Shipped off: Just how young were Brits shipping their children off to boarding school?

In short, really young in some cases.

Britain has long had a strange attitude towards the treatment of children — “seen but not heard” was a well known phrase in older literature and other media — but it still surprised me when I looked up actual numbers.

In 1966, 1.7% of Britain’s child population were in boarding schools. A sample of those children showed that most had started boarding before the age of 11 and over 33% had started boarding before the age of 8! There were even some children — mercifully a minority, but still… — who had been sent to boarding school from as young as 4 or 5 years old. 

This means that the characters in Malory Towers, where they started at 12, were all older than the age most 1966 boarders had started boarding. It is, of course, possible that some of those characters had attended other boarding schools, as relatively few characters reference the type of school they came from; Darrell Rivers makes reference to her and Felicity attending a day-school (non-boarding school) before Malory Towers, but she is one of the only characters that does. In St Clare’s, the opening chapter references the twins attending a boarding school that stopped catering for girls at aged 14 (which is why they had to leave). As it is unlikely a school would only cater for two year groups, they may have started there when they were 8-10 years old.

Given these young ages, it seems even more cruel than it already did that dorm rules throughout the country included things like “No Crying Allowed”; accounts from male boarders tell of how crying in the dorm, regardless of how young you were, led to punishments that included being beaten with a belt by the head of the dorm or an older student. This attitude certainly underpins the way many students in a number of boarding school books view newcomers who have difficult first nights, though not many portray the physical punishments that could occur. Even the bullying portrayed was cruel enough at times.

There are accounts from those sent to board young of how either their own parents or the parents of other boarders forced, berated, or lied to their children to get them out of the cars and into the school. Some accounts talk of the delight that one or both of their parents — more often their fathers but not only — had in ridding themselves of their children to the boarding school. It does make you wonder why some people had children if they were so keen to not have them at home.

These ages and experiences would have been much the norm after both World Wars. So, children lived through those wars (where some would have been moved around the country or had other children come to live with them), then some were sent away to boarding school, often at a very young age. It’s no wonder there were significant attachment difficulties and mental health distress. In reality, Sally Hope from Malory Towers and Joan Townsend from The Naughtiest Girl probably would not have simply “got over” their attachment anxieties the way they were shown to have in the books; being sent off to boarding school had long-term implications for many people. As more people over the past 10 to 20 years have spoken openly about their boarding school experiences, better understanding of just how profoundly those early experiences impacted people has developed.

Against this reality, it is of little surprise that boarding school books are sometimes considered a form of propaganda, as they certainly did not portray the true range of experiences of boarders of the time. Of course, not all boarders had a difficult time; the book “Too Marvellous for Words” by Julie Welch was written by someone who seemed to very much enjoy big parts of her experience at boarding school, even if there were difficulties along the way. It’s just that the negative aspects of boarding schools were rarely broached in fiction, though this became more common over time and up to current day.

 

Notes taken primarily from:

“Stiff Upper Lip” by Alex Renton

 

Also used:

“Too Marvellous for Words” by Julie Welch

“Secrets, crimes and the schooling of the ruling class: how British boarding school stories betrayed their audience” by Nicholas Tucker