Dark coronary heart of Scotland’s most elite colleges uncovered: Hotbeds of violence, racism and paedophilia. Mind-blowing pupil-on-pupil savagery. Slave auctions. As former pupils communicate out on ‘cesspits of sadism’, GRAHAM GRANT’S stunning investigation

In the chill of the night air, the shivering boy hangs upside down out of a third-storey window, held by his ankles, as his near-hysterical classmates look on.

The screams of the terrified third-former appear to go unheeded until, taking mercy on him, his tormentors forcefully pull him back into the dorm room.

But it is far from a sanctuary. Earlier that night, older boys had administered a heavy beating – known as a ‘leathering’ – to him and some other new pupils, before dangling them over the windowsill in a sick initiation ceremony.

These nightmarish scenes echo William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies, the dystopian novel about British schoolboys stranded on a deserted island who descend into savagery without adult supervision.

Yet they took place at an elite British boarding school – Fettes College in Edinburgh, alma mater of Sir Tony Blair and actress Tilda Swinton – where boarding fees for senior pupils are currently around £54,000 a year.

The rituals happened in the 1980s, according to a damning report by the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) – the long-running statutory probe into institutional abuse in living memory chaired by retired judge Lady Smith.

A disturbing picture is painted of unruly pupils at the school, founded in 1870, who were left to their own devices while staff unofficially sanctioned the abuse – or carried it out.

But this is a pattern that was repeated throughout the private sector. While the focus has been understandably on abusive staff, it’s jarring to learn of the horrors experienced by children at the hands of their peers in schools which were celebrated as among the best in the world – but were in reality hotbeds of violence and paedophilia.

And it is equally surprising that the abuse at some of them continued well into the 21st century.

Giles Moffatt, 53, co-founder of a private school abuse survivors‘ group whose roughly 200 members include broadcaster Nicky Campbell, said: ‘Children were allowed to run feral at a lot of the top schools.

‘In the past, Fettes and other boarding schools had been intended for the children of the ultra-rich and the aristocrats, but in the 1970s and 1980s a whole new demographic went to them – children of professional people such as doctors and accountants.

‘The school was all-important, and the children mattered not a jot – I’m afraid for our parents we were status symbols, and they’d parade you in your uniform at family events or on holiday, which was wrong – children shouldn’t be treated as trinkets.’

Mr Moffatt described his old school – fee-paying Edinburgh Academy, whose former pupils include Robert Louis Stevenson and Game of Thrones actor Iain Glen – as a ‘cesspit of sadism and paedophilia’ – but it was far from alone.

His group has members who attended a range of private schools, including Fettes, and now live as far afield as Australia and Africa.

Around 30 former members of staff at Edinburgh Academy have been interviewed by police in connection with alleged abuse. The SCAI is expected to report on abuse at the school later this year.

‘But it’s the tip of the iceberg,’ Mr Moffatt said. ‘Most people will not come forward – if you speak to psychologists, they will tell you that 90 per cent of abuse victims don’t ever report what happened to them.’

The figures are mind-boggling, and the SCAI has uncovered horrific examples of abuse at top schools where physical and sexual abuse were widespread.

It was at its worst, Mr Moffatt believes, between the late 1960s and the mid-1990s.

Mr Campbell, 64, a former Edinburgh Academy pupil, has told of experiencing a ’couple of breakdowns’ as a result of the abuse he suffered and witnessed.

Among the culprits was Iain Wares, who was employed as a teacher in Edinburgh between 1968 and 1979, first at Edinburgh Academy and then at Fettes.

Lady Smith found ‘many children were harmed by Wares, and many are still suffering the effects of his abuse, which was appalling both in its nature and in its extent’.

Wares, 86, was arrested by Interpol officers in Cape Town last October and charged with four rapes, 60 sexual assaults and 25 assaults, and is facing extradition to Scotland for trial.

