Channel 4 News reported yesterday on allegations of abuse at the Iwerne Trust: Archbishop admits Church ‘failed terribly’ over abuse revelations
The Church of England has tonight apologised unreservedly after a Channel 4 News investigation revealed that a prominent Anglican evangelical and former colleague of the Archbishop of Canterbury is alleged to have severely assaulted boys and young men for decades…
Other news reports include:
Patrick Foster, Nicola Harley, and Lydia Willgress The Telegraph Archbishop of Canterbury issues ‘unreserved and unequivocal’ apology after links to ‘child abuser’ emerge
‘I could feel the blood spattering on my legs’: Victims tell of ‘horrific’ beatings at hands of Archbishop’s friend
Samuel Osborne The Independent Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby issues apology over Church of England links to ‘child abuser’
Kevin Rawlinson and Harriet Sherwood The Guardian Church ‘could have done more’ over John Smyth abuse claims
The Archbishop has issued this statement in response to the Channel 4 News report.
“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. He began training for ordination in 1989.
The Archbishop knew Mr Smyth had moved overseas but, apart from the occasional card, did not maintain contact with him.
In August 2013 the Bishop of Ely wrote to the Bishop of Cape Town, informing him of concerns expressed to his Diocese Safeguarding Adviser about Mr Smyth from an alleged survivor. The British Police had been notified. The Archbishop’s Chaplain at the time was forwarded this letter, and subsequently showed it to the Archbishop for information only.
The Archbishop has repeatedly said that he believes that the safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults should be a principle priority in all parts of the Church, and that any failings in this area must be immediately reported to the police.
The Archbishop is on the record as saying that survivors must come first, not the Church’s own interests. This applies regardless of how important, distinguished or well-known the perpetrator is.”
There is also a statement from the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Adviser.
“The violent abuse of young men between 1978-82, as outlined in the Channel 4 programme, should never have happened and we utterly condemn this behaviour and abuse of power and trust. The report into these horrific activities, drawn up by those linked with the Iwerne Trust, a non-denominational Christian charity, should have been forwarded to the police at the time. When the Church of England was alerted by a survivor, through the diocese of Ely in 2013, the police were immediately informed as was the Anglican Church in South Africa where Mr Smyth was then living. The national safeguarding officer, which was a part time post, was informed and helped find support for the survivors. Clearly more could have been done at the time to look further into the case. We now have a dedicated central team made up of six full time posts – we will be reviewing all files making further enquiries as necessary. We echo the Archbishop’s unreserved and unequivocal apology to all the survivors and are committed to listen to anyone who comes forward and we would urge anyone with any further information to report it to the police “
“The Archbishop has repeatedly said that he believes that the safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults should be a principle (sic) priority”
A priority he cares about so much he can’t even be bothered to spell it correctly. Which pretty much sums up Welby’s approach to safeguarding.
ED NOTE: I corrected your other spelling error in this comment.
Oh, and while we’re at it, what is Welby apologising for? This appalling stuff didn’t happen in a CofE building, wasn’t operated within a CofE management structure, and so far as we can tell no-one involved was a CofE cleric. The money was coming from a charity that had only the loosest of affiliations with the CofE, and the victims were recruited via schools, not churches. Welby himself claims he knew nothing about it, either at the time or afterwards, and in any event at the time at which it happened he was a nascent oil industry executive, not someone… Read more »
If you wrote this in a novel it would seem too far fetched. A story involving ++Cantuar, Mary Whitehouse (indirectly) and a whiff of an establishment cover up.
According to the Charity Commissioners the Trust no longer operates but Titus Trust continues the work. No mention of it all on the Titus Trust website. Perhaps they hope if they ignore it it will go away.
Channel 4 is just ‘muckraking’. Justin Welby had no knowledge of what is alleged to have happened over 40 years ago at VPS camp. He should not be compelled to comment on what he knew {he knows nothing} at that time.
Simon, the Titus Trust front page, http://www.titustrust.org, currently reads: “Channel 4 News and others have this week run stories about John Smyth QC, who was Chairman of the Iwerne Trust between 1974 and 1981. The allegations are very disturbing and our thoughts are with all those who have suffered, and their families.” and continues in a measured way. No “may have suffered”, “feel they have been harmed” and all the rest of the weasel words of past scandals: it’s straightforward and direct. I wasn’t taking notes, but I’m pretty sure this was the case when I looked at it earlier… Read more »
Were not these camps for public school boys often called colloquially the BASH camps (I believe after the name of the founder)? It would seem that the nickname of the camps was all too accurate.
