Hammer attack victim Henry Webster’s mother entered the High Court witness box and told how her “teddy bear” son attracted violence and bullying and was finally forced to make a stand.

Elizabeth Webster, 45, said Henry had a naturally kind and gentle temperament despite being “big for his age”.

He had never thrown his weight around at Ridgeway School and, although unusually gifted at rugby, the fusion of his red hair and bulk sometimes “made him a target for violence and insults”.

“He was never aggressive,” she told Mr Justice Nicol: “On the contrary, he has always been a bit of a big teddy bear – generous and kind.”

He played rugby from the age of four, and was selected to play for Gloucestershire when 14, but the only criticism he received from his coaches was over his lack of aggression on the field, said Mrs Webster.

Boys “randomly” singled him out for hostile attention, she said, laying the ground for a series of horrific bullying incidents at Ridgeway which culminated in the January 2007 hammer assault which almost cost him his life.

Within a short time of starting at Ridgeway, Mrs Webster said Henry came home “very distressed”, explaining that someone had struck him on the bus. “I telephoned the school to let them know what had happened but they weren’t really interested,” she told the judge.

“Their response was that they couldn’t really do anything about the incident because it took place outside school on a bus.”

Over the following years, Henry had a series of bruising encounters with two white pupils – one of whom kicked him in the face, said his mother.

In summer 2006 he was left concussed after being attacked by another boy. The following term the boy who had concussed Henry “picked on him again”, but was punched in retaliation, said Mrs Webster.

The nightmare events of the January 2007 hammer attack broke on her with a mobile phone call as she and her husband were at home discussing house alterations. When she got to the school Henry was on a stretcher and “conscious but shaking”.

“He was covered in blood, his hands, his face. His coat was black but you could see blood on it. He had a big bandage around his head.

“Typically Henry was more worried about me than himself and I just remember not knowing what to do.”

In the weeks after the assault it became clear that what happened to her son was not a random attack, she said, adding that it emerged that there had been “significant discipline and racial problems for quite some time before the assault on Henry”.

She said she had been badly affected by the attack on Henry, which prompted emergency brain surgery, and particularly by the ordeal of watching the later criminal trial.

She could never understand why there were no racial charges brought over the assault, she said.

“Every day I have to live with seeing Henry in his present state and, although he is very brave and is making progress, I fear for his future.”

Mrs Webster’s evidence came on the tenth day of Henry Webster’s £1 million compensation claim against the Ridgeway Foundation School over a 2007 hammer attack that almost cost him his life and left him seriously brain damaged.

The High Court hearing continues.