Loretto boarding school abuse survivor wins six-figure settlement, publishes memoir
Angus Bell endured years of torture, violence and sexual assault at Loretto school in Scotland. He has now settled out of court and released a memoir detailing the abuse.
Former Loretto pupil details eight years of torture and assault in new memoir
Angus Bell was 10 years old when he arrived at Loretto, Scotland's oldest boarding school, founded in 1827 and set behind turreted walls in Musselburgh, East Lothian. What followed, he says, was eight years of severe physical, sexual and psychological abuse at the hands of fellow pupils — and, in some cases, staff. The Daily Express reports that Bell, now 45, received a six-figure out-of-court settlement from Loretto last year, in what his legal team described as the first case of its kind involving pupil-on-pupil abuse at a British boarding school.
Bell has since written a memoir, The Lost Boys, documenting the abuse he endured during the 1990s. "I have had years of therapy to try and recover from what happened to me there and to cope with the severe PTSD I was diagnosed with," he told the Daily Express. "I still have nightmares, severe anxiety and depression decades later."
'Worse than Lord of the Flies'
The book describes what Bell calls "daily cruelty, sadism and violence". Younger boys were locked in trunks and urinated on, launched down staircases, and hung from third-floor windows inside duvet covers. He recounts waterboarding in dirty toilets and beatings administered with hockey sticks, cricket bats, bricks and darts. On one occasion Bell was hospitalised after being pushed down a flight of stairs; his younger brother required surgical treatment for injuries inflicted by other pupils.
Bell draws an explicit comparison with William Golding's novel about private schoolboys descending into savagery. "It was worse than Lord of the Flies, and people broke down," he writes. He notes, without apparent surprise, that the school staged a production of that same novel during one autumn term. "No one saw the irony," he says.
Among the incidents Bell witnessed: children being set on fire, a pupil shot in the face with a ball-bearing gun after a group was held at gunpoint for an hour, and what he describes as genital mutilation inflicted during gang beatings. The school operated a formal "fagging" system under which junior pupils served as slaves to senior boys. "Literally, your objective in the first two years of that senior school was to survive never-ending beatings," he writes. "You had two jobs — get beaten up and be slaves for the older pupils."
Parents kept in the dark
Bell says the institutional structure of the school made it almost impossible for pupils to alert their families. Phone calls home were not permitted, parental visits were restricted, and outgoing letters were screened by staff. His parents — neither of whom had attended boarding school themselves — received consistently strong academic reports and saw a son who appeared to excel at cricket. "How can an 11-year-old explain this? Or understand it? We thought it was normal. We didn't have anything to compare it with," Bell explains.
The physical change in the brothers was, perversely, misread as progress. "We were wild before we went to that school," Bell recalls. "And then we came home in the holidays much quieter and better behaved. They thought it was doing us good." The financial burden his parents bore — fees at Loretto now exceed £50,000 a year — made disclosure feel impossible. "After all my parents' financial sacrifice — the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of pounds — I couldn't bring myself to tell them."
Loretto settlement and wider fallout
The out-of-court settlement, reached ahead of a civil case, has since prompted further claims against Loretto and other boarding schools across the country. Bell says hundreds of former pupils from institutions around the world have contacted him since he began speaking publicly about the abuse. "Writing the book has been cathartic and exposing what happened has seen hundreds more former pupils from boarding schools all over the country and the world contact me," he said. "It is part of a whole system of abuse across many boarding schools."
Bell deliberately avoided naming Loretto within the pages of the memoir itself, precisely because he believes the abuse was not confined to one institution. The school has been named in the legal proceedings, however.
Of particular concern, Bell says, is the subsequent trajectory of some of those who abused him. Several former pupils who bullied and tortured him have gone on to work in schools, run care homes, or — in one documented case — take up a role in school safety. "I also know from letters I've received from partners and wives and from stories in the papers that former bullies from my school went on to be violent towards their partners, stalk them, attack them, sexually assault them, behaviours they learnt at that school," he said.
School's stated ethos
Loretto, which was founded in 1827 by the Reverend Thomas Langhorne and counts former chancellors Alistair Darling and Norman Lamont among its alumni, along with broadcaster Andrew Marr and Formula One champion Jim Clark, describes itself on its website as a pioneer in "educating the whole person in mind, body and spirit" — an ethos it states "still successfully stands today". Next year marks the school's 200th anniversary.
Bell, who now lives in Canada with his wife and three sons, says his aim in publishing The Lost Boys is both to support other survivors and to press institutions to accept accountability. He has not ruled out further legal action.
Source: Daily Express