Andrew Brown Prospect Anatomy of a Church of England abuse scandal
“The truth of who knew what about John Smyth has been lost in the hunt for further scapegoats”
Andrew Brown The slow deep hover What help are the police?
“The innocent would also have paid if Smyth had come to trial”
Ruth Layzell Church Times Safe Church needs safe clergy
“Pastoral supervision helps ministers to protect the vulnerable better”
Andrew Brown’s first article listed, in Prospect, ends: This has been a complicated story. The grand simple narrative is much more satisfying and easier to understand.” Andrew’s forensic examination of the texts reminds me of another contributor of blogs, Andrew Goddard. Both impress me with their attention to detail. They both tend to assume that in attending better than anyone else to the detail read within a mainstream Christian narrative and mindset, a more accurate account will result. But Andrew Brown doesn’t fully understand. The grand simple narrative is even more complicated than he understands. I wish to differ. What… Read more »
Well if someone’s a predatory sexual and/or violent abuser (and by the very nature of these offenders likely to harm someone else) I don’t really care what people ‘felt’ about the abuse. And it’s not ‘difficult’ to know ‘what to do about it’. You report it. You report it as a moral and pastoral imperative that trumps anything else… because of high likelihood of harm to other innocent victims. What followed in Smyth’s case proves the point. And if the police were not being proactive enough about a serious predator like Smyth, you don’t drop the matter. You raise as… Read more »
I agree and I wish that things were always so clear cut and those in authority listened and took action. Not all abuse is “predatory sexual and/or violent abuse” much abuse is more subtle but the effect on a vulnerable person can nevertheless be devastating. Sometimes the abuse is so severe that it is necessary to involve the criminal justice system but that is not always appropriate or what the victim wants or needs. I want to suggest an alternative way of looking at abuse, a way that doesn’t of course exclude the criminal justice system in extreme cases. The… Read more »
“Not all abuse is “predatory sexual and/or violent abuse” much abuse is more subtle but the effect on a vulnerable person can nevertheless be devastating.”
Indeed, But what Susannah I think says, and with which I agree, is that the bare minimum is that you report those who _are_ predatory and/or violent, of which Smyth clearly was. Yes, there are other, more subtle forms of abuse with which the police are not necessarily best equipped to deal, but the minimum is reporting the stuff with which they _are _ equipped.
I support Ruth Layzell but why does she have to couch her proposal in such negative terms.
“Safe Church needs safe clergy”.
Why do we have to limit ourselves to clergy who are merely “safe” ?
Why not
“Safe Church needs loving and empathetic clergy” ?
I put it directly: if you are not motivated by Christian love and if you are not willing and able to show empathy for vulnerable souls in your care, what on earth are you doing in holy orders?
If you want to be a manager why not join the Post Office ?
i seem to remember ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’ being mentioned somewhere in the bible……
To build on Nigel’s point: no matter whether we receive teaching on indwelling and infilling at the same time, or on separate occasions – for the 12 these fall before, and immediately after, Jesus’ Ascension – both catechetical plans are modelled in Acts. And the manifestations are especially like the “still, small voices”. And true manifestations don’t come from superapostles like the ones on whom Wimber, Gumbel, W Taylor and the “influencer” Stott model themselves (who wouldn’t listen to Martyn Lloyd-Jones or Marshall McLuhan). Influencing – in any churchmanship – bypasses minds, which is why it doesn’t result in belief… Read more »
It’s funny, I have Lloyd-Jones two books on the sermon on the mount on my bookshelf, havent; been opened for nearly 50 years. I didn;t know Stott disapproved. I was recommended them by Henry Corbett. he was a leading lght in my college CU (corpus christi), definitely an evangelical, got a starred first in theology, Bishop material. Good footballer and cricketer too (he played minor counties for Cambridge). After ordination he looked after a parish and mission in everton, Liverpool. Recently retired. Chaplain to everton football club. https://togetherforthecommongood.co.uk/leading-thinkers/long-term-leadership One term, we studied Daniel as our college book for bible study.… Read more »
Stott and Lloyd-Jones fell out in the late 1960s in what became known (in the USA at least) as the Downgrade controversy. Lloyd-Jones felt that Stott was compromising too much by remaining within the C of E. My father, who was friendly with both and had been mentored by Lloyd-Jones, felt the split keenly.
The original Downgrade Controversy was in the Baptist Church at the time of CH Spurgeon in the 1880s and 1890s. Spurgeon thought that too many Baptists were selling out by compromising with modern developments in science, biblical criticism and the social sciences. He wanted a rigorous defense of what we might today call fundamentalism. It’s a common pattern within Protestantism as it has continually renegotiated its encounter with modernity, especially since about 1850: culture/society/science/liberalism is dangerous (and is contrasted with unchanging ‘biblical faith’) and so must be resisted.
