It’s the heart-warming tale of a teacher who brings a penguin back to life after he rescues it from an oil spill – a true story that first became a best-selling book and is now a feelgood film starring Steve Coogan.
The Penguin Lessons was based on author Tom Michell’s own experiences while teaching at a boys’ boarding school in Argentina in the 1970s. A charming tale, it relates how he rescued the Magellanic penguin while on holiday in Uruguay and, after it refused to leave his side, then smuggled it back to Buenos Aires, where it became a source of unexpected solace and inspiration during a time of political turmoil.
While the book starts with the author’s decision to leave the family home in Sussex as a 21-year-old and set out on his South American adventure, what it doesn’t mention was that he already had teaching experience, at a boys’ boarding school nestled in the Dorset countryside.
This was under his real name Mike Thompson – Tom Michell is a pen name. But if Mr Thompson’s time at The Old Malthouse wasn’t considered significant enough to recall in his memoir, it’s a school that Graham Jones* has never forgotten. And all these decades on, it is the smell that he remembers most vividly.
Musky, damp and faintly chemical, it will still catch him unawares, transporting him back to the prep school’s science laboratory.
It was in that lab, often with the lights off and the room closed to others, that Graham alleges, aged 12, he was sexually abused over months by no less than Mike Thompson, his science teacher.
Not that he recognised it as abuse at the time: in a boarding school with little access to the outside world and no guidance from parents, he says he had no framework to understand what was happening, nor any vocabulary to describe it.
‘For a very long time I didn’t realise I’d been abused,’ Graham told the Daily Mail this week. ‘I had no moral compass to know that what happened was inappropriate or wrong.’
It’s the heart-warming tale of a teacher who brings a penguin back to life after he rescues it from an oil spill (Pictured: Steve Coogan playing Tom Mitchell)
Teacher Mike Thompson in the 1970s when he worked at the Old Malthouse school
Indeed, it was not until 2017, when Graham was in his 50s, that he finally felt able to report what had happened to the police.
By this point The Penguin Lessons had been published for two years, although Graham was oblivious to the book, let alone its author.
Mr Thompson, accompanied by his lawyer, was interviewed, but no further action was taken and Graham resigned himself to the likelihood he might never receive any formal acknowledgement or redress. He tried, as he had done for years, to close the door on the past.
That resolve shifted this year, when posters for The Penguin Lessons began appearing across his home city. Alerted to the film’s release by a school alumni group on Facebook, Graham Googled it and recognised his old teacher from the publicity shots.
While the book had reflected the author’s youth when he befriended the penguin, the film reimagined Tom as an eccentric middle-aged English teacher played by Coogan.
Mr Thompson, now in his 70s and a grandfather, is credited as an executive producer and appeared on the red carpet at the film’s premiere alongside Coogan and took part in promotional television interviews.
At one point he appeared in an interview on ITV’s This Morning, alongside the lead actor, where Coogan describes him as a ‘good chap… mostly’, to which Thompson replies: ‘You don’t know me very well’.
For Graham, it was all too much. ‘Everything about it was wrong,’ he says. ‘There he is, looking pleased as punch, joking with actors and being celebrated on national television as this eccentric old Englishman.
‘And all the time he had this secret. Watching him being portrayed as this quirky, loveable figure felt deeply uncomfortable.’ He was not alone in feeling blindsided by Mike Thompson’s re-emergence. This month Graham was in a Channel 4 News report alongside two other former pupils of The Old Malthouse, each alleging that they too had been abused by Mr Thompson.
In a statement, Mr Thompson denied the allegations, saying: ‘These deplorable claims are without substance and emphatically denied. A version of [Graham’s] false story was dismissed by the police in 2017. If these individuals were abused 50 years ago, they have my sympathy, but it was not me who was responsible.’
Following the broadcast, three further former pupils contacted the programme with new allegations relating to their time at the school.
Channel 4 also received an allegation from a former pupil at Truro School, a private school in Cornwall where Mr Thompson later taught.
Mr Thompson added: ‘I have never behaved inappropriately towards any student. These serious and historic allegations are unfounded and diametrically opposite to my conduct, character or professional record.’
Tom Michell and Steve Coogan attend the UK Premiere of ‘The Penguin Lessons’
The film reimagined Tom as an eccentric middle-aged English teacher played by Coogan (Pictured: A scene from The Penguin Lessons)
Still, the claims cast a shadow over a film released to significant fanfare and still streaming widely.
The Old Malthouse itself closed in 2007, bringing to an end more than a century of operation. Founded in 1906 in the village of Langton Matravers by former England footballer Rex Corbett, it educated around 100 boys aged eight to 13, acting as a feeder for major public schools. Surrounded by dramatic coastline and woodland, it was remote and insular even by boarding school standards.
Graham arrived aged eight in the early 70s and remembers feeling disoriented by the school’s isolation.
‘It was a long way from anywhere, especially your parents,’ he says. ‘It was a small, closeted place run by a triumvirate of old men long since dead, all of whom seemed to have been there forever.
‘On Sundays after lunch we were kicked off the premises and told not to come back until dark. So eight or nine-year-olds were swimming in the sea unaccompanied, exploring quarries with torches. That part was incredibly exciting, although looking back it seems extraordinary.’
