Following Charles Spencer’s brave revelations in his book, Gaby Hinsliff confirms the psychological harm done to many children who attended boarding schools (Boarding schools can do tremendous harm. Charles Spencer’s bleak memoir proves it, 19 March). However, I was surprised to see the theory of boarding school syndrome called “a relatively new concept, and arguably fuzzy round the edges”. My book Boarding School Syndrome evolved from more than 30 years’ research. It is based on extensive data, accumulated from observations from clinical practice and from interviews conducted with people who boarded.
The term came of the need to name the identifiable psychological patterns in adults who sought psychotherapy, deeply traumatised by having been sent to boarding school at a young age. All of them, like Spencer, abandoned, bereaved and imprisoned for a percentage of their childhoods. Some were additionally traumatised by the brutal regimes and sexual abuse that we now know was rife. The research findings presented in my book are duplicated and confirmed by my colleague Nick Duffell.
This is now a term accepted by clinicians and the general public and used by journalists such as Alex Renton, the author of Stiff Upper Lip, and George Monbiot.
Prof Joy Schaverien
London
• Gaby Hinsliff is right to point to the horrendous abuses that Britain’s anachronistic boarding school system has permitted, but it’s tragic to get interested only when celebrities promote their memoirs. Since 1990, my colleagues and I have worked therapeutically with thousands of “boarding school survivors”. In many publications – for example, The Making of Them, we have highlighted the normalised neglect as the context in which such abuse regularly occurs and compensated survival is inevitable. The normalisation of neglect is the problem; and boarding itself is the trauma, whether ghastly things happened there or not.
Hinsliff references Penny Cavenagh’s idea that parental love can support boarders, but this is exactly why ex-boarders are so wounded. “If she loved me, why did she send me away?” is a bewildered inner torture I have heard expressed many hundreds of times, whenever an ex-boarder finally finds the courage to acknowledge their trauma. Parents never want to harm their children, but until our nation stops sacrificing normal childhoods for the hothousing of elites, the abuse will go on. And we’ll continue the production line of leaders who fail to understand vulnerable people because they had to disown their vulnerability by denying the loss of mummy at eight.
Nick Duffell
Psychotherapist, London
• I was sent away to boarding school in blustery north Wales at age eight. It was a sadistic, Dotheboys Hall establishment, as was Shrewsbury, where I went at 13. I quickly developed a survivor personality – in my case, I found that if you could make people laugh or simply ridicule them, they left you alone.
The most depressing aspect of “the old boys’ network”, which covers boys from all boarding schools, is that so many ex-pupils buy the whole package: “best years of my life”, “good thrashing never did me any harm”, “sending my boys there”, and if you suggest it might have been damaging, and stunted – or indeed cauterised – their emotional development, they become enormously defensive and won’t consider such ideas or any criticism of “the old school”. To do so would undermine the whole superior “jolly good show” carapace they have developed and now cling to.
Alan Ravenscroft
London
• I was sent to boarding school in 1970, age 10, for three years. And I’m a girl. Or I was – now I’m a 62-year-old woman and my time at boarding school was the most distressing of my life. The idea that only boys suffered horrible bullying and misery at these institutions is completely wrong. The teachers were mean and sadistic, and the girls were verbally and physically abusive. I was homesick, and with no contact with any family for weeks on end, I felt abandoned and unloved. It scarred me for life.
Heather Pitt
Rushden, Northamptonshire
• My work, some years ago, took me into both state and private, fee-paying schools. I still recall, at one boarding school, the trail of small boys calling in to one matron’s flat, on various spurious pretexts, but really just wanting some affection. I remember trying to explain to a sceptical colleague that many of the children at boarding schools, while financially privileged, were emotionally deprived. Perhaps the best example of this was a pupil whose parents couldn’t have him home for Christmas, as they were going skiing. He instead was invited to spend the holiday with one of the teachers and his family.
Fenella Barnes
Maldon, Essex
• Gaby Hinsliff says Earl Spencer connects the pain and damage powerful people from the upper and upper middle classes have inflicted on the rest of us to the pain and damage they suffered in boarding schools. In his book about such schools, Mark Stibbe accurately calls them “orphanages for the privileged”.
Hatty Calbus
Manchester
• It should it be stated for the record that not everyone who went to boarding school was rich and a member of the elite. Indeed, some children from outside the privileged circle had the misfortune of going to boarding school. Those of us who did survived, but we certainly didn’t have the money or connections to climb up into business and politics and resolve our issues by playing out our trauma on ordinary folk. Boarding school trauma is real, regardless of class. I am damaged but I’m most certainly not dangerous. And I’m most certainly not part of the elitist establishment.
Caroline Robinson-Day
Hertford
• Gaby Hinsliff fails to mention that there are those of us who found boarding school fabulous and made lifelong friends. She interprets thriving as a binary based on whether children feel loved at home or not, ignoring the use of boarding school to escape (whether intentionally or as accidental relief) dysfunctional relationships at home – how the middle classes go into care, as my friend (an ex-boarder) put it. I know I wouldn’t have survived another year at home with a mother who hated me and was cruel.
For me, boarding school was seven years of blissful escape. It met my educational, sporting and arty needs and was such fun. I am proud of how my class turned out – largely working for the greater good and social justice in some way – and grateful for the depth of friendship that endures. Next week I’m seeing my old roommate, who is still one of my best friends 36 years on.
Name and address supplied
• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