And then you have prominent Christian apologists who consider the world to be 4000 years old, and make Christianity ludicrous in the eyes of most. See, for example, Andrea Williams. I have prevously posted links to St Augustine’s views on science. https://harvardichthus.org/2010/09/augustine-on-faith-and-science/ https://entirelyuseless.com/2015/09/20/st-augustine-on-science-vs-scripture/ i also worry about this literal pedantic dissecting of St Augustine to be almost as painful as a literal interpretation of every verse in the bible. St Augustine’s attitude may also be applied to understand how modern scientific investigations into sexuality or equality may be used alongside bible passages. It wasn’t long ago that women were understood… Read more »
I’m a bit confused. Andrew Brown talks about
Mark Ashton, then vicar of the Iwerne church in Cambridge
but there wasn’t an Iwerne church in Cambridge?
There was the round church, vicar Mark Rushton and curate Jonathan Fletcher, when I attended in the mid 1970’s.
Mark Ashton succeeded Mark Ruston as Vicar of the Round Church in around 1987, and so was indeed the vicar there in 1989. The church’s links with the Iwerne Trust were rather strong, were they not? I believe MA also oversaw the move into St Andrew the Great (but I am prepared to be corrected).
Not really. I attended the round church for 3 years, was a member of college CU, never heard any mention of Iwerne. I first heard of Iwerne when reading the Makin report. Obviously Jonathan Fletcher had strong links, maybe Mark Rushton less so. Hugh Palmer was a later curate I think. It was not ‘the iwerne church’. no such thing existed. I’m the kind of person who holds on to facts like a drowning person holds on to a raft. But in this turmoil, surely facts matter? That is why I also objected to a Guardian statement that Justin Welby… Read more »
Justin Welby exchanged Christmas cards with Smyth and donated a couple of times to the charity funding his work in Africa. I find this adds to the likelihood that he knew nothing of the abuse. He would hardly have done either if her had known. I think Mr Makin was a little too ready to conclude that because some in evangelical circles were told of Smyth’s deeds, Justin Welby must have known too.
What evidence do we have that Welby wouldn’t have sent Smyth Christmas cards and donated money if if he had known of the abuse?
It’s a judgment of his character — one I share, for what it’s worth. The young Welby was an angry, badly damaged, prig. He’d have been horrified if he’d known what Smyth got up to. It would have violated the sanctuary that the Church had given him against the chaos of his upbringing.
Christmas cards and small charitable donations were just part and parcel of upper middle class life. My mother used to send out 150 cards a year, at least.
I used the phrase for two reasons: first it’s what’s salient about the church in this narrative — it is where the Iwerne men went (unless they were into the charismatic renewal); secondly as a partial anonymisation of the present vicar. Everyone on this blog will know who he is, and I’ve named him myself before. But he did ask for pseudonymity and I think that’s fair if it is granted to “Graham” when writing for a reasonably large readership like Prospect’s.
i understand. But it was not the Iwerne church. It was the Round church, where many Iwerne followers also worshipped, and where some clergy were also involved in Iwerne.
Maybe the ‘Iwerne’ church may have been better, and we would all have understood?
I guess I am defensive because I don’t like to think I worshipped anywhere connected with Smyth!
I agree. Survivors/Victims should only be ‘outed’ on their own terms, in their own timing, after consultation with them. I get what you did there and I respect it. Nor should there be obligation on ‘survivors/victims’ to report anything. That is the moral duty of others. For some survivors, public ‘outing’ or prying can be devastating. My own experience of abuse as a child has been published by IICSA, but fully anonymised with respect and checking of what I was happy to be made public. It was protective and professional (unlike the way ISB survivor/victims were treated by the Archbishops’… Read more »
Also One of the families of a boy beaten at Winchester did want the police brought in even if they yielded to the judgement of the headmaster and of the other parents and gave way. My reading was that the other parents were not consulted, it was the normal habit of public school headmasters to be autocratic and ignore the wishes of parents. He has a lot to answer for. It was his word alone which stated that the other parents did not want to pursue the matter. I’m reminded, at a much lower degree, of that famous Eton headmaster… Read more »
I assume the reference is not to the diminutive but ferocious John Keate, who beat boys in the heroic mould, and was cheered by his victims having flogged the whole school, but to Tony Chenevix-Trench, whose case is an interesting one. Chevenix-Trench (scion of a very prominent Anglo-Irish and clerical family) almost certainly suffered from serious PTSD, having been captured at Singapore and assigned to the Burma railway, during which he suffered great privations and punishment beatings at the hands of the Japanese. On being welcomed by his Indian Army (and Indian Political Service) brother, Charles, on release in 1945,… Read more »
yes. i think we should be very clear. the level of beatings normal at some public schools at that time, and which Chenevix-Trench carried out to the extreme, were on a totally different level to those of Smyth. Smyth’s torture, physical and mental, would not be out of place in assad’s prisons.
