I'd love to pretend I knew about these things, but I didn't. We had fagging at Harrow, but when I was a fag I was never propositioned. I wasn't raped at Harrow, though oddly, long after I left, I noticed that various masters and ex-masters were being done for paedophilia. Eton produced a lot of people who had John Peel's experience - mutual masturbation and all that sort of thing - but nobody was raped in my day. And you hoped that by the end of your career at Eton you didn't turn out to be gay. The funny thing was, if you shagged one of the maids you were instantly expelled, but if you had anything to do with boys you got a severe ticking-off. You just liked to have a pretty fag - I suppose it was a substitute for girls. There was another teacher, a good teacher and a very nice guy - he must have fiddled with somebody because he was suddenly expelled.Īt Eton, if you were a fag master you chose the prettiest fag from among the lower boys. In front of a class! And the other boys were actually laughing! We also used to have cold baths, and he would stand outside and tap each of us on the arse with a switch as we went in. He once sat me on his knee in front of a class - we were listening to Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave - and he put his hand in my pocket and fiddled with me. I remember at my prep school there was a music master who fiddled with the boys. Not particularly at Eton, but at the schools that prepared you for it. There was a lot of homosexuality at certain periods in English public schools, but I've never heard of rape. In my view would have to be very much a one-off thing. These things are so difficult, and it's not unusual for people to exaggerate after the fact. A lot of buggery went on, and things in that area - but I don't think there was ever anything that brutal. There was a system of sexual favours, but they never happened with violence. I think rapes certainly wouldn't have been called rapes. Writer and former editor, Sunday Telegraph Imagine it: 650 adolescents with nothing on their mind but sex who had to try to sublimate it all into playing rugger.
It was like a ghastly parody of courtship, more to do with adolescent yearning than lust. It wasn't a culture of gang rape it was boys getting crushes on other boys. Sex was part of the culture of the school, but it was all pretty ingenuous. As far as I can see, the point was to produce people to run the British empire: if you could survive five years at public school, there was nothing the Kalahari desert or Antarctica could throw at you. There were cold baths every morning and the food was awful. I was at Oundle in the mid-40s and it was tough.