Prior Park Preparatory School, Cricklade
This Millstones site is a fairly quiet, low-key affair. You might call it 'old school' for its so very English and restrained approach... Not like the lively rants on a site such as
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/1-Million-People-against-Child-Abuse-in-the-Catholic-Church/104773239556947 which I browse from time to time just to see whether the number of followers will ever move from the low thousands to the million that the founder vainly hopes for.
Maybe we English still think of child abuse, especially where priests and monks are involved, as something like cancer: something you don't mention at the dinner table.
For me personally the memories, largely unmentioned until recently, have been so still that sometimes I think it was all a dream. Did I merely imagine Br A's gentle fondling of my private parts nearly 60 years ago at Prior Park College's all-boys prep school in Cricklade, Wiltshire? And that image of its headmaster, Brother - I can barely bring myself to write the word - Br B, the man in black, kicking and beating a naked boy in the shower room at Cricklade while we cowered behind our towels... was it just something I invented?
I haven't even mentioned this before because I can't remember the name of the ten-year-old victim.
Then out of the blue came the invitation, from a former pupil of Prior Park College in Bath who'd spent time at the prep school in Cricklade in the late 1950s, to read a memoir called
Memories and Reflections Prior Park Preparatory School and Prior Park College 1958-1968. The document, emailed to me, was dated 27 June 2003.
Its background explanation is that around March 2002 certain ex-Prior Park College pupils from the class of '68 began to correspond and to compare notes with a view to organising their own, unofficial reunions.
More than 50 years on I remember his words of praise for my childish painting of a farm scene but also the energetic way in which he seized the paintbrush to show me how more vigorous strokes would help to bring the work to life. It's still hanging in my daughter's bedroom.
How heart-warming it was therefore to read in the memoir that his impact was equally felt by later generations who recalled their PPC teachers.
For as far as the other PPC teachers were concerned I had no complaints at all. I do remember as a junior boy worrying about how I would cope in the next year with Chemistry, whose Mr Hunt was noted for the length of rubber tubing which he'd nicknamed Percy. The
Memories and Reflections document confirmed that Percy was still painfully alive and kicking years after I left the school.
Even the bullying by other older boys which is given such prominence in the 2003 memoir is absent from my memories of PPC. The shockingly brutal yet picturesque description of 'flushing' by one of its victims was something that I never saw or suffered.
Nor did I stay long enough at PPC to experience the jolly japes involving cigarettes, drink and girls, and of course the camaraderie that accompanied all that bad behaviour. And the 2003 memoir does give the impression that the school in the mid-1960s was going through an anarchic phase, which made the subversive in me feel I'd missed out on something. "It was supposed to be a good level Catholic boarding school, yet we all basically behaved like a bunch of yobs!" acknowledges Tom Humphrys.
But I will focus on life at the prep school, since that's what I mainly shared with the writers of the 2003 memoir. Much of its content brought back positive memories as far as my four years at Cricklade were concerned. There's an attractive picture by one pupil of the Wiltshire countryside and indeed of some of the Brothers as the writer recalls those Sunday walks over the flat pastures. Even Brother Carmody's sadistic punishments were momentarily forgotten as the boys listened to his informative discourses on wildlife.
Cricklade seemed to have changed very little from my time for the class of '68. There were sunlit aspects in their and my childish memories of the place, but depressingly the dark and brutal side was still there.
Strapping was certainly one of my first memories of Cricklade when I was punished by Br B, the headmaster, for not having a pencil with me in the dining room. We'd been told to assemble there for an exam, and as a seven-year-old newcomer to the school I had no idea what the word "exam" meant. The episode later had some value for me when I recounted it during my retirement speech at Oundle School, as proof of how education had changed for the better in my lifetime.
My contemporary at Cricklade, Ben Mitchell, recounts a similar experience: "I remember many times getting the strap for reasons that I could often not understand. One time I asked if I could go to the bathroom and was told to come to the front of the class, given the strap so I would have something else to think about then sent back to my desk. Of course one can only hang on for so long and the inevitable happened. I'm sure you can imagine what happened next."