Physically slight and not sporty, Graham struggled to settle at first. ‘I don’t know whether that made me a target particularly,’ he says, ‘but one of my objections to boarding now is that you lose the everyday contact with your parents. They are no longer your first port of call. And it makes you vulnerable to exploitation, whether from a matron, another boy or a teacher.’
Into this environment arrived the ‘James Bond’ figure of Thompson, then 21, whose youth and confidence made him stand out. He drove an Aston Martin DB6 and, later, a Lotus kit car; he also owned a yacht moored nearby.
‘In that environment, anyone that much younger who could drive a fast car and kick a rugby ball 400ft up into the air was a role model,’ Graham says. ‘Boys wanted his attention and approval.’
According to Graham, it was Mr Thompson who first introduced him to sexually explicit material.
‘Part of the abuse started with him having pupils in his room and showing us pornography,’ he says. ‘Some had a pretence of academic justification, like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, which did contain images of naked men and women. Then there were magazines that were purely pornographic. Looking back, it sexualised us before we were equipped to understand it.’
Physically slight and not sporty, ex-pupil who goes by the alias of Graham, struggled to settle at first (PIctured: Scene of The Penguin Lessons)
While the film has revived painful memories for Graham, it’s raised questions for Penguin Books, already facing controversy (Pictured: Scenes from The Penguin Lessons)
What Graham describes as the grooming process extended to invitations to the science laboratory outside school hours, usually in the company of one or two other boys. ‘At that age it was exciting; you felt you were part of an inner sanctum,’ he recalls. Once there, he alleges that the boys were encouraged to engage in sexualised behaviour, sometimes on their own and at times involving Mr Thompson himself.
Graham says the encounters took place both in darkness and, on occasions, with the lights on. He believes he was also asked to carry out a sexual act on Mr Thompson. ‘What strikes me now is that because other children were in the room, it didn’t feel as strange as it should have,’ he says.
‘Now children are taught about boundaries and safeguarding, but back then there was no frame of reference. In some ways it felt exciting. It was exploratory. You felt special, as if he was guiding you or helping you.’
Thompson left the school in 1975 and a year later began teaching at an elite public school in Buenos Aires, an experience that would later form the backdrop to The Penguin Lessons.
Graham – who has asked that his profession and marital status not be disclosed to protect his anonymity – says he was unaware of any of this at the time. He left school before Thompson, though he continued corresponding with him for a few months following his own departure from school.
‘I have a letter from him after I left school, in which he describes going to Boulogne on his yacht and visiting brothels. What was he doing telling a 13-year-old that? Contact fizzled out and I have no recollection of knowing he moved to Argentina.’ For many years he rarely dwelt on what had happened. ‘I did think about it from time to time, but it wasn’t something eating away at me,’ he says.
‘For a long time my view was pragmatic: it happened, get over it. And of course all victims of abuse carry shame and embarrassment, so it’s easier to push it away. It wasn’t something I discussed with a single person.’
That changed in 2017, when Graham spoke to police about an unrelated matter and mentioned the events at school almost incidentally. ‘The reaction of the detectives was incredibly illuminating,’ he recalls. ‘Suddenly you had a police officer taking it seriously as a criminal matter.
‘I suppose that was the point at which I really began to confront it. It was a relief to have told someone; it made me more determined to do something.’
Following Graham’s report, Mike Thompson was interviewed. He was not charged but Graham says police told him the matter would appear on an enhanced pre-employment check in future, although he had retired by then.
Police also wrote what Graham describes as a ‘neutral’ letter to former pupils stating they were looking into allegations of abuse at the school in the 70s.
‘They were clear they could not go on what they called a fishing trip for other victims but they were contacted by two other people in relation to Mr Thompson who did not want to complain officially,’ he says.
Tom Mitchell, also known as Mike Thompson, left the school in 1975 and a year later began teaching at an elite public school in Buenos Aires (Pictured: Scene from The Penguin Lessons)
In 2021, after a school reunion which Graham did not attend but where another old boy in which he had confided discreetly mentioned his experiences to other alumni, he says he was contacted by two former pupils.
‘One said: “It’s silly. Everyone was at it, for God’s sake. Leave it alone.” The other was greatly traumatised and it had clearly affected him very deeply.’
Graham returned to the police to ask them to reopen their investigation but without additional complainants he was told they could not proceed.
He contacted them again in 2022 after broadcaster Nicky Campbell went public with his own account of physical abuse at the hands of his teacher John Brownlee at his Edinburgh public school.
Brownlee was deemed medically unfit to stand trial but a court found the allegations proven on the facts. ‘In the wake of it I contacted the police again because it made me think there is someone out there not facing justice. It made me quite angry.’
Graham assumed that might be the end of the matter – until posters for The Penguin Lessons appeared in his home city. ‘I Googled Thompson, the first time I had seen his picture for 40 years, and the first time I’d heard his voice in 40 or 50 years. He was older and gaunter but it was him. I immediately phoned the policeman concerned and said: “This is our man. He’s made a bloody film”.’
While the film has revived painful memories for Graham, it’s raised questions for Penguin Books, already facing controversy over alleged misrepresentation in another memoir, The Salt Path, claims denied by the author.
In a statement to Channel 4, Penguin Random House said they were shocked and surprised by the allegations, which they said they had not previously been aware of. Dorset Police told the Daily Mail: ‘We can confirm we are carrying out an investigation into allegations of sexual abuse at the Old Malthouse School in Dorset in the 1970s.’
* Graham Jones is a pseudonym.
