Prince Harry Opened Up About His Painful Eton Experience As Prince George Walks The Same Halls

Oct 06, 2026 by apost team

When Prince Harry arrived at Eton College, he thought his older brother being there would make things easier. He was wrong.

“Probably my first day,” Harry recalled in the 2017 documentary “Diana, Our Mother: Her Life and Legacy,” looking at a photograph with William. “Me turning up thinking, ‘I’ve got my older brother at the school, he’ll be looking after me.’ When, in fact, you just ignored me.”

William’s response, also on camera, was just a smile. He did not deny it.

This was among the anecdotes Harry has shared about the Eton experience in several public interviews. The picture that emerges is of a young man who found the academic side difficult, the social side isolating at first, and the absence of his brother’s support genuinely painful.

“At the time, it hurt,” he once told Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes.” He also told broadcaster Tom Bradby that as “the younger brother, that sucks.”

In the end, something else ended up holding him together.

“Sport held me together,” he had told TIME magazine. “I was one of those kids at school who did not enjoy classroom work.”

In 2026, his nephew would be the one walking through those same gates. Prince George arrived at Eton on Sept. 8, 2026, wearing the school’s famous black tailcoat, waistcoat, and pinstriped trousers with a stiff white collar — the same uniform his father and uncle wore before him. He was dropped off by Prince William and Princess Catherine and photographed waving goodbye. He was described as looking “the spitting image” of his father on his own first day almost three decades earlier.

The school he has entered is unlike any other in Britain. Understanding what Eton actually is — and what it asks of every boy who arrives — helps explain both what Harry found so hard and what George has walked into.

King Henry VI founded Eton College in 1440. It accommodates 1,300 boys, has 25 boarding houses, and a culture so dense with its own language and traditions that arriving as a newcomer can feel like stepping into a foreign country. Every boy has a room of his own — no shared bedrooms. The school’s website stated its philosophy plainly:

“Boys thus have their own private space and are required to organise themselves and to develop self-discipline in meeting tasks and deadlines.”

Its in-house vernacular also takes time to learn. Bad work earns a “rip” — named for the old tradition of a master tearing the top of a page. Too many rips and a boy receives a “white ticket,” a formal progress report. Senior prefects are called “Pop.” The Wall Game is played only at Eton, against a brick wall built in 1717, with rules so arcane that goals are scored perhaps once a decade. And every new boy must sit the colors test: a quiz requiring him to memorize the locations of school buildings and the official colors of each of the 25 boarding houses. Harry sat it. William sat it. George will sit it.

What is different now is everything else. Harry arrived still processing the death of his mother, with a brother who did not want to know him. George arrived as the son of two present, engaged parents living only a 16-minute drive away — who prepared him for this over years, watched him visit the school more than once before starting, and described him as “over the moon” at being offered a place.

Eton will test him. It tests everyone. But the boy in the tailcoat in September 2026 is not the boy his uncle was in 1998. The school is the same. The beginning is entirely different.

apost.com

Are you a fan of the Wales family? Do you think Prince George’s Eton experience will be very different from his uncle Harry’s? Let us know, and then pass this on to your family, friends, and other royal fans out there!