Caning and creepy teachers: My memories of being a girl in a 1970s prep school for boys by author Sarah Barclay By Sarah Barclay For You Magazine Published: 12:01, 8 June 2024 | Updated: 12:01, 8 June 2024 e-mail View comments Charles Spencer ’s bestselling memoir A Very Private School describes in harrowing detail what it was like for him at his traditional boys’ prep school in the 1970s. But what was it like for a girl in these very male institutions? Having arrived in 1975 (aged seven) as part of a new intake of girls at St Andrew’s Berkshire, which was previously boys-only, I can tell you. Boarding prep schools in the 1970s were a bizarre mashup of Enid Blyton and spartan training for a vanished Empire, presided over by some good teachers but also by social misfits and – for some children – childhood-decimating perverts.
Anyone could teach. Charles Spencer describes feeling the absence of female warmth. Instead, he found a place of maleness and a sadistic, duplicitous headmaster whose daily routine was beating young boys.
My school (which has diverse alumni who include Catherine, Princess of Wales and novelist John Le Carré) was equally male dominated. Only boys featured in the school photos lining the dining-room walls (unsurprising, as they had only recently admitted girls). It was so male, in fact, that even if you were a new girl, you were called a ‘new boy’.
‘Showing your feelings was weak. And there was even a sort of glamour to getting the cane’.
