British boarding schools are renowned for high-quality education, huge campuses, exceptional facilities and first-class teachers. This is why parents from across the UK – and the world – pay huge sums to send their children to these establishments. But they’ve also become known as dens of historical abuse. After Tony Blair’s former school, the prestigious Fettes College in Edinburgh, was found by an inquiry in January to have “failed to protect pupils from sexual and physical abuse”. The i Paper spoke to Angus Bell, 44, the first person to successfully sue his former boarding school, Loretto School, also in Scotland. The school settled out of court before trial in 2025, for an undisclosed six-figure sum in damages. Bell now lives in Canada. Interview by Sophie Wilkinson
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I was just short of my 11th birthday when I started at Loretto School. I’d only ever been to a tiny state school, so it looked like a fabulous place, with cricket fields, a beautiful chapel and well-manicured lawns, sold to prospective students as a pathway to Oxford and Cambridge Universities. But it became, in many ways, for me, a prison by day and a prisoner-of-war camp by night, run by the older boys.
I’d been beaten up in the park twice as a kid, but that was nothing on this scale. At Loretto, I faced daily assaults: in the changing rooms, I’d be whipped with wet towels, then forced into a tiny locker with deodorant sprayed through the holes. The deodorant irritated my throat until I coughed up blood.
At night, I’d be hit with belts, dragged from my bed and thrown into furniture. I was hoisted up in duvet covers, beaten with hockey sticks and threatened with being hung from a third-floor window. I was one of dozens of boys at the bottom of the school hierarchy, a punch bag treated to a merry-go-round of violence and verbal abuse.
I learned quickly that although there was violence, adults could not be trusted to protect me. It was only my fourth week when a staff member walked in as six guys took turns to beat me. All I remember the teacher saying was: “I don’t know what’s going on here, boys, but it doesn’t look like much fun. Better make yourselves busy elsewhere.” He didn’t defend me.
Staff often would say: ”Boys will be boys.” Our parents had no idea what was going on; we were cut off from the outside world for six weeks at a time without seeing them. For the first two years, phone calls were forbidden, as was standard in boarding schools then and our only communication was weekly letters, which were screened by teachers.
On one occasion, I was thrown down a flight of stairs and landed on my ribs. I then developed a chest infection, causing me to be hospitalised. On this occasion, my parents were told, but given the nonchalant attitude of everyone at school, I thought it best to tell them I’d fallen rather than been pushed. Another night me and several students were held at gunpoint with an air pistol until a boy was shot in the face by a 17-year-old. The shot didn’t pierce the skin.
On birthdays, we’d be grabbed by a dozen boys at night and launched into a cold bath. Some boys were strapped naked to trees. If “so-called” rules were infringed or prefects disliked you, you’d be sent on “parade” – a punishment. We’d be ordered on pre-dawn runs and made to do press-ups in shallow water until we vomited. Or made to break into other boarding houses at 3am to steal duvets or throw jugs of piss over people.
The abuse was also verbal. Older boys would call us “scabs” – I was told I was ugly, spat on and treated like a slave. At meals, we were kept so busy doing their bidding that by the time we sat down, we barely had time to gobble on scraps.
All the while, other boys would be shouting, encouraging attacks and laughing.One of the last lines of defence, before passing out, is smiling as you try to please your attacker. It was an exhausting and relentless 90-hour-a-week regime.
Bell (pictured as a child) would like the government to ban pre-teen boardingI learned quickly that complaining to anyone was futile, so I tried to focus on my studies for survival. We learned quickly to adapt in an environment of stress and danger. You bury emotions deep and brace each day for assault. But being the top pupil in plenty of my classes only led to more bullying.
I carried on as long as I could, until I mentally cracked at the age of 14. My grades disintegrated, I got straight U grades and was at risk of leaving without university qualifications. It took outside tutoring for me to gain some ground and claw back my A Levels.
