It may be the alma mater of seven prime ministers and a finishing school for royalty, but Harrow is acquiring a reputation of being a drugs haven.
Contemporaries of William Jaggs told The Times that a combination of wealth and boredom gave rise to a situation in which drugs were rife. “If you wanted to use drugs, you could get them — there was little to stop you,” one said. “If you wanted to do Ecstasy or coke you could just walk into someone’s room and do it . . . I used to get sent down town to pick up pills or coke. I’d bring it back to our rooms and the lads would give me a cut of it for free.”
Old Harrovians remembered Jaggs as a clever boy who, like many, dabbled in Ecstasy and cannabis before moving into cocaine. “Jaggs and I used to drop a bit of Ecstasy together and hang around after lessons for a cigarette or a joint,” one Harrow and Oxford contemporary said. “At school he was into weed and cocaine. We would have parties at his parents’ house where we’d do coke.”
Down the road from the Jaggs and Braham families lived Simon MacPherson, a classics master at the school. His son, also Simon, spent a brief spell at Harrow, overlapping with Jaggs, before being expelled after drugs paraphernalia was found in his room. The two were part of a group who experimented with harder drugs. Yesterday the Old Bailey heard that, four days before Jaggs killed Lucy, he went to the MacPherson house with a chainsaw to kill his former classmate.
At Oxford, Jaggs made the transition from dalliances in “party” drugs to crack cocaine. Mr MacPherson, the Old Bailey heard yesterday, was a companion in that abuse.
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It was then that those around Jaggs started noticing that something was wrong. A friend told The Times: “He would ring up in the middle of the night and come round to my room. He would sit there, obviously high, obviously depressed, but refuse to talk about what was wrong. I stopped taking his calls. I don’t regret it.”
Another said: “He would call me up when he was on a trip and just blather absolute nonsense down the phone. I remember him very clearly once going on about how he thought he might be insane. He said, ‘Am I mad? How would I know if I was mad? Eventually he snapped out of it and said he’d had a bad comedown and that everyone was over at his house doing coke.”
In late 2005 Jaggs was suspended by Oxford after concerns about his behaviour and poor work. “People were saying that he’d lost it,” said a friend. “He was constantly wrecked and really ill and emaciated. His parents seemed a bit naive. They must have known that he was in a bad way. Everyone knew.”