How I was sexually abused at just 11 by school matron, Diana’s brother EARL SPENCER reveals in devastating memoir as he says trauma left life-long toll

Princess Diana’s brother Earl Spencer has revealed he was sexually abused at the age of 11 by a female staff member 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 attacks and horrific abuse he suffered at Maidwell Hall and the lifelong damage they caused.

The 59-year-old reveals how a predatory assistant matron – who he describes as a ‘voracious paedophile’ – preyed on him and other young boys, grooming and abusing them in their dormitory beds at night.

The book also describes how John Porch, the “terrifying and sadistic” headteacher of the exclusive preparatory school, inflicted brutal beatings, apparently receiving sexual pleasure from the violence.

The torment Earl Spencer endured during his five years at Maidwell Hall led to him deliberately making himself ill – a shocking precursor to Diana’s later struggle with bulimia.

And he believes the emotional damage caused by his time at the Northamptonshire school had an effect on his first two marriages.

The peer, who attended Maidwell for between eight and 13 years, said he hopes his unflinching story will shed light on “what too often happened” in English private schools in the 1970s and provide “closure”. to fellow students who were abused. .

READ MORE: In the harsh, masculine environment of a boarding school – where I missed my mother terribly – I was easy prey for the matron’s calculated deployment of feminine warmth, says EARL SPENCER

“I have often witnessed deep pain still flickering in the eyes of my contemporaries in Maidwell,” he writes. ‘Many of us left Maidwell with demons sewn into the seams of our souls.’

In his memoirs, Earl Spencer reveals:

• After being abused by the matron, he wanted “full sex from too early an age” and lost his virginity to a prostitute in Italy at the age of 12;

• The pedophile cynically manipulated his emotions, causing him to become so distraught at the idea that she might leave school that he harmed himself by cutting himself with a pocket knife;

• The school’s violent Latin master, Henry Maude, hit him with the tips of a cricket boot and knocked another boy unconscious;

• Maude selected boys for nude swimming sessions, during which the teacher became visibly sexually aroused;

• When Earl Spencer returned to Maidwell after his holiday, he was gripped by such ‘despair’ that he frequently considered shooting himself in the foot with one of his father’s hunting rifles;

• Reliving Maidwell’s regime of ‘casual cruelty’ and ‘sexual assault’ has been an ‘absolutely hellish experience’;

• He did not fully understand the damage Maidwell had done to him until his early 40s, while in therapy.

READ MORE: The abuse was 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 admitted only boys until 2010 and currently charges fees of up to £31,700 per year.

Earl Spencer, who came to the school in 1972, remembers how boys were told to call all female staff ‘please’ instead of ‘ma’am’ – a rule intended to teach good manners, but which according to Earl Spencer it was ‘very strange’. ‘.

At the age of 11, he was moved to one of two dormitories in the school’s attics, known as ‘The Uppers’, which were supervised by an assistant matron who was 19 or 20 years old. The woman, whom he does not name, groomed boys by bringing them illegal snacks in the evening before sexually assaulting them.

Earl Spencer describes how she first “kissed me on the lips” before “promoting me to the second rank of her reverse harem: those she touched intimately.”

“While we were kissing, one night she reached under my bedclothes, teasing with her fingers as she made circles along my stomach until she landed on the little that an eleven-year-old boy could muster,” he writes. “The first time she touched me there, she put my hand on her breasts, and I felt her heart pounding underneath.”

Earl Spencer reveals how the woman chose one boy to have sex with each term and cynically encouraged boys to compete for her affection, writing: ‘There seemed to be an unofficial hierarchy among her prey…she chose each semester one boy to share her. bed and would use it for sexual intercourse.’

Earl Spencer writes: ‘Her control over mesmerized boys was total, for we had run out of feminine warmth and were desperate for attention and affection.’

Amid the emotional turmoil caused by the abuse, Earl Spencer injured himself when the matron suggested she could leave school for a job in the Royal Navy. ‘I was so distressed at the prospect of losing her that I started cutting the inside of my arm with a pocket knife.’

Describing the misplaced elation he and other boys felt when it became apparent that she would be staying until the end of the year, he writes: “We jumped up and down, waving our arms in childish euphoria, not knowing that we were in fact the victims goods. of a ravenous pedophile.’

He says men who heard about what happened to him “initially” downplayed the abuse and said he was “lucky.” But when he asks how they would respond if it was a 20-year-old man sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl? ‘Then they understand.’

The ordeal at Maidwell led to Earl Spencer paying a prostitute for sex at the age of 12 while on holiday in Italy with his mother and stepfather. “I lost my virginity at the age of 12, driven by a compulsion,” he writes. ‘There was no joy in the act, no sense of arrival, no coming of age. I now believe that I was simply completing the process set in motion by the assistant matron’s perverse attentions.’

Earl Spencer has established that the assistant matron, now said to be in her late sixties, has been married at least twice, but he suspects she is now living abroad or dead.

The memoir is also a damning indictment of John Porch, the director of Maidwell from 1963 to 1978, who died in 2022 aged 95. Porch, known as “Alec” by his friends or “Jack” by his students, made brutal corporal punishment part of the school. routine, administering blows with a slipper or walking stick.

Earl Spencer describes one beating: “The blows were delivered quickly and sharply, with the full force of his sinewy arm, before he pushed you away in disgust.”

One of Earl Spencer’s fellow students recalled how Porch “reached his hand toward the boy’s scrotum” during a caning. Another former student told how he “saw a large bulge in the front of Jack’s cavalry twill” as he was being caned.

Porch’s ‘main accomplice’ was a ‘cruel sadist’ called 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 ten or eleven years old, Earl Spencer writes: ‘He sat down next to me, threw me over his knees and hit me hard with one of my cricket boots, the metal spikes pierced. the skin of my buttocks in a dozen places.’

Gripped with despair, Earl Spencer thought he had been sent to boarding school ‘because I had failed as a son’. Shortly after his ninth birthday in 1973, he began making himself vomit in what he now describes as “a desperate attempt to get an adult to show me warmth and sympathy.” It was an emotional cry for help.”

Earl Spencer only recently told his family about Porch’s predatory matron and violent regime. It wasn’t until middle age that he realized the damage his time at school had done.

After the breakdown of his second marriage in 2007, he enrolled in a therapy course during which he disclosed the abuse. He considered legal action against the woman who ‘tainted my childhood’, but concluded it would bring back too many traumatic memories.

Last night Maidwell Hall said it was “sobering” to hear about the experiences of Earl Spencer and other former pupils, adding: “We are sorry that this was their experience.”

‘It is difficult to read about practices that were unfortunately sometimes considered normal and acceptable at the time. Nearly every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s. At the heart of the changes is the protection of children and the promotion of their well-being.’

The school said it was “stunned” to hear allegations of sexual abuse and had referred them to the “designated local authority officer” who oversees such claims. It urged anyone with similar stories to contact the officer or police.