It won’t be long before Prince George finishes his time at Lambrook and heads off to secondary school. And while Princess Kate and Prince William have not yet confirmed where their son will head next, according to numerous reports, their top choice for their eldest child is Marlborough College, which the Princess herself attended between 1996 and 2000.
The co-educational boarding school is one of the country’s most prestigious facilities, where fees reportedly come in at an eye-watering £19,714.20 each term / £59.142.60 a year. And while it has attracted some notable alumni – including Kate – it once had a very wild side, according to one former pupil.
Journalist Lebby Eyres joined the school in 1988 and she has now lifted the lid on what went on behind the scenes. According to Lebby, at the time she attended, female pupils who attended Marlborough were ‘howled’ at by boys in their shared houses when we first walked into house assembly. And “marks out of 10 were given to the girls eating in the dreaded Norwood Hall dining room”.
Weekends, meanwhile, were usually spent ‘oating’ – the pupils’ code word for ‘snogging’ – and drinking in the local pubs while trying to avoid getting ‘gated’, the equivalent to being grounded. “If you had snogged someone (or worse), the Hall would erupt to the sound of 800 trays being bashed on the tables,” she said.
Lebby, who attended the school alongside Samantha Cameron, told for The Sun that pupils would usually head to a local pub on a Saturday evening, “escaping into the car park at the back if we caught sight of a beak [teacher] coming in to ‘bust’ us”.
Sundays, meanwhile, allegedly saw students drink home brew in house bars, in addition to the allotted two glasses of beer or wine (for sixth form students only). “In reality, two turned into several glasses of disgusting red wine or beer, which often led to our loos being redecorated in a fetching shade of scarlet,” she confessed.
Much has changed for Marlborough since then, however, and it is now one of the country’s leading schools, with a progressive female Master, Louise Moelwyn-Hughes, at its head.
Prince William’s future wife Kate joined the prestigious co-ed boarding school in 1996, having moved after enduring bullying at her previous school, Downe House. Kate is believed to have felt at home from the start of her time at Marlborough, where she joined the school’s cosy all-girls boarding house, Elmhurst.
She also made a very close group of friends – but there was one thing that set her apart. According to the publication, Kate remained a responsible role model and was never caught with illicit alcohol – unlike her friends, one of whom once confided: “A group of us used to sneak off to Reading to go drinking but she would never join us.”
