Montgomery says there was widespread abuse at his boarding school. ‘You just accepted it as part of your life’
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Montgomery was sexually abused at the boarding school he attended in the 1950s and 60s.
He was sent there at the age of eight, and says he didn’t want to go but ‘my father insisted … he thought it would do me good’.
Montgomery describes the headmaster of the school as ‘pompous, austere and a man to be avoided’. He adds that the school was ‘cold, bleak, uncomfortable and monastic’. If the boys were sent a parcel for their birthday, the matron would comb through it for sweets and confiscate them.
He recounts a humiliating nightly routine where pupils had to do a strip wash and line up naked for the head matron to ‘inspect’ them. One of the masters would sit watching the boys. Montgomery says he felt this man was a ‘peeping Tom’.
Montgomery remembers another master as ‘a pervert of the first order’. All pupils in the junior school had to wear shorts and this teacher would ‘find any excuse’ to put his hand up the boys’ shorts.
One day the headmaster announced that this junior master had been dismissed due to gross misconduct. He told the boys ‘to say no more about it’. He didn’t ask any of them if they had been affected by the teacher.
The following weekend, Montgomery’s parents came to take him out. He remembers getting into the car and his mother asking what had happened that week. Montgomery told her about the dismissal of the teacher, but his parents didn’t ask what had happened and Montgomery says he didn’t feel he could tell them the details.
Montgomery said the level of sexual abuse reduced in the school after the junior master was dismissed, but the physical abuse continued.
When Montgomery was 13 years old, he moved to a senior house. He describes how one of the masters used to ‘creep’ round the dormitories at night to find boys committing any minor misdemeanour, so he could take them to his study and thrash them on the backside.
The school had a cadet force. There was an ex-military man in charge who also physically abused the boys on the slightest pretext.
The school had an outside pool where the boys were made to swim naked. Montgomery remembers asking why this was, and being told there were no drying facilities for swimming trunks.
Montgomery also recalls the school doctor, who he describes as a ‘very devious figure’. Every term, each boy was sent for an ‘examination’. The doctor would make them strip, turn around, bend over with their legs apart and touch their toes. During one of these examinations, Montgomery heard a sound like a camera shutter. Later he saw a camera in the doctor’s white coat pocket.
Montgomery didn’t tell anyone. He says ‘I didn’t want to believe the school doctor would have photographed me. I didn’t say anything to anyone ... I didn’t think there was any point’.
Some time later, when his parents had come to take him out for a meal near to the school, Montgomery saw the doctor in the far corner of the restaurant with two men. The doctor took an envelope from his pocket and passed it to the men. They looked at the contents of the envelope and gave some money to the doctor.
Again, Montgomery never told anyone what had happened. What he saw makes him strongly suspect that the doctor was photographing the boys and selling the pictures.
Montgomery considers that all boarding schools should have a designated person for children to talk to in confidence. He adds that it might also help protect children if there were independent visitors to schools in the same role.