Tuesday 19 March 2024

Boarding schools have a devastating impact on society, says Charles Spencer / SAD LITTLE MEN by RICHARD BEARD

 


Boarding schools have a devastating impact on society, says Charles Spencer

 

Brother of Diana reveals he was sexually abused as a child at Maidwell Hall and that a nanny would beat him and his sister

 

Jamie Grierson

Sun 17 Mar 2024 17.26 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/17/boarding-schools-impact-charles-spencer

 

Charles Spencer, the younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, has said the brutalising effect of boarding schools on people who have come to power has been devastating for society.

 

Spencer was speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme after the release of his memoir, A Very Private School, in which he revealed he was sexually assaulted as a child at the boarding school Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire.

 

In an extract, the 59-year-old detailed the sexual assaults and beatings he experienced at Maidwell, saying they had left him with lifelong “demons”.

 

He said he was abused by an assistant matron at the school when he was 11, leaving him with such trauma that he self-harmed over the notion that she might leave the school.

 

Elsewhere in the book, Spencer suggested the impact of public school culture had made a difference to some of the people who lead the country.

 

When asked about this, he told Kuenssberg: “When it goes really wrong, as it did in Maidwell in the 1970s, you’re going to come out very damaged, and I know I did. And I actually say in the book, you know, to survive that, a small but important part of me had to die. And I think that’s true, you know, there was a softness that had to be trampled on, because otherwise it would be too painful.

 

“So if you extrapolate that and think of the damage it’s done to other people who have ended up in powerful positions – and I’m talking over the centuries, not just contemporaries – they have to have had their view of what’s acceptable behaviour, what other people mean in terms of empathy, they have to have been brutalised.

 

“And I cannot think that all of the effects of these schools can have been good for society, or for the empire, or whatever we were in control of at the time. I think it’s been devastating in some ways.”

 

In the wide-ranging interview, he revealed that his and Diana’s childhood nanny would “crack our heads together” if they misbehaved, with a “cracking crunch” that “really hurt”. He said it emphasised the “disconnect of parents”, but he did not criticise his mother and father, saying it had been “normal” to “leave it to the nanny to deal with”.

 

He claimed that another nanny punished his two older sisters by “ladling laxatives down them”.

 

In his memoir, Spencer described reliving his experiences at boarding school as “an absolutely hellish experience”, writing: “I’ve frequently witnessed deep pain, still flickering in the eyes of my Maidwell contemporaries.”

 

On the matron, Spencer wrote: “There seemed to be an unofficial hierarchy among her prey … She chose one boy each term to share her bed and would use him for intercourse.

 

“Her control over mesmerised boys was total, for we were starved of feminine warmth and desperate for attention and affection.”

 

As a result of the experience, Spencer said, he lost his virginity to an Italian sex worker at the age of 12.

 

“There was no joy in the act, no sense of arrival, no coming of age,” he wrote. “I believe now that I was simply completing the process set in motion by the assistant matron’s perverted attention.”

 

He also said he was beaten with the spikes of a cricket boot by the school’s Latin master.

 

In a statement, Maidwell Hall said it was “sorry” about the experiences Spencer and some others had had at the school.

 

“It is difficult to read about practices which were, sadly, sometimes believed to be normal and acceptable at that time,” it said. “Within education today, almost every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s. At the heart of the changes is the safeguarding of children and promotion of their welfare.”


SEE ALSO: 

https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-guinea-pig-1948-clip-on-bfi-blu-ray.html

 

https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-clique-of-pseudo-adults-britains.html

 

https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-riot-club-official-trailer.html


In 1975, as a child, Richard Beard was sent away from his home to sleep in a dormitory. So were David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

 

In those days a private boys' boarding school education was largely the same experience as it had been for generations: a training for the challenges of Empire. He didn't enjoy it. But the first and most important lesson was to not let that show.

 

Being separated from the people who love you is traumatic. How did that feel at the time, and what sort of adult does it mould?

 

This is a story about England, and a portrait of a type of boy, trained to lead, who becomes a certain type of man. As clearly as an X-ray, it reveals the make-up of those who seek power - what makes them tick, and why.

Sad Little Men addresses debates about privilege head-on; clearly and unforgettably, it shows the problem with putting a succession of men from boarding schools into positions of influence, including 10 Downing Street. Is this who we want in charge, especially at a time of crisis?

 

It is a passionate, tender reckoning - with one individual's past, but also with a national bad habit.

 

© Richard Beard 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

 

Listen on your Booktopia Reader App

 


Richard Beard Q&A: ‘This is a very private-school idea – you just have to live with social injustice’

Author Richard Beard.

Author Richard Beard. Photograph: Urszula Soltys

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0u-1O8sYoxjXRP0qkEL9ImB_5ecE0AcmsJKwqemcxWrUANP_bHQOPYnmM#Echobox=1628416840

 

How has your schooling affected you?

My relationship with my own emotions was distorted from the moment it was taken as gospel truth that it was good for me to be separated from my family aged eight. You’re doing something that feels terrible, but everyone tells you it’s good. That leads to further dislocations, which allow individuals to become fractured, divided, and very good at leading a double life.

 

Boris Johnson and David Cameron attended similar schools at a similar time. How do you think it shaped them?

In so many ways. Almost every day I read the paper and think, yes, I recognise that. Recently, it’s the idea that you just have to live with stuff – with Covid, for example. Just as at school you just had to live with your parents leaving you behind, with the daily authoritarianism, with not going home for weeks at a time. This is a very private-school idea – you just have to live with social injustice.

 

There’s also the extensive training in dissembling and putting up a front. I don’t get any sense of authenticity from them, or genuine empathy. At some point, you start feeling sorry for them.

 

Do you feel sorry for them?

Well I hope it’s there in the title of the book – it’s not just the pejorative name-calling of sad little men. I know that they had to create their own coping mechanisms. And those coping mechanisms are what you see in these behaviours, which do seem to me to start out from the sadness of little boys out of their depth, but who learned early in their lives how to hide that.

 

Johnson has been described as confusing and contradictory, but you say that’s precisely what boarding school produces… shapeshifters with fluid identities.

That connection is made quite clearly by John le Carré – he often links this type of education to the vocation of being a spy. I do think it’s different now, because we’ve grown up through a period of peace and prosperity, and we haven’t had that tempering that previous generations have had, when confronted by major world events – being goaded into seriousness, but also into empathy for other people in the country.

 

You’re pretty unambiguous about the hellishness of boarding school. Why do parents send their children to these places?

It’s not hellish on a daily basis. On the surface, it seems quite the opposite, especially to the parents. When you see the tennis courts and the swimming pools it looks fantastic. The problems are underneath the surface.