Beyond the notorious cases of egregious abuse – Wares is described as a ‘feared monster’ capable of ‘terrifying fury’ who sexually molested pupils and struck their heads off their desks in fits of rage – was a lawless world, at Fettes and elsewhere, in which racism and misogyny were allowed to take root alongside endemic violence – with pupils responsible for much of it.

The SCAI was told mock ‘slave auctions’ took place at Fettes in the relatively recent past with the stated aim of raising money for charity – which ‘continued into the first decade of the 21st century’.

The auctions ‘only stopped after prefects complained they were being abused when acting as “slaves”; only then was it recognised by the head and deputy head that the practice was entirely wrong’.

Fettes head Helen Harrison told the inquiry it was ‘something that was seen by the majority as a charity fundraising event, but… I can’t actually sit here and explain that now in terms of why they happened. They were wrong and just should never have happened.’

But Lady Smith notes that it ‘became clear that it was in fact pupils who had voiced concerns and not the school itself’.

Former Fettes pupil Saffy Mirghani, 26, said she ‘endured inhumane treatment from my opening time at the school’.

Ms Mirghani said she was contacted by a black female student who had left the school in around 2015 and ‘on multiple occasions [was] called the N word… in front of staff and staff did nothing; staff laughed’.

Lady Smith said she had ‘no difficulty in accepting that there was racism at Fettes which led to racist abuse from at least the 1950s well into the new millennium’.

Her 226-page report, published in January, said the school ‘did not address it as it should have done’.

Indeed, it seems that it was ‘really not until the activities of Everyone’s Invited and the Black Lives Matter movement [founded in 2013] acted as a wake-up call that the school focused on the problem’.

Now the school says ‘racism in any form by staff or students is not tolerated… and it is distressing to read these accounts from former students’.

The abuse had a lasting effect on those who saw it, as well as those who suffered it.

Journalist Hugo Rifkind has recounted the ‘flippant savagery’ he witnessed at fee-paying Loretto School in Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, though he did not experience abuse of the kind meted out to another former pupil who said children were ‘beaten with hockey sticks and cricket bats’, while beds were ‘urinated and defecated on’. The child was also stabbed, kicked, whipped and thrown downstairs.

Rifkind reflects that he was ‘blind’ to much of the serious abuse and concludes that ‘public schools are cults – they’re supposed to be’.

Loretto – the oldest boarding school in Scotland – found itself back in the headlines for the wrong reasons this week when its headmaster crassly suggested that its Victorian values had protected the mental health of pupils for generations, provoking anger and disbelief among abuse survivors.

Pete Richardson insisted that Loretto, whose alumni have included Alistair Darling, the late Labour chancellor, should be proud of its 19th-century ethos.

‘Life is not a bed of roses and we need to normalise it,’ he said. ‘A key part of building resilience in young people is in having them appreciate that feeling stressed and anxious is natural.’

Responding to criticism from survivors, the school told the Mail it is ‘committed to an approach that places a strong emphasis on kindness, integrity, loyalty, and tenacity’.

At prestigious George Watson’s College in Edinburgh, the late bestselling historical novelist CJ Sansom had an experience far removed from either kindness or integrity.

He said he suffered years of abuse at the hands of bullies which drove him to the brink of suicide – and claimed pupils and teachers collaborated in bullying him during a decade at the school.

Sansom, who wrote the Shardlake series, said he was ‘mocked and isolated by the other children, while the teachers blamed this on me’, adding: ‘I spent my whole time in the bottom form.’

By 14, he was ’seriously mentally ill’ and, after leaving Watson’s at 15, took an overdose of sleeping pills that led to a spell in a mental hospital.

In response, the school ‘pledged openly that any case brought to us will be reviewed to the highest possible scrutiny’.

Staff at another leading private school in Edinburgh removed a portrait of a former headmaster from its walls after the son of a former pupil revealed that he had been convicted of indecent acts against young boys.

The portrait of Norman Barber had been in a gallery of former headteachers at Stewart’s Melville College for five years, even though his court case caused a scandal in 1945 and he was sent to jail for two years.

