s plans to tax them, as the scions of a new global elite queue up to fill their places — now abhor bullying, competing with each other to recruit full-time counselling staff. Perhaps this makes sense: tomorrow’s ruling class will presumably need to wield power with a softer touch than those who ran the British Empire. And in any case: surely, surely things can no longer be allowed to go on the way they used to. Can they?
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SubscribeIs this a lament, a complaint or a celebration? The author writes beautifully and is obviously highly educated. I wonder what part he thinks Harrow had to play in his considerable accomplishments. Did he acquire a lot of knowledge there, and learn his many skills with words, or would he have become such a good writer wherever he had gone to school? He writes about his social and emotional experience but not his intellectual, academic and cultural progress. I’d like to hear about those too, perhaps in his own memoir.
MRH’s memoir Original Sins was published in 2022
Young impressionable children will have loyalty to whoever they spend most time with even if they are abusers. Are UK state schools that different from public schools? X
Probably the key difference is between day schools and boarding schools. At a day school, no matter how badly you are being bullied — or abused — you can go home at the end of the day. A boarding school, with its captive student body, is a perfect environment for an abuser, either among staff or students. That’s why so many historic cases of serial abuse took place at schools like Charles Spencer’s.
Even if a child isn’t being overtly bullied, it’s simply wrong for him or her to be sent away from home to be looked after by strangers from as young as 7.
I wonder if the day will ever dawn when Harrow – bending to the ignorant revisionism of the progressive Left – decides they ought no longer to promote their most celebrated old boy, Churchill?
I say this only because my own school, Sherborne, went through a similar process, though in reverse.
Sherborne, like all the great public schools, makes much of its history and heritage. The school has been on the same site since 705 AD, only Winchester can claim to be older, and much is made of their illustrious old boys – Alfred the Great being one of Sherborne’s earliest.
Yet whilst I was there (in the early to mid 80s) there was no mention of one particular Old Shirburnian, Alan Turing, who, one could argue, was second only to Churchill in their personal impact on our winning the 2nd World War. Turing was presumably an embarassment due to his post-war arrest and hounding for homosexuality, and the subsequent shame that led to his suicide.
Now, to prove their right-on credentials, the school flies a pride flag over the gatehouse in June each year and has pictures of Turing across a lot of their literature – and the school’s decades-long disavowal of him is never, ever to be mentioned.
Rising seas will leave Harrow and the hill it stands on twenty thousand leagues deep before it ever renounces Winston Churchill
I hope you’re right, but I fear your confidence may be over-optimistic.
Over the last 20 years, the publication of revisionist books that damn Churchill as a war-criminal and white supremacist, greatly outnumber those that see him as a (flawed) hero and national icon.
The BBC, the National Trust, most of our educational establishment, seem to dwell more on Churchill’s “problematic” attitudes rather than the more salient facts of his career and legacy – such as him standing agaisnt tyranny and rescuing Europe from fascism.
UHR,
Once again, my response to you has disappeared. I can’t think of anything in the post that might have transgressed any commenting guidelines, or got over the wellingtons of another posters.
I know I’m not alone in noticing that this keeps happening to posts more and more often.
Has the mod-bot become more censorious, or has there been a recent influx of weak-kneed commenters here who flag up anything with which they disagree?
Turing wasn’t actually that important. He’s been used as a personification of the dozens, if not hundreds, of boffins who cracked the codes. The pre-war work done by the Poles, including providing the Brits a copy of the Enigma machine that they produced, was far, far more important. But no one gives the Poles credit for anything. Just like Fermi was the driving force behind the A-bomb, but Oppenheimer gets a movie named after him. You Brits and us Yanks don’t like to share credit with the wogs.
There were very many people who played their part – in cracking Enigma and in laying the foundation for computing – but Turing was almost certainly the most significant single figure amongst them.
To suggest he “wasn’t actually that important” is a WILD underestimation of his contribution.
The most important among 100 isn’t actually that important. The other 99 would have gotten by without him. Even if Bletchley Park never existed, the Allies still win the war, at a moderately higher cost. The Germans and Japanese were outproduced far more than they were outsmarted.
Without Churchill, the UK almost certainly makes peace with the Nazis in 1940, and Hitler defeats the Soviets in turn. No way the US intervenes to save the USSR if the UK is at peace. The whole of world history revolved around Churchill.
“Without Churchill, the UK almost certainly makes peace with the Nazis in 1940.”
You open a real can of worms there. There were certainly those like Halifax who would have made peace, and those like Eden who would have resisted. Important figures on the Left would also have resisted.
Admittedly, the Anglophile AH, who wanted to be pals, would have offered exceptionally generous terms.
Thank God we weren’t obliged to put your theory to the test.
Sorry to correct you, but having been at Sherborne in precisely the same period, I can attest that there was a science lab named after Turing with his picture prominently displayed in the hallway.
