These things are so difficult, and it's not unusual for people to exaggerate after the fact. A lot of buggery went on, and things in that area - but I don't think there was ever anything that brutal. There was a system of sexual favours, but they never happened with violence. I think rapes certainly wouldn't have been called rapes. Writer and former editor, Sunday Telegraph Imagine it: 650 adolescents with nothing on their mind but sex who had to try to sublimate it all into playing rugger. It was like a ghastly parody of courtship, more to do with adolescent yearning than lust. It wasn't a culture of gang rape it was boys getting crushes on other boys. Sex was part of the culture of the school, but it was all pretty ingenuous. As far as I can see, the point was to produce people to run the British empire: if you could survive five years at public school, there was nothing the Kalahari desert or Antarctica could throw at you. There were cold baths every morning and the food was awful.
I was at Oundle in the mid-40s and it was tough.
