Beatings, humiliation and loss of self-worth: how Edinburgh Academy victims were scarred

The enormity of the abuse suffered at the hands of the Edinburgh Academy teacher John Brownlee became clear when the first witness was asked a simple question about the moment his mother left him alone at the boarding house of the elite private school.

John Graham, now a trim 56-year-old with a goatee beard, was asked: how did he feel? Until then fluent and factual in the witness box, Graham froze. His face crumpled. In that moment, Graham again became the eight-year-old boy who had felt “not good” that day, but with the awful adult hindsight of the abuse he would endure there.

“I didn’t know these people. I didn’t know this place. It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.”

Graham’s graphic account at Edinburgh sheriff court earlier this month, of being a child repeatedly assaulted, beaten and abused at Brownlee’s hands set the scene for nine harrowing days of witness accounts which exposed, in their words, a vicious sadist who relished inflicting pain.

According to a lengthy indictment, Brownlee, now an 89-year-old with advanced dementia, terrorised young boys over a 20-year period: both at Dundas House, where he lived with his own family alongside boarding pupils, and at the Academy’s junior school, where he rose to the position of deputy head.

Declared unfit to stand trial on health grounds, the 36 charges against him were heard in a rare quasi-trial process known as an “examination of facts” overseen, without a jury, by Sheriff Ian Anderson.

Witnesses including Nicky Campbell, the BBC journalist and broadcaster, recounted the weapons Brownlee employed over those two decades. Those included the clacken (a spoon-like bat Brownlee repeatedly used “with a golf swing” to strike the boys’ backsides), a cricket bat, a broken snooker cue, metal and wooden rulers sometimes brought sharp edge-down on a child’s knuckles, his own brogues, fists and open hand.

“He had a hair-trigger temper on him,” Graham said. He witnessed another boy being “annihilated” once in the junior school dining hall. “Smashed him down on the floor, just laid into him; he was kicking him, just battering him.”

Frazer MacDonald, 54, a former Christian missionary who arrived at Dundas House aged eight, recalled Brownlee had a method for choking boys by inserting his knuckled fist inside the back of a boy’s collar, and twisting as he flexed his fist. “You felt like you were being strangled; it happened to many boys.”

Others testified to that technique; Campbell told the court Brownlee, who at turns could be charismatic and at others arbitrarily violent, once rained blows on his head like “a knuckle dance down on my skull”.

Giles Moffat, 51, described being locked in a garden shed with two other boys over a weekend for a minor infraction, and being fed on bread and milk by Brownlee’s wife. He also described one shocking incident where a six-year-old had a garden hose pushed into his anus by Brownlee as a punishment for bedwetting.

Moffat, who co-founded a support group for survivors of Edinburgh Academy abuse, was clear that for those who witnessed the abuse of their fellow pupils it could be as traumatic as being abused themselves.

“He enjoyed the psychological torture, there was no doubt about that,” said another witness, who has asked not to be named. During one assault, Brownlee slammed the folding door of a blackboard on his head “spraying spittle” as he did so. “He enjoyed the fear, knowing that the violence could happen at any time.”

“The pain of the beating passes,” said Graham Macleod, a day pupil who had Brownlee as a teacher at junior school, “but the humiliation of being beaten in front of your peers, the class, that lasts,. So humiliation is very much part of the experience.”

Others described routine humiliations: cold baths for boys who failed to brush their teeth; children’s underpants paraded in front of their peers; a metal comb dragged painfully across their scalps in the morning.

Witnessed described a culture where violence, fear, silence and shame were so normalised that bullying was “institutionalised”, as the children turned against one another to act out their distress.

The loss of self-worth was a recurring theme. A number of the witnesses have survived alcoholism and opiate addiction; some struggled to build careers; others know classmates who killed themselves in adulthood.

Neil McDonald, a former army major, said self-loathing drove him to reckless, suicidal conduct in war zones. “I hate myself,” he told the court bluntly. “I see myself as a loathsome piece of shit. I can’t stand being me. Because I was taught that that was what we were.”

The witnesses were repeatedly pressed by Andrew Seggie, the Brownlee family’s lawyer, to explain whether they had told their parents about their experiences. Many said they did not; some feared retribution in the school; others said they thought Brownlee’s behaviour was normal, or that they, somehow, deserved it.

Campbell, who also alleges other abuses including a serious sexual assault by other Academy teachers, never told his parents. “You thought, this is happening. It must be OK,” Campbell told the court. “I must have put myself in this situation, for this to happen.”

But the court also heard Brownlee routinely censored the weekly letters boys were expected to send home: “If he didn’t like what was in, you would be made to rewrite it.”

These men, now stout with their hair grey or receding in middle age, say privately that telling their story in court – even without Brownlee in the dock to hear them – was an opportunity to break the hold this man had on them. Some wanted the chance to speak for longer, but others described the mental strain of returning to their vulnerable younger selves in public.

The question of why no other staff member intervened became another recurring theme of the hearings. Brownlee’s wife, Margaret, and his sons Neil and Graeme also lived in Dundas House. Did they ever intervene?

They did not, said the witnesses, and instead appeared for the defence to vigorously dismiss the allegations of more than 30 former pupils as “ridiculous”, “lies” or “distortions”.

Margaret, an immaculately presented 83-year-old, insisted Dundas House was “run along family lines”.

Her elder son, Graeme, at 56, of an age with many of the victims, described it as “a happy house” where he grew up “cheek by jowl” with the other pupils and witnessed no evidence of beatings or other excessive punishments.

“The truth is you are here to protect your father’s legacy and you will never and can never accept these things happened,” the fiscal put to him at the conclusion of his evidence.

“That is correct,” he replied.

The evidence exposed a wider culture of complicity. Other teachers were keenly aware of the abuse but it appears none took action, and some were directly complicit in Brownlee’s violence.

Indeed, Brownlee is one of numerous former teachers facing prosecution for violent and sexual assaults on their pupils. Many of these charges stem from the work of the long-running Scottish child abuse inquiry, which has commended the work of the journalist Alex Renton, whose BBC Radio 4 documentary series In Dark Corners about abuse in Britain’s elite private schools prompted Campbell to reveal his own abuse. It resulted in a flood of other former pupils coming forward and encouraging the inquiry to take detailed evidence on the school.

But one boy did summon up the courage to report Brownlee, to the headteacher’s wife one evening. Then about nine or 10 years old, Graham Macleod recalled “a very tearful conversation” with her about the abuse and trauma he had suffered. “She seemed to be obviously distressed by it. I didn’t hold back. My impression after that was things did improve, at least for me.”

That conversation took place in 1967. Brownlee remained on Academy staff for another 20 years.

• In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800; adult survivors can seek help at Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International