“Justin Welby had no knowledge of what is alleged to have happened over 40 years ago at VPS camp” Yes he did: he was told in 2013. He says that quite clearly in his statement. No-one, so far as I can tell, is accusing the young, pre-ministry Welby of anything other than being innocent of what was going on. There is not the slightest suggestion that in the 1970s or 1980s Welby knew, should have known, could have done things to find out, or anything else. He was present in the same postcode, no more. Once is happenstance, as Auric… Read more »
As the product of the “Bash” camps at Iwerne Minster might I be permitted to comment? I happen to have some sympathy with ++Justin on this. I think he instinctively feels sorry for the survivors, but he cannot possibly be blamed for the physical punishment between 1977-1982, which it appears may not have taken place either at the camps or at Winchester College. The question of whether the Church has dealt correctly with the survivor who reported to the Bishop of Ely in 2013 is separate, but there is no suggestion that it has not. On a guilt by association… Read more »
Simon…. It didn’t involve Welby or Whitehouse… The Titus trust has information on its website.
You did make it all up… to no good end…why?
I certainly agree that it seems to unfair to hold ++Welby responsible for this though the Church is culpable in not responding sooner to this. What this episode does do is to remind us how deeply class-ridden the Church of England was and, I think, continues to be. The original ‘Bash’ Camps were targeted at the top 30 British Public Schools as these provided the ruling class and influence. At some point in the fifties camps were set up on the same lines for oiks from minor public schools and grammar schoolboys of whom I was one. I was sent… Read more »
@Anthony Archer
Thank you for your very personal and informative comment.
Rather than comment on this case specifically, I think we need to start considering in general whether those who perhaps should have known of abuse happening in various situations years ago didn’t “know” because they were truly innocent and could not comprehend that such things might happen or whether they now claim they don’t “know” anything because they took a conscious decision not to investigate or find out. Morally at least the two are quite different.
Paragraph 160 of the Faith and Order Board’s report on leadership, written by Loveday Alexander and Mike Higton, says: “These movements are often led by Christian businesspeople who are more at home with the language and operating methods of business ‘leadership’ than with the traditional categories of the church. They have been highly successful in training generations of Christian leaders. Yet, for all the biblical teaching and discipleship training they offer, it is still noticeable that they sometimes operate with a relatively uncritical acceptance of secular hierarchy and power. In this sense, they are prone to similar hermeneutical criticism as… Read more »
I apologise for saying there was nothing on the Titus trust website about this. There was nothing when I looked this morning but I have since read the statement.
Channel 4 News is certainly making a big story of this with more revelations promised tomorrow- this time involving Zimbabwe and ” a death in mysterious circumstances.”
Looking at the list of prominent “Bash “camp alumni helpfully provided by Anthony, David Watson could be added to the list.
Ian
There was nothing about this on the Titus Trust website when I looked this morning but I have since read the statement. Mary Whitehouse’s involvement was as I have said indirect as John Smyth was instructed by her to prosecute Gay News. I do agree that Justin Welby’s connection is actually pretty peripheral. Certainly it is unfair to suggest he should have known about the abuse , particularly as it took place (assuming the allegations are true) at John Smyth’s home in Winchester and not at the camps themselves. However these are the angles the media have seized on.
Kate, I am conflicted about whether people in general knew that there were men who enjoyed hurting children in schools. I think they did, but I think they just didn’t see it as wrong. Today, you don’t need to be doing a PhD in hidden subtexts to realise that under the humour Searle and Willans’ Molesworth books point to some pretty seedy activities by some pretty seedy people. Those books had been published in the early 1950s, long before both the Chatterley Trial and the Beatles’ First LP (to co-opt Larkin). But how were they read at the time? The… Read more »
I wonder whether such actions and attitudes ran wider through the history of the Bash Camps. For interest I have been reading the wikipedia account of Rev Nash (the founder) and I came across the following comment by John Stott (himself a graduate of the Bash Camps). “Nash wrote many letters. John Stott reports: “His letters to me often contained a rebuke, for I was a wayward young Christian and needed to be disciplined. In fact, so frequent were his admonitions at one period, that whenever I saw his familiar writing on an envelope, I needed to pray and prepare… Read more »
The whole of the current abuse issue must be horribly unsettling for any who had connections with Bash camps, but it impacts also those like myself who worked with Scripture Union camps. I was certainly unaware of any violence or abuse, but the coercive intent of our Christian agenda is in retrospect clear. What right had we to seek to ‘convert’ the unformed young we shared time, activity and friendship with? Other comments here have been illuminating. The class-related nature of Bash camps wasn’t shared in their relatively down-market equivalents run by SU, but interpenetrating them all was a particular… Read more »
The comments of Interested Observer are acute. I think that there were teachers who enjoyed beating children and, of course, the children didn’t go home at night so parents, while generally accepting that corporal punishment was used, didn’t know the detail. There was also a curious kind of omerta about admitting to having been caned. The problem is the pyschological damage that boarding schools did. I see that the evangelical Mark Stibbe, himself reportedly a victim of Smythe, has recently published a book about his school experiences and there is an excellent blog, http://woundedleaders.co.uk/blog/ which explores the consequences of boarding… Read more »
“Has anyone really properly yet explored the link between a core doctrine of penal substitution and the punitive mind-set which in the present dreadful case emerged as sadistic violence?” I think you are crediting Smythe with a theological depth he doesn’t deserve. Le Vice Anglaise has a long and horrible history, sufficient to explain his actions without other factors. He was presumably sexually attracted to young men (one of the accusations in the C4 report was that he only picked the pretty ones) and particularly to exerting power over them and humiliating them. Most if not all of them were… Read more »
“My concern is that the whole HTB nexus has been dominated by public school boys”
It seems lazy to blame the obsession with homosexuality displayed by parts of the church on tired old tropes about boys’ boarding schools. But it’s hard to avoid the thought that much of the obsessive worry about homosexuality is essentially teenage boys giggling about “poofs”, and it would be interesting to know who, if any, in the senior ranks of Anglican opposition to equality had a mixed education.
