'I Felt Blood Trickling Down My Legs': Victim Of Alleged Beatings By Man Who Ran Christian Summer Camps Testifies To The Horror

By Ruth Gledhill
Christian Today
February 6, 2017

https://goo.gl/prmMa2

John Smyth, who now lives in South Africa and campaigns on morality, is at the centre of the allegations

A victim of alleged physical abuse by a prominent Çhristian lawyer has given an extraordinary testimony of the effect that thousands of beatings had upon him. 

He was speaking after a series of disclosures by Channel 4 News about allegations of physical abuse  inflicted on young male evangelical Christians by barrister John Smyth, who ran popular Christian summer camps attended also by the present Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.

Speaking anonymously to the Telegraph, the victim, now 56, says he has contacted the police as a result of the Channel 4 reports.

Describing how it began, he says that as a "pretty" boy he was frequently molested by other boys at his prep and public schools.

He met Smyth at his school's Christian Forum. Desperately homesick, Smyth spotted his vulnerability.

When he was 14, Smyth began to ask him back to his house nearby. When he was 16, Smyth asked him to follow him to a shed that doubled as the changing room for his swimming pool, and then told him to take off all his clothes.

"He was a renowned and brilliant barrister and involved in some of the most famous cases of the time. But somehow he always found time for our forum meetings and afterwards chatted with us boys over coffee," the victim writes. 

He describes how Smyth built up his trust and became like a father figure.

"The beatings were Smyth's big secret. It was in January 1977, when I reached 16, that Smyth first introduced the topic of being beaten by him. Quoting from the Bible – Hebrews in particular – he said it wasn't enough to repent your sins; that they needed to be purged by beatings. I had to bleed for Jesus.

"He was particularly interested in the usual teenage stuff – masturbation, indecent thoughts, pornographic magazines … That got my attention immediately. I was a 16-year-old boy, after all, newly over the age of consent. Sex was what I thought about most of the time.

"But as I took my clothes off in that garden shed, I slowly realised that sex was not what Smyth had in mind. As soon as I was naked, he asked me to bend over, said a short prayer and then encouraged me to pray out loud while he removed a cane from the stack. I was stunned by how hard he hit me that first time and gasped with what little breath I had left."

That was the first of the 8,000 or so strokes he would receive.

"Each and every stroke delivered with the same extraordinary ferocity. After 10 strokes, I felt my skin burn. After 20, I felt blood trickling down from my buttocks to my legs. At 30, he stopped and embraced me from behind, leaning against my back, nuzzling his face against my neck and whispering how proud he was of me.

"I never felt or saw him have an erection and he never touched me sexually, although he, too, was often naked and groaning in spiritual ecstasy while doing the beating. He did the same thing, pretty much every time."

The victim says he attended the Christian camps at Iwerne Minster in Dorset run by the Iwerne Trust, a Christian charity chaired by Smyth and where Justin Welby, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, worked as a young man and as an officer.

"In my case and to my knowledge, boys were never beaten there, only at Smyth's house. I never saw anyone other than Smyth beat anyone."

The beatings continued after he left Winchester and Smyth promised him a "special" beating for his 21st birthday, which drove the victim to despair.

He sent anonymous letters to both Smyth himself and to David Fletcher of the Iwerne Trust, threatening to expose Smyth to the press unless the beatings stopped immediately.

"Although both letters were received and read, neither produced any result. Days passed. The beating drew closer. I resolved to kill myself."

The victim has made suicide attempts and been treated for depression five times, once for two months. 

"Only after the Channel 4 news reports were shown was I able to tell my story. I have been able to contact the police, and I now have the confidence to recognise that the cycle of my abuse is completing. That it had a beginning and is moving towards an end."

A prominent clergyman, Giles Fraser, also writes in The Guardian of how he suffered beatings during his public school education. 

He says his problem is with the whole idea of evangelical decency. "It takes me back to the so-called decency of the man who caned me, and the sickness I felt in my stomach as a little boy, waiting outside that chapel in a gloomy wood-panelled corridor. This was more than 40 years ago – but I still don't have it in me to forgive him for what he did to me."

Fraser says the problem was deep in the educational philosophy of the public school system and the sort of men required to run the British empire.

"Often we would go to bed with underpants drenched in blood," writes Fraser.  "I was beaten like this throughout the 1970s, with canes and bats and shoes and clothes brushes, from the age of seven all the way through to when I was 12. The pain doesn't last so long. But a burning anger settles in your soul."

He says the idea that being beaten had moral, character-forming properties "cannot be understood without the rise of so-called muscular Christianity during the second half of the 19th century." Fearing effeminacy, the Protestant public school establishment promoted a version of "manly Christianity" through the character-forming powers of chapel, rugby and the cane, Fraser says.

Fraser writes: "The moral formation I received from my school beatings was almost entirely the opposite of what was intended." 

Archbishop Welby clearly bears no responsibility for the behaviour of sadists in the 1970s, he adds.

"Nonetheless, his particular brand of Eton/Alpha Course Christianity is cut from the same cloth as the muscular Christianity of the 1850s. And this is why the Church of England hierarchy remains obsessed with maintaining the Anglican communion (ie what's left of the empire) – it is no coincidence that Smyth fled to Zimbabwe and South Africa – and why it can't get past an over-fascination with homosexuality.

"The archbishop is not to blame for Smyth's sins. But he is still too much a part of the world that made him."