 

But a lot of these parents have gone through it themselves, so they are well aware of the damage it creates…

If you’re now in a position to send your children to private school, it means you either managed your inheritance wisely or you’re a QC or an investment banker or the prime minister and you can say: “What a great success!” It’s very hard to fight back against that surface, against that lie.

 

Did you ever consider sending your kids to private schools?

No. I wanted the kids to be coming home at night, and I wanted them to be in co-education.

 

Did that extend to sending them to state schools?

I lived abroad a lot, where they were in lycées, French-speaking schools. In this country, to keep the language going, that meant finding what’s now a free school, so a state school but not a classic comprehensive.

 

Do you feel that by writing this book, and facing up to your schooling, you’ve exorcised it in some way?

I think facing and unpacking a past life is the antidote to some of its effects. But I was deeply formed by these experiences. The lies create habits for life which are, in many cases, detrimental to living well, and that takes a long time to undo.

Interview by Killian Fox

 

‘Everyone who was not us, a boy at a private boarding school from the late 70s to the early 80s, was beneath us’: Boris Johnson, centre front, at Eton. Photograph: Richard Shymansky from News Syndication/Gillman & Soame UK Ltd / News Licensing

 

Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t fit to run our country

Boris Johnson, centre front, at Eton.

 

Our elite schools foster emotional austerity and fierce clique loyalty. Here a privately educated writer of the prime minister’s generation reveals the lasting damage public schools do

 

Scroll down for a Q&A with Richard Beard

Richard Beard

Sun 8 Aug 2021 07.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0u-1O8sYoxjXRP0qkEL9ImB_5ecE0AcmsJKwqemcxWrUANP_bHQOPYnmM#Echobox=1628416840

 

I had a feeling I couldn’t immediately place. I wanted to go out but wasn’t allowed. Shelves were emptying at the nearest supermarket and instead of fresh fruit and vegetables I was eating British comfort food – sausages and mash, pie and beans. My freedom to make decisions like an adult was limited. I wondered when I’d see my mum again.

 

March 2020, first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back at boarding school. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves in charge.

 

My first night at Pinewood school was two days after my eighth birthday in January 1975. A term earlier David Cameron had left his family home for Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire, while also in 1975, at the age of 11, Alexander Johnson was sent to board at Ashdown House in East Sussex. This means I know how two of the past three British prime ministers were treated as children and the kind of men their schools wanted to make of them. I know neither of these men personally but I do know that they spent the formative years of their childhood in boarding schools being looked after by adults who didn’t love them, because I did too. And if the character of our leaders matters then I’m in possession of important information.

 

At the age of 13, after prep school, Cameron and Johnson progressed to Eton. I went on to Radley College near Oxford. The exact school picked out by the parents didn’t really matter, because the experience was designed to produce a shared mindset. They were paying for a similar upbringing with a similar intended result: to establish our credentials for the top jobs in the country. We were being trained for leadership, or if not to lead then to earn. The most convincing reason to go to a private school remains to have gone to a private school, with the prizes that are statistically likely to follow.

 

It is noticeable, and often noticed, that something immature and boyish survives in men like Cameron and Johnson as adults. They can never quite carry off the role of grownup, or shake a suspicion that they remain fans of escapades without consequences. They look confident of not being caught, or not being punished if they are. Cameron has his boyishly unlined face and Johnson his urchin’s unbrushed hair, and his arch schoolboy’s vocabulary.

 

But what kind of boyhood was it, in our paid-for rooms in those repurposed mansions that housed our schools? What of the distant past still works in us as adults and can we pass on the harm to others? Are we the right people to steer the country, either clear of trouble or in the direction of sunlit uplands? The answer to these questions depends on lessons learned at an impressionable age. Unless, of course, we learned nothing. And no one pays hundreds of pounds a term, even in the late 70s, to learn nothing.

 

I remember the feeling of desolate homesickness: abruptly, several times a year, our attachments to home and family were broken

 

One of the first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night, and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the little children they really were – in name-taped pyjamas with a single soft toy (also name-taped), blubbing themselves to sleep and wetting their beds.

 

I remember the feeling of desolate homesickness: abruptly, several times a year, our attachments to home and family were broken. We lost everything – parents, pets, toys, younger siblings – and we could cry if we liked but no one would help us. So that later in life, when we saw other people cry, we felt no great need to go to their aid. The sad and the weak were wrong to show their distress, and we learned to despise the children who blubbed for their mummies. The cure was to stop crying and forget that life beyond the dormitories and classrooms existed. Concentrate instead on the games pitches and the dining hall and the headmaster’s study. By force of will we made ourselves complicit in a collective narrowing of vision.

 

In Richard Denton’s BBC documentary Public School, filmed at Radley College in 1979, the Radley headmaster Dennis Silk tells a daunted audience of new boys that they’re about to pick up “the right habits for life”. Among these habits was cultivation of the stiff upper lip. We could be ourselves – homesick, vulnerable, lovelorn and frightened – or, with practice at putting up a front, we could pretend to embody the idealised national character. We could perform being loyal and robust and self-reliant. Wearing a commendably brave face we could distance our feelings, growing the “hardness of heart of the educated”, as identified by Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class.

 

This wasn’t healthy. In her 2015 book, Boarding School Syndrome, psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien describes a condition now sufficiently recognised to merit therapy groups and an emergent academic literature. The symptoms are wide-ranging but include, ingrained from an early age, emotional detachment and dissociation, cynicism, exceptionalism, defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism, compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional misdirection and stiff-lipped stoicism. Fine fine fine. We’re all doing fine.

 

We adapted to survive. We postured and lied, whatever it took. Abandoned, alone, England’s future leaders needed to fit in whatever the cost, and we were not needy, no sir. We could live without, and we convinced ourselves early that we had no great need of love, in either direction. Acting like a grownup meant needing no one.

 

Discouraged from crying out for help, frightened of complaining or sneaking, we developed a gangster loyalty to self-contained cliques, scared to death of being cast out as we had been from home. Of being cast out again. In the absence of family we kept in with our chums, but also ingratiated ourselves with the teachers: God knows what might come next after abandonment if we kicked up a fuss.

 

From the teachers we learned about mockery and sarcasm as techniques for social control, with our boy hierarchies regulated by banter, ranging from a sharp remark to a knuckle in the crown of the head. Attack was the best form of defence, and ridicule was honed as a deeply conservative force, controlling by means of fear, either of being the joke or of not getting the joke. There was plenty of fear to go round. The author Paul Watkins, in his memoir Stand Before Your God, remembers at Eton the huge amount of energy, in the time of Cameron and Johnson, that went into “teasing and ignoring people”. “I felt a harshness that I’d never felt before.”