The
Memories and Reflections document is full of such stories told by the class of '68.
If anything, the beatings at Cricklade seem to have become more frequent in the early 1960s judging by their accounts in the memoir. Clearly the permanent threat of such violent punishment had a psychologically damaging effect on many children at the school, as at other Christian Brothers' schools.
There is mention of the Brothers' over-enthusiastic coaching on the games-field, which brought back for me personally the moment when Br Madigan decided that I was being a bit laggardly on the games-field and that a similar "warming-up" was the answer. Catching sight of this strap-wielding figure with cassock flying as he ran after me transformed me into an unexpected sprinter and somehow enhanced my reputation as an athlete, which of course I never was. I think it was shortly after that when to my surprise I was named as captain of one of the junior rugby games.
There was a comic element to that episode, which in fairness to Madigan he also recognised. And at that stage I think I was in my final year at Cricklade and less likely to be terrorised by the incident even though the strap was involved. The publicly staged punishments were a different matter.
Public hangings, stonings, amputations and mutilations may well have served as a form of entertainment for the mob in the past, and for all I know they may serve the same purpose in today's Iran or Afghanistan. But I will always remember the chill which came over us at Cricklade when the Brothers - sinister word - chose a victim to be punished at a whole school assembly. I'd always imagined that Br B was the sole instigator of these occasions, but reading the account of public strappings at Cricklade in Memories and Reflections filled me with disgust that the practice was continued in the years after his departure from the school.
I found this account valuable in one respect in that it corroborated in more detail what I told Archbishop Nichols at
http://millstonesblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/easter-letter-to-archbishop.html On that occasion, the victim was, as far as I can remember, forced to bend over a vaulting-horse while the strapping was given on his buttocks. His crime of soiling his underpants, probably due to some sort of faecal incontinence, inspired Br B to institute a regular ritual of underpants inspections which became another aspect of our terrorised lives.
A similar misfortune from which a Cricklade boy suffered resulted again in a public strapping of the victim where Br B's twisted imagination inspired him to create a truly humiliating spectacle. This time, a boy who suffered from bed-wetting was forced to dress in a sailor suit like the one above which Br B must have borrowed or hired and then paraded from classroom to classroom where we witnessed him being savagely beaten on the hand. Was it six of the best on one hand and then six on the other? All I can remember is the sight of his reddened hands and face streaked by tears of humilation, and the sound of successive strappings in our ears as he left our classroom and was taken to be punished in front of other classes in rooms along the corridor. He must have left the school shortly after the episode but I can't recall any edict of expulsion being announced. I just hope that his parents offered him some sort of comfort and support in later life. As far as I am concerned I would love to know that any compensation that he may have claimed has contributed to the Christian Brothers' financial woes following the avalanche of lawsuits which has hit them.
Above: The Ryan Report delivered a devastating verdict on the Catholic Church in Ireland for its longstanding toleration of sexual and physical child abuse
It's astonishing to learn that this reliance by the Brothers on corporal punishment had been criticised within the higher ranks of the Congregation more than 20 years previously. According to the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA) commonly known in Ireland as the Ryan Report, it was acknowledged by the Brothers that as long as corporal punishment was tolerated, the possibility of abuse existed and this was recognised by Br Noonan, Superior General, in 1930:
"The opinion amongst educators that corporal punishment should be altogether abolished in schools is hardening," he wrote. "While admitting its decline in our schools, the Committee felt, and the Higher Superiors are aware, that abuses have arisen; and they will recur, I fear, as long as our regulations give any authority for the infliction of corporal punishment. Let us aim at its complete abolition in our schools and anticipate legislation which would make its infliction illegal." (CICA report 6.217
"It is inexplicable, therefore, that Brothers who were in serious breach of the Congregation’s own rules were tolerated and protected by the Congregation," concludes the report (6.222). "Complaints by parents or lay-persons were discounted, even when these complaints reached the Provincial Leaders, notwithstanding the clear understanding the Congregation had of the danger posed by abuse of this rule."
