Police investigate Yehudi Menuhin School for past abuse

Antwerp Smerle says:

Abusive behaviour by the director Marcel Gazelle and by other staff at the Menuhin School has been reported many times, by Nigel Kennedy amongst others. I hope that the victims will gain some belated satisfaction when the police investigation confirms the truth of those allegations.

Ten years ago, the musician Ian Pace posted this on his blog:

[“Gazelle would allegedly enter the younger girls’ rooms to wake them up and would touch them under their bed clothes as they lay there. The older girls suffered an even more intrusive wake up call. Several girls at the school during the 1960s have claimed that he groomed them and then sexually abused them repeatedly over several years, leading to lifelong severe mental and sexual problems and often an inability to go near the school again (an attitude shared by many others claiming to have suffered non-sexual, but severe psychological and emotional abuse at the same school). His activities were not talked about leading many to believe that they were the only ones to suffer that fate, only discovering relatively recently that others had also been abused. In lessons he would sometimes have his arm placed continuously around some girls, the smoke from his Gitane cigarettes wafting into their nostrils. He also instilled fear in many due to his temper, leading some to feel they needed to feign enjoyment of his ‘attentions’ in order to avoid his anger.

Gazelle is also alleged to have employed a technique which is eerily near-identical to that of which I have heard from other teachers in other institutions. This involved reducing students to tears regularly at the beginning of lessons, by cruelly berating them for how they played, completely undermining their confidence (obliviously to whether they might be ill or anything else), so as then to be able to take them on his knee to comfort and cuddle them, thus exploiting vulnerability as a strategy for control.

Mental and emotional cruelty and manipulation were allegedly equally common from other teachers there. The cello teacher Maurice Gendron is claimed to have systematically reduced students to tears in practically every lesson, whilst projecting outwards the symptoms of his morphine addiction, and would quiz students on their sex life and masturbation habits.

Jacqueline Gazelle was remembered as pointedly staring at the floor when students would make the slightest slip in a concert, then refusing to say a word to them afterwards. Boys would queue up at the toilets before her lessons out of fright. She is remembered to have had ferocious tantrums and would throw their music on the floor and insult them mercilessly, almost taking pleasure in causing them distress – students would emerge from her lessons crying and shaking.

Barbara Kerslake is recalled to have had a characteristic trick of slamming the piano lid down on children’s hands whilst they were playing. Others’ teaching would simply consist of picking up their instrument and playing something perfectly so as to shame the child by comparison. Humiliation of pupils was common, and they were made to think that those who had left because of the pressure were merely failures, an epithet they themselves dreaded. On the other hand, the school liked to parade those it saw as its successes in front of the media and visiting royals – there was even a point where students regularly appeared on Savile’s Jim’ll Fix It. The idea that children need reassurance and help, rather than just criticism, appears to have passed various teachers by, though some have spoken fondly in particular of Margaret Norris.

The tortuous environment caused children to run away, be expelled, shoplift, or even set the building on fire deliberately. Some children claimed to be being abused by a parent, and no-one believed them or cared. One member of staff is alleged to have had a public affair with another whilst the former’s spouse and children were living on campus; another, whose family also lived on the premises, had an relationship with a young student on and off campus. Empty beds were the tell-tale sign that pupils were being ‘tended to’ elsewhere.”