Word: gordonstoun
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Gordonstoun is anything but luxurious. Dormitories are stark and functional. The daily regimen, while it pays due deference to academic achievement, ordains two cold showers a day, student-labor details (Charles, more often than not at first, drew the garbage detail), and plenty of toughening outdoor sports. The Prince was not cosseted. One of his teachers made a point of referring to him as "Charlie-boy," and on the rugby field he was hit hard, often deliberately. He made few close friends. Most boys, afraid of being scorned by their fellows for "sucking up" to Charles, treated him distantly...
Adding to his unpleasant experiences was the "cherry brandy" incident, Charles' first brush with notoriety. During a cruise from Gordonstoun aboard the school yacht, the boys went ashore at Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. Charles and a few others stopped at a hotel for a meal, and the 14-year-old Prince, annoyed by tourists who stared at him through the windows, fled to the bar. He had never been in one before, he recalled later, and "the first thing I thought of doing was having a drink. It seemed the most sensible thing." He ordered a cherry brandy...
Early in 1966, the Prince jumped to Australia and Timbertop, a Gordonstoun-like branch of Melbourne's posh Geelong school. Charles arrived in February, and for the next six months took 50-to-60 mile hikes in the outback, cooked johnnycakes over his own campfire, fed the pigs and chickens, and chopped wood by the cord. His schoolmates were friendly, though he recalls being chaffed as a "Pom" (Aussie slang for an Englishman) on at least one occasion. "I had an umbrella with me," he said. "It had been raining quite heavily, and they all looked rather quizzically at this...
...Back at Gordonstoun in November, he had a long-awaited chance to play a comic acting role: he starred as the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance. Otherwise the year passed quietly. Without sitting for college entrance examinations, Charles was allowed to enter Trinity College, Cambridge, in October...
...painfully reserved. In his first week at Cambridge, he made no attempts to get to know fellow students, walked around the college grounds alone with his head down. He will probably mix eventually; after five years at Cheam, then five more at his father's old school of Gordonstoun in Scotland, he gained a good deal of self-confidence during a six-month stay at Timbertop, the roughing-it school in Australia from which he returned last year...