Any system which invites participants to see their participation as a privilege is open to this kind of manipulation. Selecting from a social elite, indeed “the key boys from the key schools” as Nash described it, is a recipe for cult-formation (and, by the way, profoundly unchristian : the first shall be first and the last shall be last?). All those invited would see their position as in the gift of the leadership – by the way, where’s the grace in that? – and as easily as one was identified as a “key boy”, one could equally be rejected with… Read more »
This is all very sad and very interesting. It encourages me that someone on this thread mentions that very questionable doctrine, ‘penal substitution’ – perhaps the Evangelical church should revisit it and work out why it is wrong! The concept of God the Father doing any such thing is ridiculous but it is also an evil distortion. I will add that on ‘people knowing’ what went on or could go on, I can say that actually children raised in the 1960s were not knowledgable about odd sexual practices, and so as parents in the 1980 and 1990s we did not… Read more »
I tried to investigate Iwerne some twenty years ago when researching for a book on fundamentalism. It was hard to get information apart from rumour and anecdote. No one had done any research on who went to these camps and even now it is being suggested that records from the late 70s are missing. The camps started in the 30s so there seems never to have been concern to hold on to important historical archive material by the Iwerne Trust. Two published accounts eventually did come my way. One concerned the falling out between David Watson and Bash in the… Read more »
This is a long way from my experience, since I am Scottish and female and never even went to an SU camp. But it may be worthwhile to remember that corporal punishment in schools persisted into the 1970s. I recall being at a parents’ meeting at a Scottish school probably in the late 1970s, when the head teacher was explaining that there was to be no more corporal punishment. The distressing thing about that meeting was several fathers, with upper-class English voices, expressing anger that this punishment was to be discontinued, saying that it had never done them any harm.
John Richardson RIP is interesting: http://ugleyvicar.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/whats-really-wrong-with-english.html
The Church endorsed beating for over 1500 years, beginning with the Rule of Benedict. From the reformation through the Victorian age to the late C20th the public schools set up by or for the CofE encouraged it. Archbishop Fisher was said to be a ferocious beater as headmaster of Repton (even taking into account Roald Dahl’s mistaken recollection of one event). And the judge in sentencing Bishop Peter Ball in 2015 made clear that his abuse included beatings. An Archbishop seems to have intervened on Ball’s behalf. Now this evangelical beating scandal brings more Archiepiscopal equivocation and reassurances. Of course… Read more »
I was routinely (almost nightly) beaten at a top boarding school. The effects on me were harmful and distressing, and I even ran away three times and suffer flashbacks periodically to this day. So this whole topic is quite hard reading for me (and maybe for others too). But Interested Observer has it right: it was routine public school culture in the 1960s. It was known about, though in the case of boarders, when exeats were fewer, parents lacked day to day insight and oversight of a lot of what was going on. But certainly in my experience it was… Read more »
Interested Obsverver in his comment on my remark “My concern is that the whole HTB nexus has been dominated by public school boys” does me an injustice. I was not commenting specifically on homosexuality, to which I do not refer in my post, but the predilection for beating and above all the nature of the public school ethos and its sense of class superiority. It is this latter which seems to dominate the HTB leadership and by extension some aspects of the CofE hierarchy. I see this as pernicious. I am sorry that I did not make myself clearer. I… Read more »
I was a member to HTB in the early 80s. Many of the leaders there had come out of Eton and Cambridge. They all went off every summer to help at Iwerne or Motcombe. The camps were and I think still are only run for public school children and even then the top ones go to Iwerne, the next rung go Rushmore etc. When I asked where the comprehensive schoolchildren can go, I was told that another organisation runs ‘go -kart camps’ for them! I was and remain very disturbed at the way independent school children only are allowed at… Read more »
@susannah clark
Re your question, according to the Church Times in September 2014 exactly half of bishops were educated privately compared with 7% of the general population.
