Charles Spencer, the younger brother of the late Princess Diana, was only 8 when he was sent away to an all-boys boarding school in the English countryside.
Maidwell Hall catered to the upper crust of British society. But Spencer says what he experienced from the staff — blows to the head with a signet ring, a beating with metal-spiked cricket cleats and sexual abuse by a female caretaker — has haunted him for nearly 50 years.
“We were like prisoners,” Spencer said in his first interview since the publication of his new book, “A Very Private School.” “We were prey to very bad people’s worst instincts.”
Spencer attended the school until age 13 and went on to become a historian, podcaster and bestselling author. He said he felt compelled to write the book after several former students confided in him their dark memories and lasting trauma.
“Their stories are so devastating, and they are stories they’ve never told anyone,” said Spencer, who interviewed about two dozen former classmates who attended the school with him in the mid-1970s.
“As soon as I got stuck into the writing of it and interviewed more and more people, I realized that this was a serious scandal.”
A Maidwell Hall spokesperson said the school is taking Spencer’s allegations seriously and has reached out to the local authority charged with protecting children in the U.K., the local authority designated officer, or LADO.
“We will follow their guidance on what we do from this point,” the spokesperson said. “We would encourage anyone with similar experiences to come forward and contact the LADO or the police.”
Spencer, the godson of Queen Elizabeth II and the uncle of the future king, was born into privilege but still endured a complicated childhood.
He was 2 when his mother divorced his father and left the family home. His father was loving but withdrawn and seemingly depressed, Spencer said. Diana became his protector. On his first day at their local day school, little Diana insisted on leaving her classroom to check in on him.
“Four years after that,” he said, “I was 8 being sent off to a brutal place by myself, saying goodbye to Diana, who I grew up with, and my nanny, who was my mother substitute, standing by my school trunk, the big chest with all of my stuff in it.”
Spencer arrived at the school in 1972.
Maidwell Hall sits on sprawling, picturesque grounds in Northamptonshire, about two hours north of London. At the heart of the estate is a 17th century manor house. The roughly 75 boys at the school all lived on the grounds surrounded by stone walls.
Spencer soon learned that inside those walls, violence and cruelty reigned.
Boys were routinely beaten with canes for minor transgressions. Others were struck with heavy window poles, Spencer said.
It was not uncommon to see students in the communal shower rooms with split-open skin and bloody welts on their buttocks from the canings.
Spencer blames the school’s headmaster, John Alexander Hector Porch, for its culture of cruelty. Porch ran Maidwell the entire time Spencer attended (he is now deceased).
“The headmaster was, in my view, a paedophile and a sadist,” Spencer said. “And he staffed the school with either people who were going along with what he was doing or who were going to be mute about it.”
Porch would force the young boys to drop their pants and their underwear and lie across his lap to be whipped. He sometimes fondled their genitals in the process, Spencer said.
Many of the boys selected for the beatings were the same physical type, a “type that the headmaster seemed to like,” Spencer said.
The Maidwell Hall spokesperson described the experiences Spencer and other alumni had at the school as “sobering.”
“We are sorry that was their experience,” the spokesperson said. “It is difficult to read about practices which were, sadly, sometimes believed to be normal and acceptable at that time.”
Spencer acknowledged that he received an excellent education at Maidwell Hall, and, like many other students, he went on to attend two other elite schools, Eton and Oxford.
He emphasized that he isn’t opposed to boarding schools for older children, but he does believe it shouldn’t be legal to send children away to them as young as 8.
Spencer dedicates “A Very Private School” to Buzz, the nickname his family gave him before he went away to Maidwell, because he had the “happy effervescence of a bee.”
“That was the boy who had part of him snuffed out during those five years at the school,” Spencer said. “So I wanted to reconnect with the carefree happy little guy I was before I was sent to this place.”
He said he feels he’s well on the way to reclaiming that lost childhood.
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