Boys who were infected with HIV and hepatitis when they were experimented on as schoolchildren have been recognised with a new memorial.
During the 1970s and 1980s, boys with the blood clotting disorder haemophilia were given experimental blood products while they attended the Lord Mayor’s Treloar’s College, a boarding school in Hampshire.
Of the 122 pupils with haemophilia who attended the school between 1970 and 1987, only around 30 were still alive when the Infected Blood Public Inquiry published its main report into the scandal in 2024.
The report highlighted how few of the pupils with haemophilia who ‘attended the school during the 1970s and 1980s ‘escaped being infected’.
It concluded that the pupils, commonly referred to as the Treloar Boys, had been treated as ‘objects of research’ and highlighted how the pupils were experimented on without their knowledge by NHS clinicians, who knew the dangers it posed.
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Now, a memorial has been installed at the college, with a statue depicting two pupils, one with a sling and another holding a cane, embracing each other.
‘Remembering 122 haemophiliac pupils of Treloar’s. Infected as children, victims of unethical research’ is inscribed at the bottom of the memorial.
Adrian Goodyear, 55, said that when he first attended the school it felt like a new dawn, adding: ‘When I first arrived here with 10 other friends I was nine years old – we couldn’t believe the place we were looking at: rolling country hills, swimming pools, canoes, a Jacobean mansion, it was just remarkable at first.
‘We left school with death sentences,’ he added. ‘In 1985, a doctor tearfully said that I had two to three years to live.
‘I was told this with five other boys, and the doctor went round the room and said: ‘You have… you haven’t… you have… you haven’t… you have got HIV’. I was the last remaining boy in that room.’
What did the enquiry discover?
The inquiry concluded children at Treloar’s were treated with multiple commercial concentrates that were known to carry higher risks of infection and staff favoured the “advancement of research” above the best interests of the children.
The report found that from 1977, medical research was carried out at Treloar’s “to an extent which appears unparalleled elsewhere” and children were treated unnecessarily with concentrates, particularly commercial ones rather than alternative safer treatments.
Haemophilia is an inherited disorder where the blood does not clot properly.
Most people with the condition have a shortage of the protein that enables human blood to clot, known as factor VIII.
In the 1970s, a new treatment was developed – factor concentrate – to replace the missing clotting agent, which was made from donated human blood plasma.
‘When we were here we made promises… they died in front of us, one winter we lost five boys,’ Adrian said. ‘I made promises to them, as did the other lads here today, that we would never give up, we would find out what happened.’
Gary Webster, 61, who was infected with HIV and hepatitis C when he attended Treloar’s between 1975 and 1983, recalled how he was called to the doctor’s office one dinner time as a child, and was told he had HIV ‘and had two years to live.’
He said that the memorial was important ‘to remember what happened and to make sure it never happens again’.
Sir Brian Langstaff’s report found there is ‘no doubt’ that the healthcare professionals at Treloar’s were aware of the risks of virus transmission through blood and blood products.
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