 

George Orwell, during his time at prep school, remembers being ridiculed out of an interest in butterflies. The banter that day must have been immense. Nothing was sacred, and once we found out what another boy took most seriously we were ready to strike, when necessary, at its core. Our most effective defence was therefore to act as if we took nothing very seriously at all.

 

We learned to stay detached, some would say cold – “You had to have a coldness in yourself,” writes Watkins. “Of all the rules I learned and later threw away, this one I kept. If you did not know it, you could get hurt very badly at a place like Eton.”

 

Later in life, these unwritten school rules could infect every type of relationship. Prematurely detached from our parents, we had a preference for abandoning others before getting abandoned ourselves. Jump ship. Also, to be on the safe side, keep an emotional reserve.

 

Prof Diana Leonard, who established the Centre for Research on Education and Gender at the University of London, published research in 2009 showing that boys from single-sex schools were more likely to be divorced or separated from their partner by their early 40s. And mental health professionals, like Schaverien, are convincing in their explanation that those years of disconnection mean we expect too much, our fantasies rarely surviving contact with reality. Making up for lost time, for example, we want sex but come to resent women for our weakness for sex – as adults, erotic dependence becomes a new form of vulnerability to be doubted and denied. Why couldn’t women be more like our boyhood Athena posters?

 

At school we tried not to feel foolish, angry, loving, stupid, sad, dependent, excited or demanding. We were made wary of feeling, full stop. By comparison, children not blessed with a private education must be fizzing with uncontrolled emotions and therefore insufferably weak. How did the schools teach us this sense of superiority? The language was always chipping away – in the documentary Public School the boys casually refer to “the lower orders”, as if to a species difference, reptiles considering insects. In our isolation we learned that we were special. Everyone else was less special and often stupid – school was where we went, aged eight, to learn to despise other people.

 

Cameron, Johnson and I absorbed attitudes once familiar to Orwell, who was confronted with some realities about his Eton education when documenting the living conditions of working-class households in Lancashire and Yorkshire. “Common people seemed almost sub-human,” Orwell writes in The Road to Wigan Pier. “They had coarse faces, hideous accents, and gross manners… and if they got half the chance they would insult you in brutal ways.” Alien and dangerous, the working class evoked “an attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred”.

 

Anyone underestimating the durability of this divide should consider the evidence of the Radley College swimming pool, circa 1980. A story used to circulate that the pool was a yard shorter than a standard pool, so that no local swimming club would want to use it for practice or competitive events. Christopher Hibbert’s history of Radley, No Ordinary Place, corrects this myth: the pool was deliberately designed a yard longer. The same reasoning applied. The locals shouldn’t be encouraged. Typically, in a summer term ending in early July, we didn’t swim in it much anyway.

 

In the early 80s, Radley’s non-teaching staff were known as College Servants. We had cleaners, chefs, groundsmen, bit-part players and comic mechanicals. They represented the proles, the plebs, the oiks, the yokels, the townies and the crusties (a term Johnson continued to use 40 years later). Our special language had its range of words to set these unfamiliar animals apart, meaning people not like us, and if you didn’t know the language you were probably one of them. As Orwell doubles-down in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The proles are not human beings.”

 

In his autobiography, For the Record, David Cameron admits that about Brexit he “did not fully anticipate the strength of feeling that would be unleashed both during the referendum and afterwards”. Of course he didn’t. Strong feelings were involved, and also the common people. He was floundering in a pair of blind spots, to emotion and the British public. He gorged on a double helping of ignorance undisturbed since his schooldays.

 

Looking now at old school photos, I find I can count the darker faces on the fingers of one hand. At Pinewood we had two brothers recently arrived from Nigeria, and the son of an Indian doctor who lived not far from my parents in Swindon. The only other dark faces we saw were in our Saturday-night films, in Zulu and Young Winston, where savage natives were subdued by the civilising force of white British warriors. Did that turn us into racists? Yes, I think it did.

 

In the holidays I’d go to the post office on Victoria Road, to collect Mum’s child benefit, and when the British Asian post office worker stamped the book I was immensely pleased with myself for acting as if he were just like anyone else. At Radley one boy in our year was possibly mixed race – we didn’t really know but mocked him for it anyway – and the two of us played in the same rugby team. In my end-of-year sports reports I make feeble gags about Brownian motion and his “blacking” of other players. I don’t even know what that means, beyond the racial slur. The supervising editor of the school magazine, a teacher, saw nothing in need of editorial attention. And why would he? The racism was institutional – with the evidence currently available online in the school’s digitised archive.

 

Girls, swots, oiks, wogs and queers were synonymous with weakness, to be joshed without mercy by the strong

I find the son of the Indian doctor on LinkedIn – Ravi is successful in business, though he asks me not to use his real name. Whatever I think about private schools and racism, what does he think? Initially he’s cautious. He writes back that “frankly there are some very bad memories of that time that are very painful”.

 

As first-generation immigrants, he tells me later by phone, his Indian parents wanted to give him a good education. Overall, Pinewood was “pretty decent”; his public school less so. He asks me not to name it.

 

“I was called a wog and a Paki. There was the National Front.”

 

In his school as at mine, public speaking was encouraged – good for the confidence – and one boy was “passionate about the National Front”. Ravi regrets sitting in the audience and at the end of a hate speech clapping politely, demonstrating the good manners he’d been educated to value. There was also racism from the teachers, in remarks that casually encompassed Ravi’s father and family.

 

Our schoolboy vocabulary, with its stock of disparaging words, expanded to include everyone who deserved our scorn, like poofs and homos. As long as we weren’t girls, swots, oiks, wogs or queers, we could be jolly decent chaps. All those other categories were synonymous with weakness, to be joshed without mercy by the strong. And if a boy struggled with the spontaneity of banter, he could memorise jokes about the Irish, who were unbelievably thick. We laughed at anyone not like us, and the repertoire on repeat included gags about slaves and nuns and women hurdlers. One September, after a boy came back from a holiday in Australia, we had jokes about Aborigines. We internalised this poison like a vaccine, later making us insensitive as witnesses to all but the most vicious instances of discrimination. Everyone who was not us, a boy at a private boarding school from the late 70s to the early 80s, was beneath us. Obviously, we too were a minority, but of all the minorities we were the most important. Of course we were. We’d end up running the country.