http://www.childabusecommission.ie/rpt/pdfs/CICA-VOL1-06.PDF
Strapping, of course, was not the only punishment employed at Cricklade. Being made to eat unfinished food at one meal by having it mixed with the main dish at the next meal was a humiliation practised in my days at Cricklade by Br B and continued by his successors. Relatively minor in the scale of punishments, this forced eating encouraged phobias against certain foods which have lasted well into adulthood as testified in the memoir. My particular phobia was swede, especially when served with spam and glutinous brown gravy. And I remember with distaste Br B's lying and nonsensical refrain of "£70 a ton, £70 a ton" which was supposed to encourage us as we did our best to swallow dollops of lumpy and stringy mashed potato.
It was a matter of some satisfaction to me to find that my complaint against the other Christian Brother named in my emails to Archbishop Nichols and to Bishop Lang
http://millstonesblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/letter-to-bishop-of-clifton.html was shared by an ex-Cricklade pupil writing in
Memories and Reflections. Br A was already an ancient relic among the staff when I arrived at the school. In due course he would be known as "The Saint" by the boys and when he died at Cricklade the whole school was made to file past his coffin.
Br A, known as The Saint
Small in stature, with tufts of white hair standing out against a face tanned from his years spent in India, he told us tales of life in the sub-continent, impressed my parents with accounts of his horsemanship and entertained generations of Cricklade boys with his records of Irish folk-songs played on a wind-up gramophone complete with big curly horn. But Br A "disguised unhealthy instincts in a cloud of sanctimoniousness" in pupil Tom Humphrys' words, with his unfortunate tendency to fondle little boys' private parts. As I told Archbishop Nichols and Bishop Lang, I still have more than half a century later, the strange sensation of his scaly fingers caressing my scrotum as he gathered us bare-legged boys in shorts around him in a public display of Brotherly affection.
Tom Humphrys, one of the class of '68, recalls "the 'saintly' Brother A sticking his hands down my pyjamas when I was coughing one night - he decided I needed a rub on my chest with something - however, it wasn´t my chest that he touched! At the time, I had no idea what he was doing and, when he apologised, I didn´t think much more about it. Luckily it was no more than that and only on the one occasion."
Shortly after the event, Br A arranged for the boy to be moved to the Top Dormitory. "No doubt because he was aware of his weakness and the temptation I posed for him," Tom Humphrys reflects. "In some ways, this could be seen as sensible and the right thing to do." But it seems that the Brother's resolve to resist temptation came at a cost to his victim. "After that he picked on me for any reason he could find (no doubt because I reminded him of his weakness."
A friend of Tom Humphrys told him that he had had a similar experience with Br A.
George Vincent is one of many former Cricklade pupils who has found these stories hard to accept. "I have to say that there were no incidents of sexual abuse to my knowledge at Cricklade during my time there between 1960-1964," he wrote to me in an email in July 2010.
"I mention this in particular relation to Brother A. I think it is X who infers something of sexual abuse by the aforesaid. X was with me at Cricklade but two years ahead.
X, I believe, is referring to Br A individually drying us boys with our towels after coming in from swimming. To my knowledge he only did this once (on the arrival of our new metal swimming pool) as he died the following winter. We all lined up, twenty or so of us in a line, and he ensured we were properly dry. There was no touching of private areas. It was all innocent but a bit surprising as we were not used to any kind of considerate care. I remember very clearly at the time that it all seemed odd but I rationalised that he was probably observing for any signs of puberty. This I had noticed the headmaster doing very occasionally in the showers; perhaps for reasons of pastoral care. Br A was a kind man and was mourned by us all as such."
