Princess Diana’s brother Earl Spencer has revealed that he was sexually abused at the age of 11 by a female member of staff 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 lifelong damage they caused.
The 59-year-old reveals how a predatory assistant matron – whom he describes as a ‘voracious paedophile’ – preyed on him and other young boys, grooming and then abusing them in their dormitory beds at night.
The book also details how John Porch, the ‘terrifying and sadistic’ headteacher of the exclusive prep school, inflicted brutal beatings, seemingly gaining sexual pleasure from the violence.
The torment Earl Spencer endured during his five years at Maidwell Hall led to him deliberately making himself sick – a shocking precursor to Diana’s later struggles with bulimia.
Earl Spencer is unflinchingly frank about how his horrific schooldays left him scarred
Earl Spencer with Princess Diana. The torment he endured during his five years at Maidwell Hall led to him deliberately making himself sick – a shocking precursor to Diana’s later struggles with bulimia.
And he believes the emotional damage wrought by his time at the school in Northamptonshire had an effect on his first two marriages.
The peer, who attended Maidwell between the ages of eight and 13, said he hopes his unflinching account will shine a light on ‘how things too often were’ in English private schools in the 1970s and bring ‘closure’ to fellow pupils who were abused.
READ MORE: In the hard, male environment of a boarding school – where I missed my mother terribly – I was easy prey for matron’s calculated deployment of feminine warmth, says EARL SPENCER
‘I’ve frequently witnessed deep pain, still flickering in the eyes of my Maidwell contemporaries,’ he writes. ‘Many of us left Maidwell with demons sewn into the seams of our souls.’
In his memoir, Earl Spencer reveals:
- After being abused by the matron, he wanted ‘full sex from a too-early age’ and lost his virginity aged 12 to a prostitute in Italy;
- The paedophile cynically manipulated his emotions, making him so distraught at the notion she might leave the school that he self-harmed by cutting himself with a penknife;
- The school’s violent Latin master, Henry Maude, beat him with the spikes of a cricket boot and knocked another boy unconscious;
- Maude selected boys for naked swimming sessions, during which the teacher would be visibly sexually aroused;
- Earl Spencer was gripped by such ‘despair’ 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 regime of ‘casual cruelty’ and ‘sexual assault’ has been an ‘absolutely hellish experience’;
- He only fully understood the damage Maidwell caused him when he was 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 family seat of the Spencers, where Diana is buried. A feeder for 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 by the Mail
Earl Spencer, who joined the school in 1972, recalls how boys were told to refer to all female staff as ‘Please’ instead of ‘Miss’ – a rule that was meant to instil good manners, but which Earl Spencer believed was ‘deeply odd’.
Aged 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 who was aged 19 or 20. The woman, whom he does not name, groomed boys by bringing them illicit snacks at night before going on to sexually abuse them.
Earl Spencer describes how she first ‘kissed me on the lips’ before she ‘promoted me to the second rank of her reverse harem: those she intimately touched’.
‘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,’ he writes. ‘The first time she touched me there, she placed my hand on her breasts, and I could feel her pounding heart beneath.’
Earl Spencer reveals how the woman chose one boy each term to have sex with and cynically encouraged boys to compete for her affections, writing: ‘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 writes: ‘Her control over mesmerised boys was total, for we were starved of feminine warmth, and desperate for attention and affection.’
Amid the emotional turmoil caused by the abuse, Earl Spencer self-harmed when the matron suggested she might leave the school for a job in the Royal Navy. ‘I was so fraught at the prospect of losing her that I started cutting at the inside of my arm with a penknife.’
The young earl helps tidy after a Maidwell sports event in 1975
Describing the misplaced elation he and other boys felt when it emerged she would be staying until the end of the year, 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.’
He says men who learnt of what happened to him would ‘at first’ make light of the abuse, saying he was ‘lucky’. But when he asks how they would react if it was a 20-year-old man sexually molesting an 11-year-old girl? ‘Then they get it.’
The ordeal at Maidwell led to Earl Spencer, at the age of 12, paying a prostitute for sex while on holiday in Italy with his mother and stepfather. ‘I lost my virginity at 12, driven by a compulsion,’ he writes. ‘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.’
Earl Spencer has established that the assistant matron, who would now be in her late 60s, married at least twice but he suspects she now either lives abroad or is dead.
The memoir is also a damning indictment of John Porch, Maidwell’s headmaster from 1963 to 1978, who died in 2022 aged 95. Known as ‘Alec’ by his friends or ‘Jack’ by his pupils, Porch made brutal corporal punishments part of the school routine, administering beatings with a slipper or cane.
Earl Spencer describes 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 Earl Spencer’s fellow pupils recalled how during a caning, Porch ‘reached down with his hand to cup the boy’s scrotum’. Another former pupil told how he ‘caught sight of a large bulge in the front of Jack’s cavalry twills’ while being caned.
Earl Spencer reads up on history in a school holiday, aged 12
Porch’s ‘chief henchman’ was a ‘vicious sadist’ named Henry Cornwallis Maude, who later became High Sheriff of Kent and died six years ago.
Recalling an ‘unprovoked attack’ on him by Maude when he was aged ten or 11, Earl Spencer writes: ‘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.’
Gripped by despair, Earl Spencer believed he had been sent to boarding school ‘because I’d fallen short as a son’. Soon after his ninth birthday in 1973 he started to make himself vomit in what he now describes as ‘a desperate attempt to get somebody adult to show me warmth and sympathy. It was an emotional cry for help.’
Earl Spencer only recently told his family about the predatory matron and Porch’s violent regime. Indeed, it was not until middle age that he understood the damage his time at the school caused.
After the collapse of his second marriage in 2007 he enrolled on a therapy course where he revealed the abuse. He has considered legal action against the woman who ‘corroded my childhood’ – only to decide it would resurrect too many traumatic memories.
Last night, Maidwell Hall said it was ‘sobering’ to learn of the experiences of Earl Spencer and other former pupils, adding: ‘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.’
The school said it was ‘dismayed’ to hear allegations of sexual abuse and had referred them to the ‘local authority designated officer’ who oversees such claims. It urged anyone with similar stories to contact the officer or the police.