Angus Bell's Memoir Reveals Horrors of Life at Loretto Boarding School

London, United Kingdom Aug 30, 2026 ALN: In 2023, Angus Bell broke his silence on these pages. Today, he’s bringing out a memoir and wants the public to understand just how deep the damage goes in our society

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It is a testament to his courage that Angus Bell only cries once throughout our conversation.

If I was Angus, I don’t know if I’d ever stop crying. His childhood was an endless litany of torture, violence and abuse. Yet here he is, against the odds.

It is not memories of the past which overwhelm him, rather it’s the act of recounting kindness.

The moment comes as he starts talking about how he wouldn’t be here without the love of his wife.

“It was so hard for her,” he begins. But the words catch in his throat. “I’m going to get emotional,” he says. “F***, I didn’t want that to happen.”

He breathes deeply, composing himself. “So many women and children are the forgotten casualties of this,” he says.

He blinks the tears away. “Crying is good, though,” he says. “It’s the antidote to sociopathy.”

I tell Angus he’s the most courageous guy I’ve ever met – that I’ve met soldiers, medics and rescuers who have faced hell but couldn’t survive what he’s been through with the same dignity and humanity.

Schooldays

IT'S been two years since we last talked at such length. Today, we’re discussing his new book – about his childhood.

The last time we spoke, he told a story that, when I wrote it, horrified not just Scotland – or Britain – but people around the world.

In 2021, I began investigating pupil-on-pupil abuse in elite boarding schools. Angus’s old school, Loretto, outside Edinburgh, quickly became the focus of my reporting.

A former teacher at Loretto, David Stock, stepped forward as a whistleblower, detailing a horrifying “culture of violence” and sexual abuse.

Angus first spoke to me anonymously, describing the grotesque physical, mental and sexualized abuse he was subjected to by older boys in the 1990s.

The investigations expanded. Soon pupils from boarding schools across Britain contacted me revealing their abuse. It was described as a “MeToo moment”.

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Then Angus lifted his anonymity so I could tell his story in full. Angus described Loretto as “a factory for sadists and sociopaths. Children were tortured by other kids on a daily basis, beaten and abused by staff – subjected to the cruellest corporal punishments”.

He said: “I witnessed kids set on fire, their genitals mutilated from gang beatings with boots. Boys were raped with objects in front of other boys. We were beaten with hockey sticks and cricket bats daily.

“Beds were urinated and defecated on by our tormentors.

“I was whipped with belt buckles, thrown down stairs, waterboarded in dirty toilets, locked in trunks, strangled. Kids were hung out of windows, their heads beaten off the ground until they foamed at the mouth.

“We were crushed under furniture. Kids were shot in the face with BB guns. Teeth were punched out. I was stabbed with compasses, fly-kicked in the stomach.”

He called Loretto “a cross between The Purge and The Running Man. None of this would seem out of place in an Isis torture site, let alone a school that cost families hundreds of thousands of pounds. Children were abducted from their beds at night, stripped naked and tied to trees”.

He says: “Even now, decades later, remembering it can make me curl up and cry. We were sanctioned slaves for older pupils.”

Boys like Angus had to wait on older pupils at mealtimes. Their own food was stolen, spat in or thrown on the ground. “I went hungry every day for years.”

The cruelty was both bizarre and sadistic. Older pupils “played games” like “Head, Bollocks, Toes” where victims were beaten with sticks on their face, genitals and feet.

Older boys would ejaculate onto dinner plates and masturbate in front of younger pupils. Younger pupils were made to masturbate in front of older boys.

“I was thrown head first off a cliff, dunked in rivers, my face and spine were stamped on with rugby boots. My nose was broken, my face split open. I suffered multiple concussions, I was electrocuted in the showers, pelted with rocks, my finger was nearly severed. Someone stamped so hard on my leg I got a golf ball-sized blood clot and could’ve died.

“For me, we’re talking thousands of assaults over 2,000 days – it was eight years in hell. So many people were compromised socially, professionally, emotionally and criminally.

“I was physically assaulted by dozens of boys. Several pupils were violently or sexually assaulted by staff. Every one of us was a victim of a violent regime.”

Then Angus used one devastating phrase. “I was a child,” he said, “in a madhouse of violent abuse.”

It was so raw, so visceral, so nightmarish, it was picked up by media around the -speaking world.

Life after Loretto

ANGUS and I stayed in touch. In 2025, he took legal action against Loretto – the first of its kind involving pupil-on-pupil abuse. Before the case reached court, Loretto settled for a six-figure sum. His lawyer said what happened to Angus was “among some of the worst accounts of violence and depravity” he’d encountered.

Make no mistake: Loretto isn’t an isolated case. What makes the history of violence at elite boarding schools all the more disturbing is that the truth was staring the public in the face for years – yet we did nothing.

Everyone has heard of “fagging” – where older boys use younger boys as unpaid servants. Everyone knew violence was involved. Yet nobody questioned what was happening until Angus stepped forward.

Indeed, nearly every victim I spoke to said that when they did raise the issue in the past they were dismissed.

One told me: “It was seen as a rich kid’s problem. Folk would say, ‘oh poor you, it must be hard having a loaded daddy’. It was like people felt you deserved it.”

The ripples of boarding school abuse run deep in British society. As part of my investigations, I spoke to psychologists about “boarding school syndrome”.

Put crudely, the damage done to children – not just through violence, but the abandonment felt at being sent away from home – has profoundly detrimental effects in adulthood.

Some emerge with troubling personality traits, even psychopathy. Empathy has been stamped out of them.

Angus Bell with his book 'The Lost Boys' (Image: Supplied)