A teacher at a top private school stabbed a pupil in the hand so hard it drew blood, an inquiry has been told. Philip Dundas, 57, told the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry yesterday of the huge psychological damage caused by physical and sexual abuse at Edinburgh Academy.
A female teacher stabbed him in the hand with a pencil and drew blood “to show what she meant by the pencil being sharp enough”. A male teacher who was normally “nice” made him see stars – something he had only ever seen in Tom and Jerry cartoons – by bashing his head off a desk, out of the blue. He said that as a small boy who had arrived at the school aged 10, coming from East Lothian, he had been an easy target for bullies due to his lack of sporting talent. But many of the bullies were among the staff. He told of the “humiliation” of being forced to remove his PE shorts and underpants in front of the PE teacher and other boys. He said the teacher also watched the boys shower.
That assault led him to fear waiting for lifts home in the school, so he had started going to local shops and was befriended by a shopkeeper in Henderson Row, who he later saw sexually abusing another boy.