The name
Brownlee keeps coming up. He has been mentioned in press articles in relation
to the abuse suffered by boys at the junior or prep school in the 1970s. The
main word that comes to mind when I think of him, is fear. We were scared of
him. He wasn’t just strict, he was violent. Anything that he himself might have
described as a punishment went way beyond anything that any other teacher might
have done to us even for a serious wrongdoing.
My
contemporary Robert Johnston described in his Times article of how Mr Brownlee
would force pupils to get down on their knees while he slid back the door of a
cupboard under the blackboard and then pull his victim back just as the door came
hurtling towards the boy’s head. That’s not a punishment that should be
inflicted on any boy, especially not a 10-year-old. I have a memory of it
happening to me once. Being a fairly quiet kid I would do all I could to keep
out of his bad books, but sometimes these punishments were dished out so randomly
that he may just have decided to pick on me one day regardless of whether I’d
done anything wrong or not.
And the
thing is, looking back all these years later, we must have somehow justified to
ourselves that this was acceptable behaviour from an adult who was, in theory,
there to educate us and encourage us to learn. Not treat us like we were tearaways
at some borstal prison.
But at that
age we weren’t able to understand that what was actually happening was that we
were being assaulted. He should have been arrested and charged but as with
Wares, Dawson and others at schools all around the country back then, he was
able to get away with it.
Did other
teachers know what was happening in his classroom? Did they just turn a blind
eye to his behaviour or were they frightened of what might have happened to
them and their careers if they spoke out?
And what
about the Court of Directors who oversaw the running of the school? How much
did they know of what was happening? Two of them were close friends of my
father. I knew them both and they were decent people. I like to think that the
school kept them in the dark about what was going on. But it adds another dimension
to the whole sordid affair when you realise you had a connection to two such
senior individuals.
The report
from the enquiry covered the after-effects on the boys who suffered at the hands
of these abusers. I am told not to let myself feel survivor guilt but all of us
who were in Brownlee’s classroom were victims regardless of whether he picked
on us or not. You don’t forget these things.
I mostly have good memories of my
four years at Arboretum. I had a brilliant class master in 5th year.
He was the science teacher, and we were sorry to see him go when he left the
school towards the end of that year. I suppose I should say that most of the teachers
were good people, but it was the bad apples who, without wanting to sound
melodramatic, left us with memories that will haunt us until our dying days.
Lastly,
mention should go to Nicky Campbell for his tireless work to bring these
individuals to justice and it is worth repeating an extract from a recent Libby
Brooks article in the Guardian about another famous old boy from Nicky’s year –
And just
as chilling was the wider culture of complicity the evidence exposed – when the
internationally acclaimed actor Iain Glen spoke out about his abuse in 2002,
Campbell said “the wrath of Morningside and Muirfield and Murrayfield [wealthy
Edinburgh suburbs] rained down on his head with biblical fury because he’d
broken the code, the Edinburgh omertà .”
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