Boarding school abuse
Renton, who was abused at prep school, did an extensive research and study of enduring culture of abuse at Britain’s elite schools. Alex Renton’s trenchant new book about boarding schools, narrating stories of institutionalised humiliation and rampant physical and psychological abuse are far worse than what an inmate might expect in jail. According to Renton the boarding school environment and its abuses were a deliberate strategy by a British elite that wanted to instil resilience in its youth who were sufficiently hardened to run an empire and feel comparatively home to a hostile environment.
Children who were moulded by this abuse are running Britain’s public institutions and private companies.
He describes a catalogue of miseries and atrocities inflicted on himself and several interviewees, who recall their profound malaise in the British elite, hypocrisy, cronyism, conspiracies, unacceptable treatment by staff and victimisation by other students. These sufferings are compounded by the careful ignorance of parents choosing a “bought education” an instrument to toughen up their off-springs.
Renton reveals, complicity in the bleak secret at the heart of today’s British elite.
Renton, as a young boy from East Sussex Prep school, Renton was preyed on sexually by a teacher and terrorised with beatings. In 2014, in an article in Observer, about the abuse he suffered at Ashdown House prompted more than 800 others to get in touch, Stiff Upper Lip follows these incidents alongside research into the history of boarding school and their ethos.
His personal revelations include “ I never showed her (my mother) the marks of beatings made as that would have crossed the line that I did not yet understand”.
George Orwell’s 1952 essay about his experiences at the hands of a sadistic prep school headmaster and his wife provides Renton with basis for his arguments. He also quoted accounts by interviewees by the Churchill family and other high profile former pupils who rejected the unwritten code of boarders to have silent loyalty. According to some of his witnesses, the wit and confident persona of the public school-educated are a mask created for survival. Orwell’s description of a flogging that could enhance Renton’s argument about ruling class pathologies “ Fright and Shame seemed to have anesthetised me”.
Over 70,000 children are educated currently in UK Boarding schools, which, after a period of decline, benefited from a Harry Potter boost. Wealthy families from China, Hong Kong Germany and Russia, line up to pay high-octane academic and extra-curricular priming of their off-spring.
Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class by Alex Renton, Weidenfield & Nicolson £16.99, 416 pages.