“What proportion of our bishops were educated at Private Schools, and how does that compare with the actual percentage of people in England who do?” Massively higher, but for reasons not unique to the church: the incidence of private education at Cambridge has dropped below 50% for the first time in living memory, but only just, and at all ancient universities the rate is around or over 50%. That rate has been up and down a bit since the war, but not by much. The rate of private education is above the general rate in the population for all the… Read more »
Maybe I can contribute a little to Stephen Parsons’ request for more background to the 60s evangelical scene, as I was a public school/Oxbridge ordinand (sorry about that) and a contemporary of David Watson’s at Ridley. In those days, David was no more than a typical public school product – Wellington, in his case – where belief in God was all of a piece with playing with a straight bat (he and I were in the college cricket, football, hockey and rugger teams together) and being kind to those down on their luck. He was certainly not one of the… Read more »
Kate raised the question – and others have voiced similar amazement – about why abuses of corporal punishment in the ‘good old days’, even the practice itself, were not reported as criminal acts. At my public school in the 40s, a midlands one more noted for its toughness than its empire-building record, beating was administered by house prefects. Yes, undertones of sexual gratification and sadism (not seen as sexually flavoured in those days) were acknowledged, but they were thought to be an acceptable risk, outweighed by the advantage of being able to run our own house and not have the… Read more »
I went to a Iwerne ‘camp’ just once – I think it was in 1965. I went with doubts and questions about the conservative evangelical faith I had grown up with, and I soon realised that asking questions was not welcomed. They dealt in certainties. It was all about ‘authority’ – which I experienced even then as authoritarian. It was very masculine, the officers were all bachelors, and girls were not mentioned. For me, Iwerne marked the beginning of my disenchantment with evangelicalism. My subsequent search path took me to India, to Cuddesdon and ordination, and then medicine, psychiatry, academia.… Read more »
Like David, I can look back on a time when the first cracks were formed in my strongly evangelical faith and world view. I had recently lost my father. He had died in my arms. He was the gentlest, loving, selfless person I have probably ever known. He made huge sacrifices for his family. He was kind. Being programmed with evangelical teaching, the horror for me was that he was not a professing Christian. I think he’d been put off by ardent Christians and the camps he himself had been sent on. Yet he epitomised the Christian imperative of loving… Read more »
Susannah, in my experience far, far more people believe in Jesus than admit to doing so even – or, perhaps, especially – to themselves. It is one of the underlying weaknesses of the sort of Christianity that HTB teaches – they only see belief if it is professed in words, if people proclaim Jesus. Many people express their belief in different ways, perhaps alongside a large dollop of doubt.
In fact, I think it is possible to argue that everyone believes in Jesus, even those born before His incarnation.
“the underlying weaknesses of the sort of Christianity that HTB teaches” HTB style Christianity appeals to affluent, educated, middle class people. They aren’t looking for sophisticated theology, but a certain amount of certainty and a great deal of community. Amongst those aged, say, 40+ there is a plentiful supply of actual homophobes, and even greater supply of people to whom homophobia is a matter of supreme indifference. But as you look at younger cohorts, the willingness to throw their LGBTQI brothers and sisters under the bus diminishes. And diminishes not only in society in general in those cohorts, but particularly… Read more »
I attended Iwerne holidays two or three times in the early 1970’s. It had its shortcomings but I appreciated my times there, and will always be grateful to those times for introducing me to the Christian Faith, even though my theology has moved on considerably since then. It was successful at what it aimed to do: I remember being told one time that ‘everyone had become a Christian’ and it would take a strong person to stand out against the level of group think that developed. I did not know John Smyth well, though I recollect a charming, confident and… Read more »
Varsity & Public Schools summer holidays (Iwerne Trust) Hired the School and grounds of Clayesmore, a well known west country public school and a member OF HMC. No boys from Clayesmore would have been invited, as it was not one of the top thirty and would have been thought of by the directors as being part of the great unwashed! However even if they had, it would have induced severe culture shock. The chaplain of the time at Clayesmore was Father Norris Scadding, a charismatic liberal Anglo Catholic. He did however offer the use of the Chapel to V.P.S. and… Read more »
My response to Chris Bemrose’s last sentence is: always.
