Back in April 2024, Team Uprising reached Everest Base Camp with 4 of the team completing a successful summit attempt in May 2024. Collectively, with your incredible and very generous support, the team raised an incredible £55,000 for the NSPCC.

Now the 6 members of Team Uprising Base Camp welcome two new members to the team in order to run the London Marathon 2025.

I’m Niall Murphy and I’m one of the new team members and a Boarding School Survivor having been sent to board when I was nine. Over the last 18 months I testified as a witness about my Adverse Childhood Experiences while being at boarding school in Edinburgh during the 1980s to both the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry and at an Examination of the Facts at the Edinburgh Sheriff Court.

Attending boarding school can be an institutional experience. You are required to wear a uniform, your day is completely timetabled and there is no personal space as the aim is to break you down and remake you in the school’s image. It is depersonalising. So, in such a place, there is no room for the loving and nurturing environment a family and a home can bring which is so crucial to a child’s emotional development.

The experiences I went through included being physically assaulted and psychologically abused by my house master (the Sheriff upheld these charges), and, in the brutal anarchic ‘Lord of the Flies’ culture which festered unchecked in the boarding houses, a peer-on-peer campaign of physical, psychological and emotional abuse by an older boy who coercively controlled me.

This made the school and the boarding houses a completely unsafe space for me especially when you are in the same dorm as your abuser so there was no escape. There were times when sneaking out to sleep in a cold cast iron bath was safer for me than sleeping in my bed in my dorm as I never knew when my abuser would strike.

The school’s omertà - that you never spoke about what was going on or snitched on fellow pupils - meant I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening. As my parents were 8000 miles away in Hong Kong, contact was very limited anyway. Instead, you learnt to endure it by cauterising your emotions - which ranks amongst the worst things boarding schools do to their pupils - as showing your vulnerability was a sign of weakness which was not tolerated in that culture.

Unfortunately, this culminated in my having a nervous breakdown after being sexually assaulted in front of a room full of boys. I was just 11 years old. Though, as a result of what he’d done, the older boy was asked to leave, my parents were not told about what had happened and nor was I offered any support.

Instead, it was swept under the carpet because, to my mind, the reputation of the school trumped the welfare of the child. This destroyed my childhood. It made me question my faith and, such was my self-loathing, it resulted in a suicide attempt less than a year later and years of suicide ideation and feeling worthless thereafter.

Over the last few decades I have worked hard to overcome this in part to demonstrate to myself that I am not “…a worthless individual whose life will amount to nothing” as my abuser angrily informed me when he last confronted me in the playground after he’d been asked to leave the school.

I’m also doing this because I decided that I didn’t have to be a victim anymore and that rather than beating myself up and blaming myself for what happened, when it should be #NotMyShame, I could try to be happy instead.

It wasn’t easy reliving these experiences so now I want to turn it around into something positive and, as someone who hasn’t run before, the London Marathon is a great challenge for me!

I started with Couch to 5K in September 2024 and by April 2025 I managed a run of over 20 miles around Glasgow. Though I have suffered the occasional injury on the way, the running has done wonders for my fitness and mental health.

I’m doing this because I don’t want any child to go through what I went through. That is why I am supporting the NSPCC and Childline as being able to talk to someone who understood, at what was the lowest point of my life, would have really helped.

Children continue to need the help and support of the NSPCC so, collectively, Team Uprising would like to ask for your support once again to help us fundraise for this worthy cause.

The NSPCC is the leading children's charity fighting to end child abuse in the UK and Channel Islands. The NSPCC help children who have been abused to rebuild their lives, protect those at risk, and find the best ways of preventing abuse from ever happening.

Every child deserves the best possible chance to rebuild their life after abuse.

That’s why the NSPCC are here. That's what drives all their work. And that’s why – as long as there’s abuse – we will fight for every childhood!