 

Single-minded ambition became acceptable as a way of deadening the self. Get elected president of the debating society. Edit the school magazine. Lobby to become head of house, head prefect. Join a milkround company, get a column on a national newspaper, write a book. For the worst afflicted, at the high end of the greasy pole, become prime minister. The drive for success was an ongoing plea for attention and affection, a condition described by Lucille Iremonger in her book Fiery Chariot as the Phaeton complex. In Greek mythology Phaeton was a frustrated child of the sun god Helios, who insists on driving his father’s chariot just for one day. He crashes the chariot, turning much of Africa into desert.

 

According to Iremonger, a hunger for power is the tragic fate of children abandoned by their parents, and she developed her theory from a study of British prime ministers between 1809 and 1940. No prizes for guessing where most of them were educated, and many former boarders can be recognised as Phaetons.

 

In his book The Old Boys, David Turner has the statistics for the “highly disproportionate share” of public school alumni in the top jobs of the UK. These figures come from 2014, to include boys at school at the same time as me in their middle-aged professional prime: “seven in 10 senior judges, six in 10 senior officers in the armed forces, and more than half the permanent secretaries, senior diplomats and leading media figures”. Seventeen out of 27 members of Johnson’s full cabinet in 2020 went to private school. Of the more visible recent political buccaneers, leading English private schools have sent out Rees-Mogg, Hunt, Mitchell, Cash, Redwood and Cummings: English boys with English minds.

 

A follow-up report by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission, Elitist Britain 2019, paints a mostly unchanged picture. Private schools account for nearly 70% of the judges and barristers in the country. To this list can be added more than 50% of bishops and ministers of state and lord lieutenants and the England cricket team, these doors not even half open to anyone else.

 

Johnson was any boy who started boarding in 1975, only more so, because not growing up was openly a part of his act

When deciding on a private school education for his children, my dad must have envisaged useful connections for life that seem psychologically plausible as well as professionally desirable: a segregated elite united by a common uncommon experience. Cameron surrounded himself with like-minded people – of the six men who worked on the Conservative Party Manifesto in 2014, five had been to Eton. The other was an old boy of St Paul’s. Sonia Purnell, Johnson’s biographer, says Johnson doesn’t have friends – his younger brother was best man at his first wedding – but he knows what kind of person makes him feel comfortable. He remains loyal to boys’ school boys like his friend Darius Guppy (who famously asked Johnson for the address of a fellow journalist so he could have him beaten up) and Cummings, rebels but public school rebels. Or loyal at least for a while. Once Johnson and Cummings fell out, each was right to be frightened of the other. Their schooling was more powerful in them than any self-projection as icon or iconoclast: they knew how to hurt their own.

 

In her biography, Purnell calls Johnson “an original – the opposite of a stereotype, the exception to the rule”. Not quite. He was any boy who started at a private boarding school in 1975, only more so because not growing up was openly a feature of his performance. He flaunted shamelessly what the rest of us tried to conceal: he was chaotic, unformed, cruel, slapdash, essentially frivolous. When he messed up he was just a boy, with his boyishly ruffled hair, and expected to be excused.

 

Cameron likewise turned his back on the mess he’d made with the serenity of a public school boy whose ancestors had been public school boys too. Between the lectern and the door of yet another temporary home Cameron hummed a happy tune, pretending to be fine. All is well, thank you and goodnight. Possibly he’d been a bit naughty, but luckily England was arranged in such a way as to protect his own best interests. Of course it was. Boys like us had arranged it.

 

In the end we can’t take anything seriously.

 

In earlier generations, Orwell and others like him were exposed by war and other calamities to a seriousness that grew their stunted selves and tempered the isolated and ironic cult of an English private education. They were goaded by events into compassion, so that sooner or later, Orwell believed, even in “a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly”, England would brush aside the obvious injustice of the public schools.

 

The wait goes on. Maybe in 40 years’ time, assuming the country survives Brexit and Covid, a more enlightened nation might look back on Cameron and Johnson as a self-erasing supernova, a final bright flare and a burning out, the dying of the public school light in a burst of corruption and incompetence so spectacular the glimmer will be visible from space.

 

Anyone betting on that outcome, at any point in the past 600 years, would have lost.

Monday 18 March 2024

Silence and Secrets: Charles Spencer’s Very Private School / ‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse


Interview

‘I don’t think I developed emotionally’: Earl Spencer on the pain of boarding-school abuse

Tim Adams

The brother of Diana, princess of Wales, talks about his difficult decision to write about being physically and sexually abused and the resistance he faced from members of his own class

 




Tim Adams

Sun 17 Mar 2024 14.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/17/earl-charles-spencer-a-very-private-school-interview

 

It was one thing writing about the abuses of his childhood, Charles Spencer tells me, with half an ironic laugh; it’s quite another talking about them with strangers. When we meet in an office at his publisher, he is reeling a bit from this new fact of his life. The more sensational chapters of his memoir of a deeply traumatic five years at the Northamptonshire prep school Maidwell Hall had been splashed all over the previous week’s Mail on Sunday. The following morning, he had been a guest on Lorraine Kelly’s mid-morning TV sofa, raking over the painful detail of that long-buried past for the viewers. As a result, he says, apologising if he seems a bit strung out, he’s had two days of thumping headaches followed by vivid nightmares.

 

The early responses to his book about being sent away from home to be brutalised at school at eight years old have been instructive. On the one hand he’s had a mailbox of emails from fellow survivors, praising his courage in speaking up for the generations of “privileged” schoolboys and girls who, like him, suffered serial beatings and sexual assault in the closed world of boarding schools well before puberty.

 

On the other he’s experienced the default prurience of the tabloid press, which picked over his book for clickbait (ever since Spencer stood up in the pulpit at Westminster Abbey and blamed redtop journalists for hounding his sister, Diana, to death, he seems to have been considered fair game). The Sun, for example, thought the most appropriate headline for a book about the lasting harm of childhood trauma to be “Di Bro’s sex at 12 with hooker”. The food writer William Sitwell, a near contemporary of Spencer’s at Maidwell and Eton, meanwhile, blithely dismissed the substance of the memoir in two columns in the Telegraph. In the first, Sitwell branded Spencer a traitor to his class: “One of their own – an earl, uncle to princes, seriously landed, stately housed, replete with a deer park, fine furniture and fabulous paintings – is dishing the dirt from within…” he wrote. In the second, he argued, bizarrely, that “Spencer has not suggested that, beyond corporal punishment, he or anyone else was a victim of abuse”.

