The Edinburgh Academy - Abuse at Arboretum

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 5^th 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.”