SOUTH AFRICA
Noseweek
Highly respected teacher scapegoated over 30-year-old sexual abuse incident – to save school’s reputation
By end of this school term, Bishops – formally Cape Town’s (Anglican) Diocesan School for Boys – and its powerful old boys union will ever so quietly have cut all ties with Tim Hamilton-Smith, who for 40 years has been an admired and beloved master, housemaster, vice-principal and rugby coach at South Africa’s oldest private school.
The school authorities had every reason to hope the event would pass unremarked-upon by most old boys, let alone the public, because it is intended to be the final stage of a protracted cover-up; and the school chairman has said (in a confidential email) that he has received information which tells of a “long and sorry history” of such cover-ups, devised to ensure the school’s reputation remained untarnished by sexual scandal.
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