 

While professing to have long avoided any column bearing Sitwell’s byline, Spencer shakes his head when I mention that sentiment. His book was written precisely to challenge that stubborn, unhinged belief among his peers that school regimes featuring daily beatings and endemic paedophilia “never did me any harm”. (Reading Sitwell’s piece I was reminded of an observation by Alex Renton, the journalist who has done much in recent years to shed light on the history of abuse at many of Britain’s most exclusive private schools. Soon after Renton revealed the worst of what had happened to him as a child, he ran into an old school friend at a party: “Don’t stand near Alex,” the friend warned others present, “he’ll put his hand down your trousers.”)

 

The affecting power of Spencer’s account lies in its description of the way predatory violence was entirely normalised in his school years. Maidwell Hall was presented to wealthy parents as a kind of term-time paradise for young boys; once the family had departed down the gravel drive, Spencer writes, it became a hellish place. The awful wound of homesickness was preyed upon by fearful teachers who bullied and thumped and caned vulnerable boys, or insisted on “special” naked swimming lessons; that was exacerbated by a senior matron obsessed with humiliating bedwetters, and a junior matron who molested 10-year-olds and had sex with 12-year-olds after lights out. “I realised very early on that this was a horribly ugly subject,” Spencer says. “And I made a conscious effort to make the book as smooth a read as possible. As a result every now and then the reader might tread on a landmine and think: what the hell was that?”

 

The idea that such a thoroughly sweet boy has had to live with that for the last 50 years is appalling to me

 

Ritual beatings were a timetabled part of the day. Every evening after tea, a senior boy would read out the names of small boys who had committed some minor transgression of opaque rules. They would be sent to line up outside the headmasters’ office, inside which he would require boys to drop their trousers and then choose the implement with which to inflict punishment, slipper or cane or switch. Some of the contemporaries who have shared their stories with Spencer still have the physical scars on their backsides to this day, 50 years on.

 

In the book, he says he first started to properly reflect on the psychological damage of those years in his 40s, after his second marriage had broken down, and he was questioning, in therapy, the roots of his destructive behaviour. In talking about his parents’ broken marriage and his abandonment issues, he mentioned in passing his time at Maidwell Hall. The therapist asked Spencer to expand and he found he couldn’t stop. He’s now approaching 60 and has just become a grandfather for the first time. I had a sense, reading the book, I say, that the impetus for telling this story was that it was now or never.

 

“I suppose it was,” he says. “I started considering writing it when I was 54. I’d been accumulating memories from the school as my own therapy, but then I started to hear from other people who had gone through much worse than me [fellow pupils he met by chance, or contacted specifically] and that activated a form of survivor’s guilt. I had been quite mainstream in the school, academically OK and decent at sports. But it was a ruthless place, very Lord of the Flies. And these people who were truly brutalised were the quiet blokes who weren’t in the sports team and were sitting at the back of the class. It sounds ridiculous – I was a very small child – but I felt guilty that I hadn’t defended them more.”

 

The identities of his fellow pupils are protected in the book (the historian in him has given each of them the name of one of King Charles I’s regicides). He names the teachers he knows to have died, including Jack Porch, the headteacher who “retired early” at 51 for unspecified reasons.

 

“He was a fascinating case of a very intelligent paedophile sadist,” he says, “because he’d constructed a system that fed him little boys’ buttocks every night. He had this ability to present to parents a sort of charm and humour. But he was deeply deviant. A chilling presence. I received the audiobook [of A Very Private School] today and I listened to the first bit again. The preface is about this incredibly sweet kid being systematically made to feel like nothing every day. I started crying, actually. The idea that such a thoroughly sweet boy has had to live with that for the last 50 years is appalling to me.”

 

In among the pictures in the book, there is one of the moment his life shifted, as he waits to be driven to Maidwell for the first time. He stands in the stiffest possible jacket, a mini-me of his father, the eighth earl, behind a large trunk with his name written on it. His big sister Diana sits on the trunk smiling – she is not to return to boarding school until tomorrow. Their nanny stands by looking anxious. Before he went away Charles acquired the nickname Buzz, from his estranged mother, because he had “all the happy effervescence of a bee”. His book is dedicated “to Buzz”, the boy he believed to have died at the moment he was handed over to the care of Porch.

 

One question the book raises is: what can the parents who sent their seven- and eight-year-old sons to these institutions have been thinking? One answer is that they bought into in that curiously British notion that young boys, particularly the children of privilege, must get used to pain and suffering, must break their attachment to their mothers and homes in order to mature – to embark on their destiny as leaders of men. Another is that the parents wanted them out of the way to pursue their social lives (the priorities of some are described here as “horses, dogs, children”, in that order). Spencer’s book dwells on the choices of his own parents, without condemning them. Why is that?

 

“Well,” he says, again with that half-smile, “among the plethora of psychotherapies that I’ve undergone, one of them has been understanding your parents and letting go of any blame. So that probably comes across. My mother had a very tricky mother herself. No doubt these things can get passed down generationally. And she was so young. She went straight from being head girl of a private school to marrying this very eligible chap, and a mother at 19. And she couldn’t navigate the demands of that.”

 

Frances Spencer’s response was to divorce her husband to marry Peter Shand-Kydd and – having lost custody of her four children – including two-year-old Charles, to divide her time between the Scottish island of Seil and a sheep station in New South Wales. He recalls visits to Scotland to stay with her in the holidays, where he’d help out in the newsagents she owned in Oban. “She wasn’t at all a mollycoddling mother, but she was fun at parties,” he says. “Her life ended with intense Catholicism; she spent her time helping children visit Lourdes every year. And at the same time, I think, there was massive guilt, which manifested itself through alcoholism. She died young, at 68, and the last decade of her life was one of sadness. So, no, I’m not angry with her.”

 

People who went to these schools at that time simply had to become desensitised in order to survive

 

There is a sad moment in the book when the young Spencer escapes from some of the attentions of his schoolmasters to be alone in a favourite place in a wooded part of the school grounds; he sees his father drive past in his Rolls-Royce, returning from some lunch or other. The ludicrously large family seat at Althorp was only a few miles from Maidwell, but he felt like it could have been on another planet. Once he seriously considered shooting himself in the foot at the end of a holiday, to avoid returning to school. Could he not have told his father how desperately unhappy he was?

 

“It never occurred to me,” he says. “And I have to say, it never occurred to any of the people I spoke to.” He supposes they didn’t want to disappoint their fathers. “At the end of the term, I’d come home with a report, and he read it with me. And that was our 15 minutes talking about school. He was very much a product of his class.”

 

With his own seven children, Spencer has tried to be far more present in their education. They all went to day schools, though his two sons boarded at their own choice in their late teens. He does the school run when he can with his youngest daughter, Charlotte, who is 11, chatting with her in the car, “trying to keep tabs on what’s happening,” the stuff he feels he missed out on.

