Describing his prep school as a ‘hotbed of all sorts of things that are coming out now’, Tom Parker Bowles told how one master at his prep school would join the boys in the shower.
Mr Parker Bowles, 39, revealed that when his daughter turned seven this month, he reminded his mother: ‘You sent me away eight months after this.’
In an interview with The Times, he claims that she was ‘slightly appalled, saying she’d never do it again’, adding: ‘But it was the thing you did.’
Mr Parker Bowles, a food critic, says his children, Lola and Freddie, go to day schools in London, although he intends to send his son to board at Eton College when he is 13.He refers to his school days at Summer Fields prep school in Oxford as ‘a hotbed of all the sorts of things that are coming out now’, including one master who take a shower in the morning with the pupils.
Mr Parker Bowles said his father had urged him to speak up if anything untoward happened at Summer Fields. He said: ‘It was just certain things that weren’t right and I’d say to my dad and he’d say “Well, you tell me if anything happens”. And it never did.’
He went on to Eton, which he says he enjoyed, but his grades were so poor that his father used to threaten to send him to a comprehensive school if he did not work harder.
Mr Parker Bowles said: ‘He meant it, [saying] “I’m not going to spend all this money on you if you’re not going to pull your f****** finger out”.
‘He drove me past Corsham comprehensive and I just remember thinking how many pretty girls there were, but there were also tough-looking boys, not like the sort of boys at Eton.’
Mr Parker Bowles, who calls himself ‘a good old pleb’, says that he was not a high-flyer at school, although he still got into Oxford.
He said: ‘I was rubbish at everything. I was good at smoking. We knew where a couple of pubs were where you could drink underage, but, apart from a couple of English prizes, I moved like a ghost through that school.’
He also revealed the pain of finding out about his mother’s affair with Prince Charles – to the extent of avoiding reading newspapers when the relationship became public. His mother and Prince Charles married in 2005.
He was at Oxford in 1993 when Camilla-gate broke and the nation read a transcript of a very intimate telephone conversation between the pair.
He recalled: ‘I sort of remember not looking at the paper. Because, you know, Jesus, the things that we’ve all said to people that we love … that you wouldn’t want the world reading.
‘I just felt pissed off. I wasn’t going to read that sort of stuff about my mother, just as much as she wouldn’t want to read it about me or my kids certainly wouldn’t want to read it about me.'
