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British Royals

Queen Mother Warned Against Sending Prince Charles To Gordonstoun School

Recent letters that have been published, written by the late Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother have detailed how she pleaded for Prince Charles not to be sent to Gordonstoun School as Prince Philip had detailed and arranged.

Prince Philip himself had gone to Gordonstoun School in Scotland and decided that his son should also go there. However, Prince Charles’s personality did not fit with the methods of Gordonstoun. The Prince found himself being bullied and frequently uncomfortable in the school.

She petitioned the Queen not to send Prince Charles to Gordonstoun in Moray as he would feel “terribly cut off and lonely in the far north” and suggested that he instead attend the “staunchly protestant” Eton.

But her concerns proved accurate after Prince Charles described the inter-denominational school as “Colditz in kilts”.

On May 23, 1961, the Queen Mother wrote to her daughter, ‘My Darling Lillibet’, before stating that she has been “thinking such as lot about Charles” and his schooling.

“I suppose he will be taking his entrance exam for Eton soon. I do hope he passes because it might be the ideal school for one of his character and temperament,” she wrote.

The Queen Mother, being particularly fond of Prince Charles, added: “All your friends’ sons are at Eton and it is so important to be able to grow up with people you will be with later in life.

Writing home in 1963, he detailed, “the people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness, they are horrid. I don’t know how anybody could be so foul.”

One contemporary at the school recalled that Charles was bullied “maliciously, cruelly and without respite.”

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