 

For all these efforts at normality, there are, inevitably, several moments in the book when you recognise him still to be imprisoned by his class, as much as his memories of school. He is at pains throughout to say he is well aware of his privilege, and that children in other circumstances clearly suffered far worse than anything he experienced or can imagine. Still, for example, he includes without much of a caveat the comment by one of his teachers to the idea that he would be better off in a “normal” school: “You are too precious a flower” for that (the implication being that you may live in daily terror of being assaulted by various members of staff here, but that clearly pales beside the horrors of being educated by the state).

 

The ground rules of our interview are that Spencer will not answer any questions about the royal family – knowing of old that any quote he gives will be immediately stripped of the context and beamed around the world. I don’t therefore get to find out, for example, whether he sees this book as a companion volume to his nephew Prince Harry’s Spare – a cry for help from within the walls of inherited privilege, a demand that things are done differently. In his book’s preface he includes this: “It’s a fact that many of the leading figures in British public life today – from prime ministers to royalty – have received just such a private, boarding school education. While some thrived under benevolent headteachers, others have been wounded by wretched treatment during formative years. Some of that poisonous legacy they have unwittingly passed on to society.”

 

He was a contemporary, among others, of Boris Johnson, whose schooling followed a similar path. Does he see these traits, for example, in him? “I can’t actually drill down on specific individuals,” he says. “But I think it has to be a logical fact that people who went to these schools at that time, of which Maidwell was one, simply had to become desensitised in order to survive.”

 

He casts his comments in the book mostly in the past tense – things have undoubtedly improved since the 1970s, but of course 70,000 families still make the choice to send their kids away at a young age.

 

“I do know a few people who have been through this more recently,” he says. “One who is only now 25 or so. He’s a wreck and he told me his life was destroyed by having to go to one of these schools at seven. He writes to his father saying just please apologise, but the father cannot apologise because that choice was part of his entire code. A lot of families ‘with an old name’ might be on their financial uppers these days, but still for them to say, my son goes to a very smart school, gives them social validation; they are prepared to put up with whatever their child is putting up with, to be able to drop that at a dinner party.”

 

I wonder, when he was writing his book, whether any part of him felt like a “class traitor”, as some have suggested?

 

“One thing,” he says, “is that school was very, very clever at inculcating thoughts. One was that telling tales was a capital offence. And there were times when my schoolboy conscience felt that strongly when I was writing. Of course, logically, that’s ridiculous. But it goes deep. Quite a lot of people, most of whom didn’t go to Maidwell, have sidled up and said: ‘You should drop this book, because you’re feeding the enemy, giving ammunition to people who are against what we do.’”

 

He welcomes the fact that the current Maidwell Hall – where boarding fees can exceed £30,000 a year – has in light of his book opened an investigation of its past and invited former pupils to come forward. It is not alone. Renton has compiled a database of abuse allegations against 490 independent schools and more than 300 named teachers.

 

I wonder if Spencer had qualms about naming the teachers who had died. Did he expect to hear from their families?

 

“I thought long and hard about that,” he says. “And in the end I thought, actually, they deserve to be named. Nobody’s going to pin the crimes of the father on the children or the grandchildren. The point is, very sadly, their fathers did terrible things.”

 

One of the teachers who singled him out at nine years old for particular violence – a man he used to fantasise about meeting up with later in life in order to return a beating – is still alive. He calls him Goffie in the book (another of Charles I’s regicides). He has sent him a copy: “He’s very old now. But I just want him to know.”

 

At one point he thought of bringing a legal case against the assistant matron who molested him and other boys in her care. Why did he decide not to do that?

 

“I thought about it when all the cases against Catholic priests happened in America,” he says. “But I think what she did was so troubling to me that it’s sort of beyond me to cope with it.” Those disturbing assaults on his innocence, interactions he found impossible to process or understand, led to him using saved pocket money to visit a prostitute while on holiday in Italy with his family when he was 12. He believes those experiences damaged for ever his subsequent capacity to form mature relationships.

 

“I got a private detective involved at one point, to find her,” he says. “She’s been quite careful to stay off the internet, married a couple of times, had a kid. There is nothing that the law could do that would make it OK for me. Having said that, if others now come forward, I would certainly validate what they say.”

 

He has been married to his third wife, Canadian-born Karen Villeneuve, the chief executive of a charity that protects vulnerable children, for 13 years. Does he now look back and see the damage of his childhood as a factor in his catalogue of earlier failed marriages and relationships?

 

“Put it this way,” he says, “I don’t think I developed emotionally in those early years as would have been the case in a loving home with actively loving adults.” Many of those contemporaries, who like him “have demons sewn into the seams of our souls” as a result of their experiences at schools like Maidwell, bear out that belief, he says. “There is a lot of addiction and depression. The wife of a great friend of mine at Eton – who surprisingly emigrated to Australia – got in touch with me when news of the book came out to say: ‘I just want you to know, he went to a place like Maidwell and had the most appalling time. He’s had terrible depression over the years but I’ve never seen him so happy as when he heard you were bringing a book out about all this stuff.’ Someone else I know,” he says, “was a guy who was terribly bullied, three years older than me. And he wrote to me a while ago and said: ‘You writing this book has let me tell my wife for the first time what I went through at Maidwell. We’ve been married for 30 years – and we just spent the last hour crying together.’”

 

For himself he suggests that the catharsis has probably been delayed. He has found the experience of revisiting all this history for publication “quite nightmarish”, but is proud that it is done.

 

“Like many of my contemporaries, I used to drink way too much,” he says. “Not on a dangerous level, but certainly to anaesthetise things. I haven’t had a drink since January.”

 

I mention to him something that Billy Connolly once told me in an interview about coming to terms with the memory of sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of his father: “It’s not called emotional baggage for nothing – it means you can put it down if you want to.”

 

“I totally agree with that,” he says. “I do feel I might put it down now.” You sense he believes he owes it to long-lost Buzz, to at least do that for him.

 

A Very Private School by Charles Spencer is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply


Sunday 17 March 2024

Kate's photoshop mishap is 'naivety bordering on foolishness' |


Where is Catherine, Princess of Wales? The internet is rife with ‘Katespiracies’

 

The royal’s absence has led to a proliferation of conspiracy theories after announcement of a mysterious abdominal surgery

 

Erum Salam

Fri 15 Mar 2024 15.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/15/where-is-princess-catherine-conspiracy-theories

 

It seems that everyone has recently become fixated on one question: where in the world is the Princess of Wales?

 

We’ve long known the world is watching the royal family, but the visible absence of Catherine has sent social media and US news outlets into a tailspin – driving even those ordinarily not interested in the royals to pay attention.

