Content Warning: Abuse, bullying, violence, adult-child assault.
Having already established in ‘Shipped off: Just how young were Brits shipping their children off to boarding school?’ that the British were fond of sending their children off to boarding school at a very young age, it’s time to look at the first night a number of children experienced.
Enid Blyton’s boarding school books have a fair amount of bullying in them, looking back as an adult. Not least of all, how children were treated for getting tearful on their first night at boarding school. Look, I cried about all kinds of stuff when I was 12, and I hadn’t just been shipped off by my parents after a world war ended, so in hindsight, Gwendoline Mary Lacey deserved better than she got.
Between the conscription and the bombings of World War 2, it is a reasonable assumption that real-world equivalents of the Blyton characters would have lost loved ones during the war — many would have had fathers and older brothers conscripted — and yet they were mocked quite cruelly for getting upset about being sent off to a school full of people they didn’t know. Blyton rarely referenced the war during her boarding school books, possibly as a means of escapism for children at the time, but in hindsight, knowing the context, that doesn’t make it better. If you wanted to encourage compassion for children who may be traumatised, books which seemed to condone bullying them on their first night isn’t really the winning strategy to go with.
Anyway, it turns out that Blyton’s characters were actually not as awful as you might think when you read some people’s real experiences of their first nights at boarding school.
From as far back as 1817 (and probably before, I just haven’t found them yet), there are records of just how awful first nights at boarding schools were. William Thackeray wrote at the time of being sent to Southampton for boarding school at the age of 5 where there were “hard beds, hard words, and strange boys bullying and jarring you with hateful merriment.” There has been a fair amount written about the tragic outcomes from boarding schools going far back into the 1700s and 1800s, but that’s for another post.
More recent accounts from boarders include an eight-year-old boy who took toys to share with boys at his new boarding school; all of his toys thrown out the window on his first night and broken. Another boy, aged 7, told of how his teddy-bear was destroyed by older boys and he was mocked for bringing it in the first place. Others discussed how their arrival as the youngest in the school was met with glee from older students of having a new cohort of students to torment and force to endure degrading chores and punishments.
Girls didn’t escape this either. One girl in 1947 (around the time Blyton was putting out St Clare’s and Malory Towers) had a jug of cold water poured over her on her first night and, with no way of drying herself and rules banning her from leaving the room overnight, she had to sleep in wet pajamas and on a wet bed. Another girl had talcum powder thrown in her face, seemingly for no reason other than the fact she was the new girl. Girls did have a tendency to use “social ignoring” as a punishment more than boys did; one girl found on her first night that none of the other girls at her boarding school in Bath would speak to her, unless she learnt to adopt a Bath accent. She was also locked in the showers on her first night and had her belongings stolen, some of which she was not able to get back.
The mistreatment also at times started out violent, and only got worse from there. One boy arrived for his first time at boarding school to be greeted by older boys who promptly forced him to play a game they called “Head, Bollocks, Toes”, which was a very thinly veiled excuse to beat the seven shades out of younger boys with hockey sticks. A girl recounted her first night at boarding school culminating in the girls who had already been there for a term or more, punishing newcomers who “caused problems” on that first night by forcibly stripping them and pummeling them. All she felt she could do was keep her head down and hope they didn’t pay her too much attention.
And if the question running through your mind right now is: what were the staff doing? Well, at best they were ignoring it and at worst they were instigating it.
A man sent to a boarding school aged 13 in the 1950s, tells of how some other boys began whispering after lights out and were heard by a staff member, who promptly beat every boy in the dormitory as punishment. Another, eight-year-old boy, recalled that one of the boys who arrived with him, wet the bed on his first night and the Matron, upon finding out, rubbed his face in his wet sheets as punishment.
Again, girls saw little better from their teachers. One girl, who was heard making noise after lights out, was taken out of bed and forced to sit on the floor in the corridor, facing the wall for hours. Another told of how the school Matron, upon learning from the girl’s mother about how milk made her sick, forced the girl to drink a glass of milk. When the girl was, unsurprisingly, horrifically sick, she was forced to clean it up.
It is little wonder that so many people have such deep-rooted trauma following their experiences at boarding school. It often started out bad and only got worse.
That isn’t to say that every boarder had such a bad experience though. As with any topic, those who had mundane or ruThere are many boarders who talk about how, beyond the inherent strangeness and isolation of being sent to a strange school where you had an uncomfortable bed, poor heating, and were suddenly expected to wash and change in front of complete strangers, there wasn’t anything particularly awful about their first night at boarding school. What was true though was that while some children were unaffected by the separation caused by being sent off to board, this certainly wasn’t as common as boarding school stories of the time made out.
Notes taken primarily from:
‘Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes and the Schooling of a Ruling Class’ by Alex Renton
Boarding school survivors reveal their horrific stories of childhood abuse in ‘MeToo’ moment
‘Too Marvellous for Words’ by Julie Welch
‘Boarding School Syndrome: The psychological trauma of the ‘privileged’ child’ by Joy Schaverien
‘Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools 1939-1979’ by Ysenda Maxtone Graham
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