Barber’s conviction appeared to have been forgotten by the school – and the present-day management said they had had no knowledge of the crimes.

The history of these two schools dates back more than 300 years, beginning with Mary Erskine’s generous donation to the Merchant Company in 1694 to establish a school for girls.

Daniel Stewart and Melville College followed in the 19th century, and the three schools formally united in the 1970s to form Erskine Stewart’s Melville Schools.

By the turn of the 21st century, they had become the largest family of independent schools in Europe.

With a similarly illustrious history, boys-only Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh was founded by Charles Chalmers in 1828 before moving in 1833 to Merchiston Castle, a nearby 15th-century tower.

Behind the fairytale setting, a much darker story unfolded over decades as abuse became ‘normalised for generations of boys’, and abusers were ‘protected by tradition’.

The SCAI said indecency occurred from the 1950s to the second decade of the 21st century – but Lady Smith said that ‘by the early 2000s, Merchiston thought itself a leader in the child protection field’.

One of the ‘prolific abusers’, veteran teacher and former pupil James Rainy Brown, took his own life aged 75 in 2013 after learning of a police investigation – prompting a major policy review in 2014.

Another abuser, Mervyn Preston, had taught Rainy Brown as a pupil – while a total of eight teachers were deemed to have been abusers.

For decades, the inquiry found differences – particularly those that made children vulnerable – went ‘unnoticed by the school and staff’, and the ‘Merchiston culture, where toughness in adversity was encouraged, facilitated and exacerbated abuse’.

After a poor inspection report in 2015, Merchiston was made subject to special measures by the Scottish government.

It was obliged to respond, and Lady Smith said it was ‘well led by its board of governors’.

And abuse wasn’t limited to Scotland’s capital city, as the SCAI’s findings make clear.

In 2023, the inquiry found pupils at Morrison’s Academy in Crieff, Perthshire – alma mater of actor Ewan McGregor – were subjected to ‘mass beatings‘ amid a ‘culture of violence and emotional abuse‘.

Former pupils gave evidence about their ordeals – including being held underwater by older children.

Boys were made by their older classmates to eat soap or given the ‘rat‘s tail’, which was being whipped with towels, during shower times.

Some senior boys in the boarding houses engaged in sexually abusive behaviour towards younger ones.

It was no wonder that violence was allowed to take hold in school, considering the conduct of some of the staff.

Lady Smith said one teacher – James Flett – was ‘renowned among the pupils for breaking a boy‘s wrist when belting him‘ but he ‘continued working and was feted for his teaching skills up until his departure from the school in 1974’.

In 2021, the school’s then rector Gareth Warren repeated a ‘genuine and heartfelt apology‘ from Morrison‘s and said there had been decades of ‘systemic failures‘.

At Gordonstoun School in Moray – the King’s former school – there was an ‘extremely violent culture‘ in some boarding houses, with pupils ‘exposed to risks of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse‘.

The abuse continued ‘for a long time‘ at the school, which Charles attended from 1962 to 1967.

A boy was raped by a staff member, while voyeurism and indecent assault on both male and female pupils were revealed.

At the junior school Aberlour – which effectively functioned as a prep school – a ‘high proportion of staff’ sexually abused children and a known abuser was dismissed but not reported to police – while three other staff members left after ‘inappropriate‘ behaviour.

Racism was ‘widespread’, while ‘sexual abuse engaged in by pupils seems to have been frequent’.

An SCAI report in June 2024 said: ‘While, after co-education was introduced in 1972, it was not unusual for girls to form relationships – including sexual relationships – with older boys, they would often do so to protect themselves from others. This was, in fact, a form of grooming.’

The school, whose former pupils also include the King’s father, the late Duke of Edinburgh, and his niece and nephew Zara Tindall and Peter Phillips, now says those who ‘were abused deserved better, and we are sorry they were so badly let down’.

There is no doubt the country’s top schools claim to have learned the lessons of the past – but for the victims of abuse, by both staff and fellow pupils, the scars may never heal.