 

The latest saga surrounding the royal family began when Kensington Palace announced on 17 January that the future queen consort was due for a mysterious abdominal surgery at the London Clinic. The world was told that she would be in the hospital and out of commission for “10 to 14 days” – therefore out of the public eye until Easter. Prince William postponed some engagements that same day.

 

Then a series of coincidences made internet sleuths suspicious.

 

Victoria Howard, a royal commentator and founder of a website devoted to the royal family called The Crown Chronicles, offered some clarity on the princess’s recent accidental entrance into the global spotlight.

 

“The length of Kate’s absence is unusual which suggests a significant procedure, but the lack of details is what is driving the rumor mill,” Howard said. “For those abroad, who don’t have a royal family and liken them more to celebrities, they can’t quite understand why the details aren’t being shared.”

 

Shortly after, on 5 February, it was announced that King Charles was diagnosed with cancer. Now, two leading figures in the royal family have health issues around the exact same time but only one of them has been seen.

 

“There is a bit of a vacuum in the royal family right now, because of both ongoing health issues, so this lack of news and public visibility of royals is driving some of this narrative,” Howard said. “The timing is unusual being so close together but for me it’s an example of how the offices do not communicate that well, and equally their different approaches with the level of detail provided.”

 

But Howard cautioned coincidences can happen and that “health often doesn’t align with your schedule”.

 

“As Kate is not monarch there is no cause for concern. Charles has counsellors of state who can be appointed and step in should he be incapacitated,” she said.

 

Still, rumors are swirling and many outside the UK, particularly in the US, have become obsessed with this Middleton mystery.

 

Theories, or “Katespiracies”, about the princess’s whereabouts range from Kate being revealed as the newest contestant on the TV gameshow The Masked Singer to getting a Brazilian butt lift (or some other cosmetic work).

 

Howard called some of these conspiracies “quite frankly ludicrous”.

 

“To not be away for so long due to real health issues would be highly risky and take advantage of public goodwill,” she said. “No sensible communications team would allow them to do that.”

 

Middleton was reportedly seen on 4 March in a car with her mother, but the poor quality of the photo has not convinced some of her fans.

 

On 10 March, things reached a bit of an apex when it was revealed that a family photo of Catherine and her three children posted by the princess on her Instagram account was Photoshopped. Various discrepancies in the image led to even more speculation, prompting major news agencies such as the Associated Press to pull the photo from distribution “because at closer inspection, it appears that the source had manipulated the image in a way that did not meet AP’s photo standards”.

 

This proved cataclysmic for gossip, which seemingly pushed the princess to issue a rare statement explaining the situation: “Like many amateur photographers, I occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused. I hope everyone celebrating had a very happy Mother’s Day. C”

 

The metadata of the file shows that the image was processed in Photoshop first on 8 March at 9.54pm local time and again on 9 March at9.39am local time, per an ABC News report.

 

The very next day on 11 March, William and someone who appeared to be Catherine were seen leaving Windsor Castle together in a car. But faces were obstructed so it’s not clear if it was actually the princess.

 

Still, the princess’s spokesperson doubled down on Catherine’s perfectly normal condition: “We were very clear from the outset that the Princess of Wales was out until after Easter and Kensington Palace would only be providing updates when something was significant.”

 

The spokesperson underscored the princess was “doing well”.

 

The US, which has no royal family, is giving the princess the “celebrity-in-crisis” treatment previously seen with the likes of Britney Spears or Amanda Bynes. If not by those on social media like TikTok, the media coverage of Catherine’s every move has shown no signs of letting up.

 

US news outlets like the Washington Post, ABC News and NPR have even weighed in on the altered photo debacle. The Los Angeles Times likened Kate and sister-in-law Duchess of Sussex’s drama to that surrounding Diana, Princess of Wales, who dominated international news headlines in the late 80s and 90s.

 

The royals expert and former BuzzFeed News reporter Ellie Hall told Nieman Lab last week that she believed the obsession with Catherine stems from “distrust” people have of the royals – in no small part to Diana’s legacy.

 

“People have started to really distrust not just the royal family – as an institution/bureaucracy, not necessarily the individual members – but the reporters and outlets that cover the royal family,” Hall said, adding: “A lot of people still hold a grudge against the royals because of Princess Diana and wonder about the circumstances of her death. I also feel like a lot of this distrust stems from what Harry and Meghan have said since leaving working royal life. Their descriptions of a back-stabbing, machiavellian organization in interviews and Harry’s memoir Spare have definitely made an impact on the public’s perception of the monarchy and the royal reporting beat.”

 

So, what’s really going on and who has the answers?

 

Howard noted that “Kensington Palace has been very reactive”, which is unusual because they mostly don’t “comment or respond in other cases”. She says it’s “the wrong approach if they wanted to ease people’s worries” and “doing so shows real concern about the conversation and indicates their level of panic essentially”.

 

Perhaps the former Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said it best in 2020, pointing out: “It is unusually difficult to judge the reliability of most royal reporting because it is a world almost devoid of open or named sources.

 

“So, in order to believe what we’re being told, we have to take it on trust that there are currently legions of ‘aides’, ‘palace insiders’, ‘friends’ and ‘senior courtiers’ constantly WhatsApping their favourite reporters with the latest gossip. It has been known to happen. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. We just don’t know.”


Conspiracies and kill notices: how Kate’s edited photo whirled the rumour mill

 

With Princess of Wales out of sight for health reasons, impact of altered family photo has been magnified

 

Esther Addley

Fri 15 Mar 2024 15.13 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/mar/15/conspiracies-and-kill-notices-how-kate-edited-photo-whirled-the-rumour-mill-princess-of-wales

 

On Tuesday, as the crisis in Gaza continued, turmoil built in Haiti and Joe Biden and Donald Trump were confirmed as their parties’ presidential candidates, the White House press secretary was asked a question by a journalist that caused her, briefly, to laugh.

 

“Does the White House ever digitally alter photos of the president?”, Karine Jean-Pierre was asked by a reporter.

 

“Why would we digitally alter photos? Are you comparing us to what is going on in the UK?” she replied. “No – that is not something that we do here.”

 

When Kensington Palace released an apparently candid photograph last weekend of the Princess of Wales and her children, timed to coincide with Mother’s Day, it no doubt expected the usual warm reception, perhaps with a few approving front pages.

 

One week on, it is fair to say things have not gone to plan. After multiple clumsy edits to the photo were identified, five leading photo agencies issued an almost unprecedented “kill notice” of the “manipulated” image.