Cricket was one of my only escapes, where I listened to the radio at night under my covers, volume on its lowest setting, to England versus the West Indies or Australia and my mind could take flight to another place.
Bullying happens in every school, but in most schools, at least you can go home at night to somebody who loves you and the safety of your own bed. In boarding schools, when the lights go out, it’s often the beginning of terror.
For me, the abuse continued till my final day. It began to reduce as I got older. Some boys my age perpetuated the cycle by picking on younger boys. The culture changed when girls joined, as they were less likely to be violent bullies. (When I started at junior school, there were no girls. But by the time I was 17, at least 85 out of 350 pupils in the senior school were girls.)
Perhaps surprisingly, many of us kept in touch after school because we did enjoy each other’s company. But even as an adult, flashbacks to the violence did continue. I went to a 21st birthday for someone I knew from school and was put in a headlock. Violence was so normalised that it became instinctual for these men. When mentioning these assaults to other boarders, the reaction is often laughter. I’ll say, “Do you remember when so-and-so was locked in a trunk and launched downstairs?” And they’ll smile, like these are simply “japes”.
The ripples from this have enormous consequences. As an adult, carrying a terror of authority and institutions, I sought low-paying, solitary jobs. Every time I’d get one, I’d have a nervous breakdown, because I’d be straining for perfection and terrified of doing anything wrong.
I moved to Australia, where I washed dishes in a restaurant, worked as a removal man, and was a lollipop man for a day. In Canada, I became a gardener and a handyman. I wrote a book, which was, mercifully, a success, about some of the world’s strangest cricket teams. But I’ve never managed to get a stable career, I believe, because of the damage done at school.
Outside of work, I’m a sociable person, but for those first years after leaving, I was terrified to speak to girls. If you’re told you’re ugly and unloveable every day, you believe it.
There are certain situations where a switch goes and I become hypervigilant for days. With PTSD, the fear centre of the brain doesn’t understand that the danger was 34 years ago.
It was only in 2019, when I was 39, that a friend emailed about the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. One of their investigations was on boarding schools. “Finally,” I thought, “people are taking this seriously.” When I sat down to list common assaults, within 15 minutes I’d come up with more than 100.
At that time, I was running a sports centre in Montreal with my wife. I started having another nervous breakdown, waking with nightmares about school. We had to sell the business.
I also began a variety of therapies and connected with Seen & Heard, an organisation supporting survivors of boarding schools. There’s such validation and empathy in connecting with others who endured similar experiences. I did Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and Matrix Reimprinting, delving into traumatic memories. You imagine entering the scene as an adult, locating your child self, and asking them what they need to fix this. In my case, it was getting the child out of there to a place of safety.
Initially, I was the only survivor from my time there to contact the inquiry about Loretto, but once I did, a flood of people reached out with a catalogue of horrors. Dozens of them gave evidence to the inquiry, to the police and my solicitors. Lady Smith, who chaired the investigation, was damning in her conclusions.
Some teachers have since emailed to say they never knew and I remain friends with some staff who I didn’t really know when I was there, including four who were due to give testimony on my behalf at trial.
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Just six weeks after I started at Loretto, David Stock, an English teacher who taught at the school for 19 years, told me he called an emergency staff meeting about what was happening. Shortly thereafter, he was forced to resign and made to sign an NDA. For three decades, he kept the evidence and presented it to the inquiry. He was going to speak for my case until the school settled before trial.
Call it a blessing or a curse, but I have a near photographic memory and felt it my duty to speak out about what happened. I brought legal action against the school, not for financial gain or revenge, but to ensure that schools will stop this from happening again. We can’t undo what happened to us but we can try to stop it from happening to others in future. Personally, I’d like the Government to ban pre-teen boarding. That’s where the greatest damage is done.
Seen and Heard exists to support the emotional wellbeing of those who have attended boarding or independent day schools, and their families. You can find out more at seenheard.org.uk
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