John Peel's autobiography, currently being serialised in The Sunday Telegraph, has revealed that the legendary DJ suffered sexual abuse at the hands of an older pupil whilst at boarding school. Peel was halfway through writing the book at the time of his death last year, and it has subsequently been finished by his wife and four children.
Peel details the abuse wrought on new pupils by the older boys at Shrewsbury High School in Shropshire, writing: "Another study monitor obliged me to perform an even more unwelcome service during what was supposed to be a period for doing homework. This period, during which we were confined to our studies, was called 'top schools', but for my study monitor it was 'hand jobs'. If for some reason my tormentor didn't require a hand job, possibly because he had already compelled another small boy to give him one, he loaned me to one of his two friends and I was obliged to service them instead."
He goes on to describe how the boy in question later raped him: "Towards the end of our time together, he compelled me to agree to meet him in a public toilet in the cemetery on the outskirts of Shrewsbury, where he raped me. Oddly enough, much as I hated the experience, I think I had become so accustomed to systematic sexual abuse that I wasn't especially traumatised by the experience."
He continues: "It was many years before I could bring myself to tell anyone what had happened to me, and when I did tell Sheila, my wife, one afternoon in the Eighties as we drove through Shrewsbury and past the cemetery toilet block, she found it, I think, more upsetting than I ever did. We have not spoken of it again."
Peel did not name his abuser, but in his later years told a close friend from his schooldays 'Sparrow' Harrison, who knows who the individual is, but is not prepared to identify him.