Diana’s brother Earl Spencer reveals he was sexually abused at school aged 11 as he opens up on trauma in new memoir
The Earl also details the vicious beatings the school's headmaster dished out to pupils
PRINCESS Diana’s brother Earl Spencer has revealed he was sexually abused at school aged 11 in a new memoir.
Details of the shocking sexual assaults and violent beatings he suffered at Maidwell Hall boarding school have been published in his upcoming biography.
Earl Spencer, now 59, tells how an assistant matron, who he dubs a “voracious paedophile”, preyed upon him and other boys by grooming them and going on to abuse the in their dormitory beds at night.
He also describes the “terrifying and sadistic” headteacher John Porch inflicted brutal beatings on the pupils, seemingly getting sexual pleasure from doling out the violence.
The suffering the Earl endured during his five years at the prep school led him to deliberately make himself sick.
His sister Princess Diana would later struggle with bulimia.
Many of us left Maidwell with demons sewn into the seams of our souls
Earl Spencer
He believes the damage he suffered while a pupil at the Northamptonshire school between the ages of eight and 13 had an impact on his first two marriages.
In extracts published by the , he writes: “I’ve frequently witnessed deep pain, still flickering in the eyes of my Maidwell contemporaries.
“Many of us left Maidwell with demons sewn into the seams of our souls.”
Maidwell Hall, is just 10 miles from Althorp House, the family seat of the Spencers and where Diana is now buried.
The school sends many of its pupils to elite private schools, such as Eton and Winchester.
Fees are currently as much as £31,700 a year.
In his book A Very Private School he says he attended from 1972 and tells how the boys were told to refer to the female staff as “Please” rather than “Miss”.
The aim was to instil good manners but Earl Spencer describes as being “deeply odd”.
When he was 11, he was moved to one of a pair of dormitories in the school’s attics, known as The Uppers, which were overseen by an assistant matron, aged 19 or 20.
The woman, who is not named, is claimed to have groomed boys by bringing them illicit snacks at night before going on to sexually abuse them.
In his memoir, he describes how she first “kissed me on the lips” before she “promoted me to to the second rank of her reverse harem: those she intimately touched”.
He writes: “While we kissed, one night, she reached under my bedclothes, trailing her fingers in teasing, looping circles down my stomach until alighting on the little that an 11-year-old boy can muster.
“The first time she touched me there, she placed my hand on her breasts, and I could feel her pounding heart beneath.”
He adds: “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.”
Earl Spencer continues: “Her control over mesmerised boys was total, for we were starved of feminine warmth, and desperate for attention and affection.”
SELF-HARM
Affected by the turmoil caused by the abuse, Earl Spencer started to self-harm when the matron suggested she might leave the school to work in the Royal Navy.
He says: “I was so fraught at the prospect of losing her that I started cutting at the inside of my arm with a penknife.”
When it was announced the matron would stay until the end of the year, he and the other boys displayed their misplaced elation.
‘VORACIOUS PAEDOPHILE’
He writes: “We jumped up and down, waving our arms in childish euphoria, unaware that we were, in fact, the victims of a voracious paedophile.”
His experiences at Maidwell led him, he believes, to pay a prostitute for sex when he was 12 while on holiday with his mum and stepdad in Italy.
He writes: “I lost my virginity at 12, driven by a compulsion.
“There was no joy in the act, no sense of arrival, no coming of age. I believe now that I was simply completing the process set in motion by the assistant matron’s perverted attention.”
The Earl adds that he established the assistant matron, would now be in her late 60s, married at least twice but he suspects that she is now either dead or living abroad.
His book also paints a disturbing portrait of the school’s headmaster John Porch, who was there from 1963 to 1978.
Porch, who died in 2022, aged 95, was known as Alec to his friends and Jack by his pupils.
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT
Earl Spencer says Porch made savage corporal punishments part of the school routine, handing out beatings using either a slipper or cane.
He writes of one beating: “The strikes were delivered swiftly and sharply, with the full force of his sinewy arm, before he pushed you away disgustedly.”
One of the Earl’s contemporaries at the school recalled during a caning Porch “reached down with his hand to cup the boy’s scrotum”.
Another pupil told how he “caught sight of a large bulge in the front of Jack’s cavalry twills” while being beaten with a cane.
Earl Spencer also details an “unprovoked attack” he suffered at the hands of Porch’s “chief henchman” Henry Cornwallis Maude, who he says was a “vicious sadist”.
Maude went on to become the High Sheriff of Kent and died six years ago.
Earl Spencer writes of the attack: “He sat down next to me, threw me over his knees and beat me hard with one of my cricket boots, its metal spikes puncturing the skin on my bottom in a dozen places.”
He reveals in the book he believed he had been sent to boarding school “because I’d fallen short as a son”.
Not long after his ninth birthday in 1973, he started to make himself throw up in what he now says was “a desperate attempt to get somebody adult to show me warmth and sympathy. It was an emotional cry for help.”
The full extent of what he went through only really dawned on him in middle age.
Following the collapse of his second marriage in 2007, he enrolled on a therapy course where he revealed the abuse.
He says he had considered legal action against the assistant matron but decided against it as it would bring back too many traumatic memories.
Maidwell Hall said in a statement: “We are sorry that was their experience.
“It is difficult to read about practices which were, sadly, sometimes believed to be normal and acceptable at that time.
“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.”
It added it was “dismayed” to hear about the allegations of sexual abuse and referred them to the “local authority designated officer” who oversees such claims.
It urged those with similar stories to contact the officer or the police.
