After a brief stay at a boarding school in Poole, Dorset, Strachey was sent on a five-month cruise to the Cape of Good Hope.
In September 1893 Strachey began a brief but catastrophic stay at Abbotsholm School in Derbyshire, whose director, Dr. Cecil Reddie, stressed physical as well as intellectual labor. The former shortly proved far too strenuous for the thin, sickly thirteen-year-old boy, so his mother removed him, placing him in Leamington College, where the bullying of other boys, who nicknamed him "Scraggs" because of his emaciated physical appearance, made him miserable. It is likely that at Leamington the feeble, nearsighted boy first fell in love with older, stronger, more physically able boys.
In 1897 the seventeen-year-old Strachey entered Liverpool University College, where he spent the next two years under the kindly tutelage of family friend Sir Walter Raleigh. At Liverpool the boy's chronic misery became at times acute, as revealed in the following passage from his diary: "My self conscious vanity is really most painful. As I walk through the streets I am agonized by the thoughts of my appearance, of course it is hideous, but what does it matter? I only make it worse by peering into people's faces to see what they are thinking.
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