As this scandal, for scandal it is, unfolds there are a number of questions and issues that need to be raised/addressed. The moving and honest revelation today by the Bishop of Guildford that he is one of the survivors merely adds poignancy to the ramifications. He is in no different a position than any other survivor, but his current role as a diocesan bishop highlights the scandal still further. As my earlier post made clear, I write inter alia as a former Bash camper (later senior camper) and am truly shocked and saddened by what has been revealed and what… Read more »
Is there any information available about who the Iwerne Trustees were who, with their Chair consulted with Winchester College in 1982? They may have acted on the advice of Winchester staff (and parents) but they must have taken their own responsible and accountable view, too. Their decision may also have been due to no clear law having been broken which could have led to all kinds of legal difficulties which we no longer understand. A problem that I have perceived since I became an evangelical in my 20s, is that in some otherwise highly theological church leaders (also in wider… Read more »
This discussion on the experience of Iwerne has been very informative, especially the contributions of the people who were actually there. There is, however, one aspect that that has not been discussed. That is the theological pretext that was used to justify the beatings. Here the Channel 4 programme was helpful. It mentioned the quoting of Hebrews 12 where the passage speaks about the resisting of sin in the same sentence as the shedding of blood. The Hebrews author then quotes a passage from Proverbs which speaks about the Lord disciplining those whom he loves and laying the rod on… Read more »
I attended VPS only once, in the early 1960s at the invitation of J R “Johnnie” Bridger, the school chaplain at Uppingham. (Anyone know what became of him?). So some time before John Smyth’s tenure. I have one thing to thank the camp for. This was the time I realised these were all fairy stories and became an atheist. The rituals, mysteries and secrecy in all religions provide an environment in which the sort of practices referred to can thrive.
I was at the public school summer camp at Clayesmore near Iwerne Minster for a couple of years in the early 1970s (71 and 72 I think). The only two staff members I remember were Johnnie Bridger, who would take us caving in the Mendips, and Andrew Cornes, both wonderful inspirational people. Doubtless many of the other staff were too, but memories fade over the decades! Come to think of it, maybe Cornes was at Forres, the “junior” prep school camp at Swanage, where I had been in earlier years. I believe Cornes is now a deacon at Crowborough. But… Read more »
As well as deploring the undoubted damage the HTB ethos has done to the Christian faith in this country, as this thread is doing, should we not also seek to show exactly *where* it is flawed? I suggest the first task is to establish that certainty is not ‘faith ++’, but those two are at opposite ends of the spectrum, as Anne Lamott pointed out: “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.” https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-profess-to-believe-the-literal-truth-of-the-words-in-the-Bible Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin, as Alfred Lord Tennyson said: “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than… Read more »
Giles Fraser’s comments on Channel4 last night were moving and insightful. The strong association of corporal punishment in public schools with evangelical Christianity and the residue of the ethos of empire is hard to argue with. It is also to the shame of the CofE that it has not rooted out those in its leadership who inflicted corporal punishment (in schools or elsewhere) or who protected those who did, and it is becoming increasingly hard to believe the protestations of senior figures that they knew or suspected nothing. It is time to start asking hard questions which get to the… Read more »
Anthony Archer — do you mean Andrew Atherstone who wrote a biography of Welby, or Andrew Graystone who was asked by the Iwerne Trust what they should do and whose advice was ignored.
This piece from yesterday’s Telegraph is worth reading:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/06/dear-archbishop-canterbury-can-look-mirror-honestly-say-did/
It asks searching questions of the trustees of the Iwerne and Titus trusts.
I also saw the moving statement by the Bishop of Guildford. What a brave man.
My response to Fr. William’s response to my last sentence:
I think you are right. But out of that comes two further questions:
1. Is there a way to engage people undertaking morality crusades or witch-hunts in a dialogue to suggest that they may be motivated by their own unintegrated shadows?
2. Does the same logic apply in the reverse direction: ie that in crusading against Trump, Brexit or fundamentalism that we are also motivated by our shadows?
Anthony Archer: A very helpful, measured post. But I understood the Andrew mentioned in your first paragraph is Andrew Graystone, not Andrew Atherstone, though of course I may be wrong. At last we are beginning to realise that abuse is an umbrella term for a wide variety of behaviours. Physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, bullying and harassment. The damage done by all types of abuse is incalculable and life-long. Please God may we express gratitude to those brave people who have dared to put their heads above the parapet. Our prayers are with them as they learn to live… Read more »