Princess Diana’s brother Earl Spencer has revealed that he was sexually abused when he was 11 by an employee at his boarding school.
In an extract from his powerful memoir published exclusively in The Mail on Sunday, Earl Spencer describes in devastating detail the sexual assaults and horrific beatings he suffered at Maidwell Hall and the damage they caused throughout his life.
The 59-year-old reveals how a predatory matron assistant, who he describes as a “voracious pedophile”, preyed on him and other young children, grooming them and then abusing them in their bedroom beds at night.
The book also details how John Porch, the “terrifying and sadistic” principal of the exclusive prep school, inflicted brutal beatings, apparently deriving sexual pleasure from the violence.
The torment Earl Spencer endured during his five years at Maidwell Hall led him to deliberately make himself ill, a shocking precursor to Diana’s later struggles with bulimia.
Earl Spencer is resoundingly frank about how his horrible school days left them scarred
Earl Spencer with Princess Diana. The torment he endured during his five years at Maidwell Hall led him to deliberately make himself ill, a shocking precursor to Diana’s later struggles with bulimia.
And he believes the emotional damage caused by his time at the Northamptonshire school had an effect on his first two marriages.
The companion, who attended Maidwell from the ages of eight to 13, said he hopes his unflinching account will shed light on “the way things were too often” in English private schools in the 1970s and bring “closure” to colleagues who suffered abuse. .
READ MORE: In the harsh male environment of a boarding school, where I missed my mother terribly, I fell easy prey to the matron’s calculated display of feminine warmth, says EARL SPENCER
“I have often witnessed a deep pain, which still flickers in the eyes of my Maidwell contemporaries,” he writes. “Many of us leave Maidwell with demons sewn into the seams of our souls.”
In his memoirs, Earl Spencer reveals:
- After being abused by the midwife, he wanted “full sex from too early an age” and lost his virginity at age 12 to a prostitute in Italy;
- The pedophile cynically manipulated her emotions, making him so distressed at the thought that she might drop out of school that he self-harmed by cutting himself with a razor;
- The school’s violent Latin teacher, Henry Maude, hit him with the toes of a cricket boot and knocked another boy unconscious;
- Maude selected boys for nude swimming sessions, during which the teacher would be visibly sexually aroused;
- Earl Spencer became gripped with such “desperation” when returning to Maidwell after holidays that he regularly considered shooting himself in the foot with one of his father’s shotguns;
- Reliving Maidwell’s “casual cruelty” and “sexual assault” regime has been an “absolutely hellish experience”;
- He only fully understood the damage Maidwell caused him in his early 40s, while in therapy.
READ MORE: The beatings were brutal and sadistic… many of us left school with demons sewn into the seams of our souls, says EARL SPENCER
Maidwell Hall is ten miles from Althorp House, the Spencer family residence, where Diana is buried. A subsidiary of elite private schools including Eton and Winchester, it only admitted boys until 2010 and currently charges fees of up to £31,700 a year.
Excerpts from Charles Spencer’s new memoir are published exclusively in The Mail.
Earl Spencer, who joined the school in 1972, remembers how boys were told to refer to all female staff as “please” rather than “miss”, a rule intended to instil good manners, but which Earl Spencer considered it “deeply strange.” ‘.
At age 11, he was moved to one of two dormitories in the school’s attics, known as ‘The Uppers’, which were supervised by a matronly assistant who was 19 or 20 years old. The woman, whom she does not name, was preparing the children. her bringing them illicit snacks at night before sexually abusing them.
Earl Spencer describes how she first “kissed me on the lips” before “promoting me to the second rank of her reverse harem: those whom she touched intimately.”
“While we were kissing one night, she reached under my bedding, trailing her fingers teasingly, circling my stomach until they landed on what little an 11-year-old can muster,” he writes. “The first time she touched me there, she put my hand on her breasts and I could feel her heartbeat beneath her.”
Earl Spencer reveals how the woman chose one boy in each trimester for sex and cynically encouraged boys to compete for her affection, writing: “There seemed to be an unofficial hierarchy among her prey…she chose one boy in each quarter to share his bed and would use him for sexual relations.
Earl Spencer writes: “Her control over the hypnotized boys was total, for we were starving for feminine warmth and desperate for attention and affection.”
In the midst of the emotional turmoil caused by the abuse, Earl Spencer self-harmed when his matron suggested he might leave school to work in the Royal Navy. “I was so worried about losing her that I started cutting the inside of my arm with a razor.”
The young Earl helps tidy up after a sporting event in Maidwell in 1975.
Describing the misplaced euphoria he and other children felt when it was learned that she would be staying until the end of the year, he writes: “We jumped up and down, waving our arms in childish euphoria, not realizing that we were actually the victims”. of a voracious pedophile.
He says the men who found out what happened to him “at first” downplayed the abuse, saying he was “lucky.” But when he asks, how would they react if it was a 20-year-old man who sexually abused an 11-year-old girl? “Then they understand.”
The ordeal in Maidwell led Earl Spencer, at the age of 12, to pay a prostitute for sex while on holiday in Italy with his mother and stepfather. “I lost my virginity at age 12, driven by a compulsion,” he writes. ‘There was no joy in the act, no sense of arrival, nor of coming of age. I now believe that I was simply completing the process initiated by the matronly assistant’s perverted attention.
Earl Spencer has established that the matronly assistant, who would now be in her 60s, was married at least twice, but suspects she is now living abroad or dead.
The memoir is also a damning indictment of John Porch, Maidwell’s director from 1963 to 1978, who died in 2022 at the age of 95. Known as ‘Alec’ to his friends or ‘Jack’ to his students, Porch made brutal corporal punishment part of the school. routine, administering beatings with a shoe or a cane.
Earl Spencer describes a beating: “The blows were quick and sharp, with all the strength of his sinewy arm, before he shoved you away in disgust.”
One of Earl Spencer’s classmates recalled how during a spanking, Porch “reached out to touch the boy’s scrotum.” Another former student told how he “saw a big bulge in the front of Jack’s cavalry serges” while he was being whipped.
Earl Spencer reads about history during a school holiday, aged 12
Porch’s “main henchman” was a “vicious sadist” called Henry Cornwallis Maude, who later became High Sheriff of Kent and died six years ago.
Recalling an “unprovoked attack” by Maude when he was ten or eleven, Earl Spencer writes: “She sat down next to me, threw me over her knee, and hit me hard with one of my cricket boots, the metal nails of which “They pierced me.” The skin on my butt in a dozen places.
In desperation, Earl Spencer believed he had been sent to boarding school “because he had failed as a son.” Shortly after his ninth birthday in 1973, he began making himself vomit in what he now describes as “a desperate attempt to get someone adult to show me warmth and sympathy.” “It was an emotional cry for help.”
Earl Spencer recently told his family about Porch’s predatory matron and violent regime. In fact, it wasn’t until middle age that he realized the damage his time at school caused.
After the collapse of her second marriage in 2007, she enrolled in a therapy course where she revealed the abuse. She has considered taking legal action against the woman who ‘corroded my childhood’, only to decide that she would resurrect too many traumatic memories.
Last night, Maidwell Hall said it was “humbling” to hear about the experiences of Earl Spencer and other former students, adding: “We’re sorry this was your experience.”
‘It is difficult to read about practices that were, unfortunately, sometimes considered normal and acceptable at the time. Almost every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s. At the heart of the changes is the protection of children and the promotion of their well-being.’
The school said it was “dismayed” to hear of allegations of sexual abuse and had referred them to the “local authority designated official” who oversees such allegations. He urged anyone with similar stories to contact the officer or police.