Turing’s adulation by the Woking Class is less to do with his monumental achievement in WW2 than about his status as an LGBTQ++ saint.
King’s Canterbury is the oldest Uk school…and probably longest surviving one in the world…..https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King%27s_School,_Canterbury….x
The only good thing about Harrow is that on a very clear day you may just see Eton.
In my long years in business I have to report that I seldom came across an Old Etonian who could be relied upon.
Were they all Englishmen by any chance?
When your ‘trusted’ parents betray you by sending you away to boarding school at the tender age of 7 it’s unlikely any ex Etonian will have even the slightest concept of what trust or loyalty actually is.
Public schools can redeem themselves by turning out young people capable of reading, of writing coherently, of doing math, and of knowing something about the world around them. In a simpler time, this was called teaching.
A very interesting and worthwhile addition to the many articles it has become fashionable to write about the negative side of boarding, aka Boarding School Syndrome. A more balanced and more panoramic view of boarding school may be found in the book The Psychological Impact of Boarding School. Inter alia, it asks the ex-boarder to confront the question as to whether their education and subsequent life would have been better if they had gone to a day school. A mixture of answers may reasonably be expected.
However, the point is that life as a child is not perfect, and suggesting that all boarding is bad is like saying all weather is bad. Nevertheless, based on my own experience I would not send my children to boarding school before the age of 13. Almost all the horror stories I have read and heard (many of them!) relate to children of prep or pre-teen age.
Some of us had little choice but to board. Our families were running an empire- sadly no longer.
There must have been English Schools in the colonies. Why couldn’t the children of Empire be day student in Nairobi or Bombay?
Many did. Doon School. St Pauls Darjeeling. Welham. Loreto. La Martiniere. A whole network of public school oriented day schools which still exist.
As someone who attended both state, and public (i.e. private, fee-paying, boarding) school in the 70s/80s, here’s my insight. State schools tend to be huge. 500 in one year group – that’s more than my entire boarding school. And this year group is the administrative division of the school – the entirety of one’s social contact. In this amorphous mass children, being human, seek and strive for a hierarchy. In the absence of a recognised structure or differentiation such as monitors, prefects, 1st and 2nd eleven colours etc and the absence of streaming and academic social recognition, the hierarchy that spontaneously arises is of who can dominate, bully and influence the rest of the crowd. The bullying and harassment, the pressure to conform at my state school were ghastly. I cannot imagine the horrors that now exist when social media prevents one from being able to retreat from the mob at the end of the school day. Boarding school by contrast was a revelation. I’m not saying it was perfect, but one lived in smaller groups where character and quirks were acknowledged and even celebrated, where achievement on the pitch or in class were accorded recognition by the other pupils, and where one’s social circle was of mixed ages, allowing a natural hierarchy to develop without recourse to extremes of behaviour. I see something like this now in my small village, older children will to some extent look out for the younger. Perhaps it was like that in cities when they were more coherent and less atomised. I also think that my boarding school was more socially diverse than my provincial city state school back then, certainly more ethnically diverse. So please don’t leap to the divisive and harmful assumption that tales of public school abuse are or were the norm. The stories obviously have a ready audience amongst some who want their prejudices confirmed, but I suspect we thereby overlook many of the failings of our current state educational system, for political reasons as well as because it is too ‘normal’ to be noteworthy.
What a pathetic article … the current zeitgeist says public schools are bad …. Therefore write an article on why they are bad. I am proud of my public school education, I made great friends, had great teachers and played lots of sport. Also tradition is great and something you should be proud of. It’s the thing our enemies are trying to destroy and make us ashamed of.
Well said! I wholly concur with your take here!
You had a great experience, others had a horrible experience, others still had a mediocre experience.
Life is complex. That doesn’t make other people’s opinions “pathetic”.
Both my son and daughter went to a private school. One got a scholarship and boarded the other was a day pupil. Both of them look back on their schooldays with pleasure particularly the one who boarded. They both send their own children to private schools and the older ones are boarding and thoroughly enjoy it. Particularly during covid when schools were closed but boarders still boarded so they did not get screwed over the way other children did.
A friend who attended a comprehensive in Liverpool in the 1980s said there fights all the time. What saved him was that he trained Lau Gar Kung Fu.
Until 1965 British schools had boxing clubs. One way of sorting out bullying was three rounds of boxing under the supervision of the PT master ( ex Armed Forces PTI ) and then shake hands at the end.
Arthur Bryant, a Harrovian writes about the libertarian life of public schools in the late 18th and early 19th centuries where boys were expected to stand up and defend themselves. Byron a Harrovian and Shelley, an Etonian boxed.
Most of the men who saved us in WW2 boxed at school and/or work for example Lt Col Paddy Blair Mayne, Sergeant Dougie Pomford, Squadron Major Reg Seekings, Douglas Bader.