School Bully

Sunday National, Herald on Sunday, 23rd April 2022.

This week, the BBC has started re-running Ripping Yarns. First broadcast in 1976, the series was devised by Michael Palin and Terry Jones in the wake of their Monty Python fame.

The show parodies the cherished Edwardian and Victorian clichés of Boys’ Own magazines and novels. I remember reading a few of these – I think my dad’s dog-eared copies – as a kid. These patriotic – and sometimes extraordinarily racist – tracts valorised intrepid British explorers, the mysteries of the orient, and pith helmeted officers hunting down tigers in India.

The show’s first episode – Tomkinson’s Schooldays – is described as an “offbeat comedy which celebrates the role that pointless violence in public schools has played in our splendid nation.”

The everyday violence is comic and often surreal. As a new boarder at Graybridge school, Tomkinson is obliged to fight a grizzly bear. Detention is served over three weeks “in a sack on the school maggot heap.” First years jump around the school grounds with their legs tied together. Older boys have the privilege of hopping. “And there was St Tadger’s Day, when by an old tradition, boys who had been at the school for less than two years were allowed to be nailed to the walls by senior pupils.”

School Bully – played by a sleek Ian Ogilvy – is the domineering centre of the institution, equally feared by masters and students. Its tongue may be well in its cheek – but the show also has a more serious moral about the kind of institution it satirises. Tomkinson begins the story a sad and lonely boy. He endures the many indignities the institution inflicts on him – and concludes the drama by returning to serve as the new School Bully, showing an instant flair for the sadism involved. The circle of public school life is complete: victim becomes perpetrator.  

The show has uncomfortable echoes with another document published this week. Lady Smith has been working on the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry since 2016. Her brief extends to “living memory.” She has examined residential educational and caring institutions across Scotland. In the work already undertaken and published, she has unearthed episodes of physical, emotional and sexual abuse from every decade in every one of the institutions she has investigated.

Previous case studies have told grim stories of whisky priests, unchristian brothers, sisters without mercy, and daughters without charity. The judge has shone an unsparing light on the damage religious hypocrites, emotional inadequates, unqualified teachers, burned out sadists and sexual predators on generations of children.

Offenders were routinely able to shelter behind the swish of the soutane or the moral unimpeachability of a dog collar or the schoolmaster’s gown. Institutions, secular and religious, often chose to protect themselves and their reputations rather than the children in their care.

This week, Lady Smith published her findings concerning Loretto School in Musselburgh. Central to the revelations of what happened at Loretto was Don Boyd. Boyd is a filmmaker and attended the institution between 1958 and 1965. In 2001, he wrote an explosive article for the Observer, detailing the abuse he experienced at the hands of Guy Ray-Hills. Loretto allowed this “charismatic and flamboyant” French master and prolific sexual abuser to resign – with references. He went on to teach in other institutions.

His “blatant” sexual conduct “was widely known about by pupils.” Lady Smith held that “headmasters and other staff must also, or ought to have, known about it.” Protection of Loretto’s reputation was preferred to protection of Loretto’s children, she concluded.

As Boyd eloquently testified, the consequences this abuse had on his life – even his character – have been wide-ranging. As a result of this early abuse of trust, he says, “I have never trusted any man. I have regularly equated sexual conquest and promiscuity with a desperate need for emotional approbation. I have always romanticised deception and secrecy. I have always thought it was normal for people to lie and cheat.” 

The broader story Lady Smith’s report tells is one of the recreational violence of the upper classes. There was abuse by teachers, yes – but what is described across the 200 pages of the report is an institution structured around kids’ reciprocal, intergenerational and sanctioned violence towards one another. Tomkinson learned to be School Bully. Loretto’s boys learned to bully and be bullied. For decades, this hierarchy of power and dominance seems to have conditioned the lives of children sent there.

Many of the experiences related by ex-pupils and teachers to the inquiry are scarcely more surreal than those satirised in Ripping Yarns. Beatings were the norm for any disciplinary infractions until the late 1970s. Walking on the lawn? That’s three strokes of the cane. Eating out of doors? Six of the bamboo. “Snowballing within range of windows”? Another thrashing. How many clothes you were allowed to wear as this punishment was administered was also conditioned by the perceived seriousness of your crime.

These punishments were administered by a caste of prefects who acted with apparent impunity. Corporal punishment was still in use at Loretto until the end of the 1980s – it was the last private school in Scotland to phase it out. In the junior school, it only stopped in 1987.

“Even today I find it strange that prefects, who are only senior to you by three or four years, had the unchallenged authority to give you a severe beating if they so felt like it. It’s just a reflection on the way these places were run, all about power and control,” one former pupil reflected.  

Even the “games” were brutal. Another ex-pupil related the memory of a boy being “taped to a chair, a gorilla mask was put on him then he was pushed down a set of chairs. The fact he didn’t break his neck was a miracle.” Then there was “the Space Invader’s Game,” when you were made “to stand with your back against a wall. You had to then put your arms out to the side and do star‑jumps whilst they threw shoes and boots at you.” Another consisted of being “locked in a trunk” which was then thrown around the room.

Upper class solidarity – and how it is generated and perpetuated by institutions like Loretto – isn’t a quaint Victorian relic. Thanks to the Conservative Party, in Britain the children raised in these institutions still have an outsize impact on our public and political life.

George Orwell famously described his schooldays in a similar institution as “a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak” where “virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people—in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way.” This all sounds disturbingly familiar.

These findings should make us all reflect on violence – and its consequences. My dad attended one of the other boarding schools Lady Smith is currently investigating. And it has been striking how the succession of cruelty detailed in the judge’s findings have prompted him to re-evaluate his memories of the place. As a kid, his stories about life at Keil School in the 1970s felt difficult to distinguish between the real and the apocryphal.

There was the one about the schoolboy who got hold of his older brother’s car keys, took it for a spin, totalling the vehicle. The older brother took his revenge, the story went, by bundling up his brother into a laundry basket and chucking him off the school roof. It isn’t wholly clear whether he landed wholly undamaged on the ground – but like the Loretto boy in the gorilla mask – it seems like a small miracle he emerged unscathed.

When he was at Keil, my dad was actually crucified by senior boys. A broom handle was shoved through the arms of his blazer, he was wrapped up in Sellotape and left suspended mid-air from a rack of coat hooks.  He doesn’t remember this as a traumatic episode – the story was always told in jokey reminiscence. But the event begins to look rather different in retrospect.

Once again, Lady Smith’s findings still haven’t attracted half the attention they merit. The material collated by the inquiry is often hugely challenging. But it needs to be. These are difficult but compelling stories of the human experience, our past, and how we remember it. These case studies are written with a rare emotional intelligence and eye for human detail. The Scottish people would benefit from knowing more about them.

The media in this country goes doolally over mean tweets. It loses the place for days on end over confected nonsense, superficial controversies and imagined offences – and collectively shrugs and strolls on by when confronted with real, systematic evidence of wrongdoing. We prefer our scandals small and inconsequential.

This inquiry is an opportunity for people who have experienced unspeakable wrongs – and who’ve often lived with the burden of them alone, silently, secretly, for decades – to share what happened to them, and to be listened to, supported and believed. The very least we owe them is our attention.