 

Since then, not only the White House press corps but large sections of the world’s media have been fascinated by the photograph – and what it may say about the princess, who has been recovering from surgery – putting the royals at the centre of a dangerous crisis of credibility.

 

If you’re caught being untruthful once, after all, why should anyone ever believe you? In Spain, some outlets have repeated claims, rubbished by the palace last month, that the princess is in a coma. On US talkshows, longstanding if highly libellous rumours about the royal marriage, similarly denied, are being openly aired and mocked.

 

And on social media, needless to say, the unfounded conspiracies are wilder still. Kate has had a facelift, or she is in hiding, or has been replaced by a body double. Most are easy to dismiss, but when even the ITV royal editor, Chris Ship, one of the select handful of “royal rota” journalists who are briefed by the palace, posts a tweet that begins: “I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist but …”, the Firm undeniably has a problem.

 

Who would be a royal? According to the palace, lest we forget, the 42-year-old mother of three has undergone major abdominal surgery and is not well enough to appear publicly. When the operation was first revealed on 17 January, Kensington Palace said she was not expected to make any appearances until at least Easter. That, they insist, has not changed. So why the frenzied conspiracies?

 

Perhaps because Catherine remains media catnip, and is incredibly important to the royal public image; three months without her was always going to be a challenge. Things would arguably have been more manageable were it not for the unhappy coincidence of King Charles’s announcements of his prostate treatment and cancer .

 

While Catherine had requested privacy over her diagnosis, the king and his Buckingham Palace press team opted to be more open, though the type of cancer has not been revealed. Most were happy to accept this as the princess’s right, yet the fact the king has remained somewhat visible, even while undergoing cancer treatment, made the absolute silence from Catherine all the more evident.

 

What tipped online mutterings into febrile speculation was when the Prince of Wales pulled out of the funeral of his godfather on 27 February, citing only a “personal matter”. The Mother’s Day photo was evidently an attempt to settle the mood; instead, its inept handling turned an uncomfortable drama into a full-blown crisis. Even a brief apology, signed in Catherine’s name, did not help. Either palace advisers had not grasped the gravity of their mistake, or – just possibly – the royal couple, so protective of their children’s privacy, were resisting their guidance.

 

Can they recover from it? Only if they change tack, says Emma Streets, an associate director at the communications agency Tigerbond who specialises in crisis PR. There remains a lot of empathy towards the princess, she says, adding: “I think [the episode] proves that she’s only human. But it’s crucial that the palace do not repeat a [mistake] on this scale.”

 

They will have to provide some form of update on the princess’s health by Easter, says Streets, whether or not Catherine is well enough to resume normal public appearances. “I think they really need to maintain that timeline to avoid any further controversy. So the pressure is on for the comms team to handle that without putting a foot wrong, and really, meticulously, plan.”

 

Streets says the royal family’s long-practised strategy of “never complain, never explain” is outdated. “That doesn’t work today, given the speed that this story will spread online, and I think that massively needs addressing from a strategic point of view.”

 

That view is echoed by Lynn Carratt, the head of talent at digital specialists Press Box PR, who says she has been “racking my brains” trying to understand why Kensington Palace did not simply release the undoctored image. “They could have put this to bed straight away,” she says.

 

“There needs to be an overhaul of their comms strategy and a bit of honesty and trust with the press. I kind of understand why there isn’t – but they need a whole new approach to PR, to bring it into the modern world of the media.

 

“We’re not just talking about print press and broadcast, when it’s now social media and the digital space where people are consuming the news. It’s very different, and you need to do PR differently for that space.”


Pranksters dupe Tucker Carlson into believing they edited Princess of Wales photo

 

Josh Pieters and Archie Manners posed as ‘George’, a Kensington Palace employee, in interview with former Fox News host

 

Richard Luscombe

Sat 16 Mar 2024 16.58 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/16/pranksters-dupe-tucker-carlson-kate-middleton

 

Pranksters claiming to be a Kensington Palace employee fired over the Kate Middleton edited photograph fiasco say they duped former Fox News host Tucker Carlson into interviewing them for his streaming show.

 

In a video posted on X that has already received more than a million views, Josh Pieters and Archie Manners explained how they concocted a story about being released by the Prince and Princess of Wales for “not doing a good enough job” in manipulating a photograph of Middleton and her children that has stoked an international furore and endless conspiracy theories.

 

The “disgruntled former employee” act was apparently convincing enough to fool production staff at the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN), who invited Manners, posing as the royal couple’s former digital content creator, to a London studio and an interview with the rightwing personality.

 

“That was great, and really interesting too. I didn’t expect to be as interested in it as I was because you told a really great story,” Carlson tells Manners after listening to a made-up tale about how the infamous photograph was actually taken by Middleton’s uncle in December, and that a Christmas tree in the background had to be edited out.

 

The pranksters, whose YouTube channel Josh & Archie showcases a series of celebrity hoaxes, told Deadline they “stroked Carlson’s ego” by offering their story as an exclusive because “mainstream media in the UK wouldn’t touch it”.

 

They convinced TCN researchers of their authenticity by creating a fake contract of employment that featured the words Every Little Helps, the motto of the British supermarket chain Tesco, in Latin on a Kensington Palace crest, and a clause in which the royals reserved the right to “amputate one limb of their choosing” if Manners failed a probationary period.

 

“If Tucker Carlson’s people read this, why on earth would they let you on the show?” Pieters says in the video.

 

Manners told Deadline that following the interview, TCN told him it would be aired early the next week, but that he and Pieters decided to break cover now to avoid misinformation being broadcast to the network’s 530,000 followers on X.

 

“We didn’t want to cause any more rumors, that are not true, to go out to lots and lots of people,” he said. “We just didn’t want to be too worthy about that in our video.”

 

In the interview, Carlson questions Manners about the photograph, which was recalled by several photo agencies when numerous anomalies were discovered. A subsequent palace statement explaining Middleton was experimenting with editing “like many amateur photographers do” failed to offer reassurance, and set in motion a chain of headline-dominating events that even prompted questions at the White House.

 

“When William and Kate put that photo out, they knew that photo was taken at Christmas, and they put it out alongside a statement wishing everyone a happy Mother’s Day, and told the world that William took it,” Manners tells Carlson.

 

“He didn’t take it. Gary Goldsmith [Middleton’s uncle] took it.”

 

In their initial emailed approach to TCN, the pair posed as a palace employee named George, who said he was “about to be scapegoated” for the furore and “in the process of being let go”.

 

“I am all too aware of the Royal Family’s ability to throw people like me under the bus in order to protect their reputation,” the email states.

 

The Guardian has contacted TCN for comment.