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Archbishop of Canterbury apologises after links to ‘child abuser’ emerge
By Patrick Foster, Nicola Harley, Lydia Willgress
Telegraph
February 02, 2017
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/01/archbishop-canterbury-apologises-links-child-abuser-emerge/
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| John Smyth QC is alleged to have carried out a series of brutal assaults on young men in the 1970s |
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| Justin Welby with 'Bash camps' founder Eric John Hewitson Nash, popularly known as 'Bash' |
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| One alleged victim, Mark Stibbe, alleged Mr Smyth told him the beatings would 'help you become holy'. |
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| Smyth was accosted by Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman |
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| The Archbishop admitted knowing Mr Smyth in the 1970s |
The Archbishop of Canterbury issued an “unreserved and unequivocal” apology on Wednesday on behalf of the Church of England after admitting he had worked at holiday camps at which teenage boys were groomed for abuse.
The Most Rev Justin Welby said the Church had “failed terribly” by not reporting John Smyth QC, the head of the Christian charity that ran the summer camps, to police after he was accused of carrying out a string of “horrific” sado-masochistic attacks in the late Seventies.
Channel 4 News will on Thursday broadcast allegations that Mr Smyth used the camps, which were attended by boys from some of Britain’s leading public schools, to gain access to teenagers, whom he forced to strip naked before subjecting them to savage beatings.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the Archbishop said that he had been friends with Mr Smyth during the late Seventies, when he worked as a dormitory officer at the camps, run by the Iwerne Trust, and had kept in “occasional” contact with the barrister since.
The Archbishop says that he was made aware of the allegations against Mr Smyth in 2013 when police eventually became involved.
The QC, who acted for Mary Whitehouse, the public morals campaigner, in some of her most-high profile court cases, is accused of recruiting 22 young men into a cult in which they agreed to let him administer tens of thousands of lashes with a garden cane, supposedly to purge them of minor sins such as masturbation and pride.
The beatings, which took place in a shed in the garden of Mr Smyth’s Winchester home, were so intense that the victims were left with lasting scars.
One alleged victim, Mark Stibbe, alleged Mr Smyth told him the beatings would “help you become holy”. Another alleged victim, Richard Gittins, said boys who were beaten were forced to wear adult nappies in order to let their wounds heal.
The assaults, which carried on for at least three years, only came to light in 1982, when one boy, then a 21-year-old student at Cambridge, attempted suicide after being ordered to submit himself to another beating.
The Iwerne Trust commissioned a report into the allegations, which was carried out by Mark Ruston, a vicar who was also a friend of the Archbishop. The report concluded: “The scale and severity of the practice was horrific.”
However, neither the charity nor Winchester College, a number of whose pupils were attacked, reported Mr Smyth to the police.
He was instead allowed to leave the country after agreeing never to work with children again.
Channel 4 News will on Thursday show footage of Mr Smyth, 75, being doorstepped by Cathy Newman, the newsreader, and asked about the claims.
He told the broadcaster: “I’m not talking about that. I don’t know anything about that.”
In a statement issued on Wednesday, the Archbishop admitted he had kept in occasional contact with Mr Smyth, who subsequently moved to South Africa, but did not hear about the allegations until four years ago, when one of the victims made a complaint to the Church, which was also reported to the police.
The statement said: “The Archbishop of Canterbury was a dormitory officer at Iwerne holiday camp in the late 1970s, where boys from public schools learnt to develop life as Christians. The role was to be a mentor to the boys, as was that of his now wife at a similar camp for girls.
“John Smyth was one of the main leaders at the camp and although the Archbishop worked with him, he was not part of the inner circle of friends; no one discussed allegations of abuse by John Smyth with him.
“The Archbishop left England to work in Paris for an oil company in 1978, where he remained for five years.
“The Archbishop knew Mr Smyth had moved overseas but, apart from the occasional card, did not maintain contact with him.”
The statement concluded: “We recognise that many institutions fail catastrophically, but the Church is meant to hold itself to a far, far higher standard and we have failed terribly. For that the Archbishop apologises unequivocally and unreservedly to all survivors.”
The Iwerne camps were also known as “Bash camps”, after their founder E. J. H. Nash, an Anglican minister affectionately known as “Bash”, who founded the movement in the early 1930s.
A biography of the Archbishop states that he gained much of his early grounding in Christian doctrine via his involvement with the camps, in a period that spanned his late teens and his time as a Cambridge undergraduate.
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