How Channel 4 News Revealed Claims of Savage Abuse by Archbishop's Friend
By Cathy Newman
My source had decided to write to me after seeing an investigation led by film-maker Wael Dabbous I worked on in 2014 about Simon Harris, a former public school teacher who sexually abused street children in Kenya. After Channel 4’s investigation, he was jailed for more than 17 years. The story my source told couldn’t have been more different. It concerned a barrister and leading evangelical Christian, John Smyth, accused of assaulting students from one of England’s oldest public schools, Winchester College, and Cambridge University. His victims, now men in their fifties, agreed to speak on camera about their claims of being violently beaten by Smyth at his house in Winchester. Many had gone on to professional and personal success, but to a greater or lesser extent, they’d all been damaged by the alleged abuse Smyth meted out to them in their formative years.
The toll it had taken was obvious on the face of Mark Stibbe, an author and former Anglican vicar, a gentle bear of a man with a passion for poetry. He’d managed to extricate himself from Smyth, but his best friend was sucked in with devastating consequences, eventually attempting suicide. Stibbe recalled visiting him in hospital, likening him to “one of TS Eliot’s Hollow Men” – a shell. The tears started to well up. And it was there on the face of Richard Gittins, a maths and science whizz who’s now a private tutor. He described in unflinching detail what he claims were beatings so violent that he and other boys were forced to wear nappies to staunch their wounds. And you’ll see the toll it’s taken for yourselves when you watch the man who attempted suicide grip the steering wheel in the car, to remind himself that now, all these years later, he’s in a safe place, and that all those traumas are in the past. The tragedy for him, and his fellow victims, is that all this could have stopped in 1982. It was then that the Christian group Smyth chaired carried out an investigation into his activities. We were given a copy of that report. When the allegations were set out in black and white – “14,000 strokes”; “I could feel the blood spattering on my legs”; “I was bleeding for 3? weeks”; “I have seen bruised and scored buttocks”; “the outrage against human dignity and the cruelty of all this in the name of the Lord”; “humiliation, nakedness and beating”; “technically all criminal offences” – I knew that although the Church had been accused of covering up the story for decades, we would at last be able to tell it. That, the courage of the victims, and the tireless work by my hugely dedicated investigative colleagues Job Rabkin and Tom Stone, enabled us to piece together the full scale of the alleged abuse. We found out just how much those in the Church and Winchester College had known about Smyth, and that for almost 30 years no one bothered to inform the police. We decided to confront Smyth. He’d started afresh in South Africa. But we learnt from a South African journalist due to interview him that he was flying back to Britain after Christmas, staying with friends in Bristol. On a bitterly cold January morning, I waited with the cameraman out of sight, while colleagues watched the door. After several hours, Smyth emerged with his wife, and so did we.
I expected him to walk straight to his car and escape, so I’d planned to ask him the most important question first: Had he beaten young men until they bled? To my surprise, he offered no denial initially, simply answering: “I’m not talking about that.” I assumed at that point he’d beat a hasty retreat. But he didn’t, turning to walk along the river, giving me every opportunity to ask in great detail about the extent of his alleged brutality, the number of victims, how he squared what he’d done with his Christianity, and most importantly whether he’d face justice. As we walked, and I asked one question after another, I got the strong impression that he hadn’t expected his past to catch up with him. And that if he just kept putting one foot in front of the other, he’d somehow manage to walk away from it all once again. For the sake of those men who have been haunted by what happened for all of their adult lives, I hope that he stands still long enough to be held to account. That’s a hope also expressed by the Church of England.
The apology issued by Lambeth Palace following our investigation was extraordinary: it left no room for doubt, and made no attempt to shirk responsibility for failing to tell the police about the allegations for more than three decades. The Archbishop of Canterbury told us he “can’t begin to describe” what he felt when we presented our findings to him. “You just think about what the people caught up in this went through and what they’re still going through and what they will go through for the rest of their lives because of what was done to them and that’s beyond description,” he told us. Now, finally, Hampshire Police is investigating, and Archbishop Welby has promised he will co-operate with their inquiries. After all these years, the alleged victims are at last daring to believe that they will get the justice which has so long eluded them.
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