The picture will bring a lump to the throats of hundreds of thousands of British people who had a ‘privileged’ education at boarding school. The young boy, stiff and unsmiling in uniform tie and too-big suit, stands by the family car, about to leave for his first day. Sister and nanny look proudly on.

The name stencilled on the brand-new trunk is C. Spencer, the sister is Diana, later Princess of Wales. It is 1972 and Charles is just eight.

If he looks rather grim for a child setting off on a Harry Potter-style adventure, it’s because he is, as he has written, very scared: ‘I had only ever stayed one night away from home and I was sleepless for six months before going.’

He was right to be nervous. Spencer was off to Maidwell Hall, an elite boys-only ‘prep’ school that would set him on the path of the eldest male child of a grand and aristocratic family: Eton, Oxford and later, on his father’s death, the House of Lords.

But that day in 1972 was the beginning of a five-year horror, a ‘hellish experience’ that would, Spencer writes in his new book, destroy two of his marriages and leave him prone to lifelong depression.

Charles Spencer, with sister Diana and nanny, leaves for his first day at Maidwell Hall in 1972

 Spencer is pictured here clearing up hurdling fences after a sports day in 1975

The headline stories from Spencer’s brave and furious memoir A Very Private School — exclusive extracts of which were published in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday — are naturally enough about the sexual abuse he and other boys experienced at Maidwell Hall.

There was the assistant matron who kissed and sexually assaulted him in his bed from the age of 11. The woman, 20, was a serial predator.

Other boys, none older than 13, were taken to her bed and made to have sex with her. Spencer says she manipulated them all emotionally — to the point where he would cut his arm with a penknife to get more of her attention.

Boys were vulnerable to such a monster because, sent away from family, they were a textbook case of neglect: children desperately needy for love. The man in charge at Maidwell — the headmaster John ‘Jack’ Porch — was in loco parentis, the substitute father. But he was a sadist who got sexual pleasure from his savage beatings of Spencer and the other children.

There is more. Spencer writes about the ‘dread despair’ he felt every day at the school, of contemplating shooting himself in the foot so he didn’t have to go back at the end of the holidays, of the sense of having been abandoned by his parents because he was not good enough. And of the lifelong emotional damage that resulted.

This should give pause to all parents still paying to send their children away from home to be looked after by those who do not love them — more than 70,000, even today.

‘Some things died for me between my eighth and 13th birthdays, when I was in the care of Jack Porch . . .’ writes Spencer. ‘Innocence, trust, joy — all were trampled on and diminished.’

These words strike home with me because very similar things were happening in the 1970s at my Eton-feeder prep school, Ashdown House. I started at the little boarding school the same day as Viscount Linley, Queen Elizabeth’s nephew; Boris Johnson turned up three years later.

Sexual assault by the teachers was common. One of them has now been jailed and another faces extradition from South Africa on multiple charges of assaults on children at Ashdown and elsewhere. I was fondled sexually by two others — the maths teacher and the French teacher. So was the journalist Sir Nicholas Coleridge, soon to be the next provost of Eton College.

The two grand headmasters who presided over Ashdown in those years resorted to violence very quickly — stupidity in class or talking after lights-out could get you viciously whipped with a bamboo cane. That was legal, of course.

Spencer started at the boarding school the same day as Viscount Linley, Queen Elizabeth’s nephew and son of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon (pictured)

More culpably, they looked away even when confronted with complaints by parents about the sexual predators on their staff. David Linley, deeply miserable at the school, was withdrawn by his parents in the middle of the year. But Ashdown and Maidwell Hall are not exceptional. 

What happened there, the total failure of child protection, the cover-up of abusers, was ridiculously common. In 2014, I wrote in a newspaper about Ashdown and the culture that tolerated sexual abuse, neglect and cruelty in the private schools.

My email inbox was flooded for months afterwards with other people’s stories of sexual assault and violence at boarding schools, state and private. Many had never told of their shame and pain before.

In a book, and on radio and TV, I have since investigated some of these allegations, most recently at Scotland’s Edinburgh Academy and Fettes College. Broadcaster Nicky Campbell has subsequently gone public about the violence and sexual assaults on him and his friends at the Academy by staff in the 1970s.

I’ve logged every credible and serious complaint. There are now nearly 1,200 allegations in my database, with 490 schools and more than 300 staff members named. Most complaints are of male predators, but there are a significant number of women who abused pupils, physically and psychologically, in both the boys’ and the girls’ schools.

Maidwell Hall appears in the spreadsheet. The former poet laureate Andrew Motion, at Maidwell a decade before Spencer, has told how he was sexually assaulted by an English teacher there.

I’ve received more stories from former pupils of headmaster Jack Porch’s ‘sadism’, and of sexual relations between the boys at the school, including rape.

That is not a surprise either. One of the distressing outcomes of sexual abuse of young children is that they may become ‘hypersexualised’ — seeking in their confusion more experience. In the book Spencer describes how he lost his virginity, aged 12, to an Italian prostitute he paid with his pocket money.

When I went to Eton, like Spencer, after prep school, it was to a sexually charged environment, with a culture of younger boys being exploited by older ones — and not without its own predatory teachers.

What’s clear is that in the upper class this was all an open secret, from the 19th century onwards. That the schools were harsh and cruel was accepted as necessary — the toughening up that children need. It had worked for generations in producing leaders of Britain.

It was known, too, that the schools attracted predators and tolerated them. Evelyn Waugh, wrote a novel, Decline And Fall, which features one as a comedy character. ‘Pederasts actually make very good teachers,’ was the wisdom.

Spencer shares much in common with others who suffered at school. Like many, shame kept him silent — it was 30 years before he told others what had happened to him. The matron would now be in her late 60s. She has not been prosecuted.

The complex PTSD that can result from neglect and abuse over an extended period in childhood is well studied — there is an acknowledged specialism in psychology called boarding school syndrome. After all, nearly one million British people alive now attended boarding school, and my research suggest that a third were not happy, or worse.

‘Emotional dysregulation’, feelings of guilt and shame and periods of extreme depression, resorting to drugs or alcohol are common symptoms. Alongside the former boarders are the survivors of state residential care. 

Many of the borstals and orphanages were run, deliberately, along ‘public school’ lines. And abuse and cover-ups were common in those, just as managers in the NHS and the BBC covered up or ignored suspicions about Jimmy Savile.

This is all ancient history, say the schools today. Maidwell Hall — it’s still there, now charging more than £30,000 a year — told the Mail: ‘School life has evolved significantly since the 1970s. At the heart of the changes is the safeguarding of children and promotion of their welfare.’

But I get reports from parents of children at private schools today telling of safeguarding protocols that haven’t worked, that abuses and failures of staff have been ignored or covered up. There are 70,000 boarders still in paid schools. Our failing state care and detention systems house more than 100,000 more children. Are we sure they are safe?

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), funded by the Government, completed seven years’ work (at a cost of £180 million) and published its recommendations in October 2022. It concluded institutions caring for children needed to do far more for their safety.

Incredibly, it is still not a legal requirement in the UK to report if an adult is suspected of abusing a child. Last month, the Government at last announced legislative changes in reaction to IICSA. ‘We are working at pace to get a mandatory reporting duty for child sexual abuse on to the statute book,’ said Home Secretary James Cleverly.

Cleverly’s proposals are watered down. Campaigners say they won’t even bring British child safeguarding rules up to the standards of most other countries. That’s why what Charles Spencer writes is not just history; it is an urgent message for parents and all who care about children today.

Alex Renton is a journalist and broadcaster, his book Stiff Upper Lip: Secrets, Crimes And The Schooling Of A Ruling Class is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.