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

Former schoolboys at the private school gave raw testimonies about abuse meted out by John Brownlee

• ‘Sadistic’ teacher found to have assaulted pupils for 20 years

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