Discreet head does not recall royal beating THE DUKE OF YARD WAS SPANKED FLOGGING

An eight-year-old Prince Andrew is greeted by James Edwards at Heatherdown Preparatory School in 1968

THE headmaster who beat the Duke of York at his preparatory school said yesterday that he had no recollection of the event. James Edwards, 75, recalled that the standard form of punishment at Heatherdown, near Ascot, was a clothes brush administered to the backside.

Mr Edwards, who lives in retirement in the West Country, was head of the school seven miles from Windsor Castle that the young Prince Andrew attended between 1968 and 1973 before going to Gordonstoun.

Even if he could recall the incident he would not dream of breaking the confidentiality, he said.

In an interview to launch the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children's Full Stop appeal against cruelty to children, the Duke said that he had once been beaten at his prep school, but would never beat his own children. His parents had never hit him, he added.

Mr Edwards recalled yesterday that he had inherited the clothes brush, the school's only form of corporal punishment, from his predecessor as headmaster. "I disapproved of the cane, and I strongly disapproved of older boys administering punishment to younger ones, as happened in some schools," he said.

The clothes brush was used only rarely. "If you have to have corporal punishment, it has to be standardised, which is why I never entrusted it to anyone else," Mr Edwards said.

He has mixed feelings about corporal punishment being banned in schools. "Its danger was that it was always open to abuse," he said.

Before Heatherdown, set in its own 30 acres of grounds, closed in 1982, it also schooled to Prince Edward, James Ogilvy, the son of Princess Alexandra, and the Earl of St Andrews, the eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of Kent. There is no record of any of them having suffered the clothes brush, which was clearly an effective instrument: the Duke of York said that, when he moved on to Gordonstoun, he never suffered corporal punishment again.

Neither the Duke nor his headmaster was prepared to say what misdemeanour prompted the punishment. Suspicion remains that the clothes brush was administered following an incident during a school outing to the Natural History Museum in London, when Prince Andrew was 11. Some Heatherdown boys were involved in a scuffle with teenagers who were said to have approached them demanding money.

Buckingham Palace vehemently denied that the Prince had been involved. The discreet Mr Edwards may have known better.