I didn't think that I could accept that explanation. There's quite a difference between being rubbed up the wrong way in bed and properly drying someone after a swim, even if it's a ten-year-old boy in both cases. And it turned out that George Vincent, the former Cricklade pupil, who had initially sent me the
Memories and Reflections document was unaware of the incident in bed described by Tom Humphrys. "If the incident was in the memoir I must have missed it or blanked it out as too much to confront," he admitted in a later email to me.
Certainly Br A may have been a man of delicate sensibilities in contrast to some of the other Brothers, and this would have gained him many friends amongst us boys. There was one occasion at lunch in the dining room when we discovered a large worm in the salad. No one would have dared to complain to Br A had he been there, but Br B was the only brother on duty. I think we felt that he would be our champion and would use the find to demand that the school's catering standards be improved. Fat hope of that. I still remember his uplifted hand and pained expression as he turned his face away: he simply didn't want to know.
I still find it difficult to describe as sexual assault the senile fumblings of the "saintly" Br A. Maybe he was fondling our private parts out of sheer innocent affection. The notion that he was checking up on us medically as part of his "pastoral care", as suggested by George Vincent, is too far-fetched for me. And, as I mentioned to the Archbishop, I do wonder how his particular affections made themselves felt in his dealings with young boys during his time in India.
So why did we not tell our parents, I've often been asked. I remember my own and my brother's regular floods of tears as term approached, but never managed to explain to my parents why I found school so intolerable. Perhaps our Catholic upbringing had trained us so well in the belief that life is a "vale of tears" and that suffering is good for the soul that we simply accepted school as a bad experience. In any case acceptance of corporal punishment at home by our own parents, as well as "not making a fuss" were things that we were supposed to take for granted in that era.
A further reason for not making a fuss, mentioned by one of the principal authors of the memoir, was precisely that Catholic upbringing which had rendered us fearful and vulnerable, faced with the worst aspects of the Christian Brothers.
The confessional booth: a dark place filled with sepulchral whisperings about imagined evils
This struck a chord in me. I similarly endured the horrors of Cricklade, coming from a background of Catholicism which kept most of us ten-year-olds cowed and obedient and trusting where the men in black were concerned. Up to the age of 14 at least, I believed in the Church with its litanies of venial sins, mortal sin, limbo, damnation, hell fire, purgatory, confession, contrition, penance and absolution. A belief deep enough for me to go to confession while on a French exchange with a devout Catholic family of course, and somehow summon up the courage and what little language skills I had at that stage to confess to the local priest that I'd been guilty of impure thoughts and actions.
In any case, if a fuss had been made, would parents have believed us? At least one pupil from the Class of '68, thinks not, and Ben Mitchell, a contemporary of mine at Cricklade, certainly found this to be the same situation with his own parents. "Your correspondence has brought back so many memories, everything you say is true," he wrote in a recent email. "Over the years Cricklade had faded in a distant memory. Sometimes I used to think that it was me being a bit of a wimp. I remember telling my parents about the various things that went on. (...) They of course believed none of it as they had been told that no physical punishment was EVER used. Maybe my mother was a little worried and must have mentioned it to one of the Brothers as I remember being chastised as being a little baby and needed to be taught a lesson."
Tragically this led to a rift with his father. "The worst thing that came of my stay at Cricklade was that my parents thought I was a liar and my father never really trusted me after that. This as you can imagine made life not as maybe it should have been. Some years ago I read an apology from the Christian Brothers in the Telegraph and was going to show my parents but decided against it. I thought let sleeping dogs lie. My father died over eight years ago, but I am pleased to say that we ended up putting the past behind us and being quite close. My mother is now ninety-three years old and in a nursing home. We get on well and I would never again mention what happened. I don't think she would understand but if she did she would be most upset."
In spite of the catalogue of unhappy incidents remembered by the Class of '68 in their Memories and Reflections the dominating tone of the memoir is certainly not of bitterness. At least one of the writers acknowledges his debt to the Christian Brothers.
Even at Cricklade I remember classes that I enjoyed, such as the first Chemistry lessons that the school introduced in a little wooden hut outside the main building. Watching phosphorous burn and seeing coal tar being distilled inspired me momentarily with the thought of becoming a chemist. Was it Br Rowe who was in charge? I feel sad that I no longer remember the names of the good teachers. Certainly it was Br Rowe who helped me discover choral music when, by chance, the solo that I was made to sing as a punishment for misbehaviour in the chapel unexpectedly revealed that I had quite a decent voice.
So it was a disappointment to me when I discovered that Br Finian Rowe was one of those complicit in producing the sickeningly dishonest obituary for Cricklade's headmaster with its laughable praise of Br B's "hearty, sociable character."
http://www.stjosephsblackpool.com/obitdaly.htm
Yet I have to admit that the first French lesson that I gave as a teacher owed a lot to Br B's pronunciation exercises which I'd remembered from 20 years earlier.
Some of the writers in
Memories and Reflections have similarly positive memories of some of the Brothers. The strap-wielding Br Madigan, remembered by me as I was pursued round the games-field is recalled by Tom Humphrys. "Madigan is an interesting case - he could, indeed, be a bully and my first memory of Cricklade, about an hour after I arrived, was being terrified by seeing Madigan shouting at another boy while he cuffed him around the ears. However, he was always kind to me and, on one occasion when I had vomited at night after eating five apples that my parents had brought for me at half term, I went to tell him instead of telling "The Saint". He was very kind and cleared it all up for me, even though I had disturbed his sleep."
Even though
Memories and Reflections is full of instances which reflect badly on the Christian Brothers, the overriding tone of the memoir is one of positive optimism and concludes on a note of forgiveness towards the Brothers which some might say is more deserving of the epithet Christian than Edmund Rice's Congregation ever was.
The Francis Hotel, Bath, venue for The Big Reunion of 2003 which brought together many of the contributors to the memoir
There are many other positive elements in this collection of schoolboy reminiscences which could so easily have been a bitter rant against the less appealing aspects of the Catholic Church. The collective effort by these victims of the Christian Brothers to face up to their childhood was indeed a traumatic event for many of them.
Sharing such views of their early education brought the Class of '68 together in a renewal of their friendship, another positive theme of Memories and Reflections. Tom Humphrys wrote how he shared this belief: "The way that many are prepared to bare their deepest thoughts to people they haven't seen for 35 years says a lot for the solidarity and camaraderie that existed between us - and clearly has survived through all the years since we were all together. This to me - sorry for the repetition - is the important thing and this is why it is so important for us to keep the impetus going from now on by reviving friendships and creating new ones with a group that by all accounts went through a unique experience together during the most formative years of their lives - for better or worse!!"
For me personally Memories and Reflections has an interesting sociological value, reflecting a sea-change in schools and in the wider society which saw the Class of '68 participating in an age of protest and revolution. I find it impossible not to see this generation of boarding-school pupils acting out their own quiet revolt against the Establishment, with devastatingly successful results. Tom Humphrys describes an incident which epitomises this. "When in the Lower Sixth, I remember a class being taken by Brother O´Brien, who asked one of us a question - when he didn´t know the answer, he pulled him out of his desk, cuffed him around the head and dragged him along the floor shouting 'you ignorant little bastard!' This was too much for us all, so we got up and walked out as a group into the corridor. O´Brien came after us saying in a quiet voice 'I'm sorry, boys, I'm sorry boys' - too late!"
Another writer boasts justifiably of his generation's part in the reform of boarding-school education as they themselves rather than the Christian Brothers outlawed ritual bullying, gauntlets and fagging at Prior Park College.
The If generation portrayed in Lindsay Anderson's film of 1968 had come of age.
Yes, these contributors to Memories and Reflections of Prior Park College and its prep school are clearly articulate and seem to have been successful in spite of or perhaps in some way because of their education. And I found their sense of having survived the ordeal of the Christian Brothers inspiring.
But of course they were the lucky ones.
The names of former pupils have been changed.