Sorry, I’ve been rereading this and trying to understand “…who beat boys in the heroic mould” – could you explain that please?
Keate was not even 5 feet tall. He had a school of 500 boys and only 5 assistants. He himself had immediate charge of 170 boys in his schoolroom. Discipline scarcely existed, and he was [barely] able to exercise control through the liberal, and fierce, application of the birch. During one night, 5 June 1832, he birched 128 boys in one go in order to suppress an incipient rebellion over the expulsion of a boy (on another occasion 87 were flogged in one session). That itself was a considerable physical task for a man of his proportions. He may have… Read more »
Thank you for expanding that. The role and extent of corporal punishment in schools in previous eras is well known. It’s the describing of the extent of it in terms that could seem (whatever the intention) respectful, even admiring, such as that word “heroic”, that I find troublesome, especially in the context of John Smyth. If Keate is described as heroic for beating (and fiercely) multiple boys in one session in the interests of restoring classroom discipline, why shouldn’t Smyth have felt himself to be heroic for beating fiercely one boy multiple times in one session in the interests of… Read more »
Agreed. But the level of abuse committed by Smyth amounts to torture, and was totally different to the beatings referred to above. Different qualitatively, not quantitavely. Which version was told to the police? Rushton report detailed the true abuse graphically. I think I mentioned before, I taught at the same school as Welby in Kenya, though separated by a year or two. there was some incident, and one of the teachers (who was very athletically built and a good footballer) told all the pupils to lay down on the grass (boys and girls) and proceeded to beat them all. It… Read more »
I suspect there’s little to be gained by trying to distinguish a difference in kind from a sufficiently large difference of degree. The experience of the victims was horrendous, unimaginable really, and vastly beyond “mere” normal public school experience. Agreed. But many of the characteristics of what Smyth did seem to me to draw from things that were accepted in the world of public schools (or for that matter, wider society) of certain eras – drawing blood, a dedicated venue, nudity, the added psychological pain of anticipation and ritual, the expectation of friendliness after the event. If we say Smyth… Read more »
The Coltart report says exactly the opposite – how accurate these conflicting sources are 40 years after the events isn’t really possible to say. The late John Thorn could hardly be less like the flogging headmasters at Eton (and other major public schools – including one in Scotland). At the time he was seen as a prominent local citizen as well as a liberal and reforming headmaster. I knew two Winchester masters, people of highest integrity, both now deceased as so many people in the total history of this saga are, including John Thorn’s immediate successor as headmaster, and their… Read more »
Yes, I was just commenting from memory of what I had read in Makin. Makin may be wrong, and my memory may be faulty.
Although he concealed the matter at the time from the governors
One of the unanswerable questions — again — is how much of the physical detail Thorn knew. Again and again in the treatments of this story we come up against the assumption that everyone who knew anything about Smyth’s abuse must have known everything. And while Thorn was clearly aware of the controlling dimensions of Smyth’s abuse, we shouldn’t take for granted that he knew about the physical savagery, the nappies, and so on.
Exactly. Doesn;t excuse anybody with any pastoral care for not going the extra mile, but also we can;t blame the police. Even if the police did nothing and said there was no evidence of criminal activity or likelihood of charges, that does not absolve anybody from taking disciplinary action and informing others. It simply means that in the period during which police were considering action, nothing much could be done, but afterwards much could have been done. Being informed that the police are not going to proceed is the start, not the end, of the process. So at the very… Read more »
The Titus Trust got such a written confirmation from the Hampshire police at some stage. But what disciplinary action could anyone in England take against John Smyth in 2015? No one in Lambeth Palace knew what was in the Ruston report until after the C4 report was broadcast.
Unanswerable questions, as you say yourself. I would have to re read the Makin report to remind myself of the chronology. Let’s try this scenario. Rushton writes report in 1982. Shared with at least 7 others. They decide the abuse is so severe it should be reported. In the absence of safeguarding processes, they go to the police. They can’t go to the Bishop, Smyth was not ordained. Police say there is nothing here which is criminal. So, instead, they contact the media, to the media’s great delight. Problem solved. Maybe they should have had a quiet word with the… Read more »
Klang
Did I make an error of fact or judgement or style?
Man, the police have kind of got away with this one, huh? This was reported six times and it took Channel 4 to make anything happen.
Like I’m not trying to deflect from the inaction or cover-ups on the part of churchmen, but feels like there’s some coppers need to lose their jobs too.
That isn’t going to happen. At best, there’s a naivety in the notion that ‘we told the police and thought they would do something’. As soon as the police are involved, you’re open to another culture with its own priorities, rules, and criteria of success. They also have to work against an ever changing background of crime and the prospect of an arrest, conviction and sentencing. Please don’t think I’m making excuses on behalf of the police, I’m the last person to do that. But I’m afraid it’s a reality, as is the ability of the police to admit responsibility.
By the time any of Smyth‘s activities were reported to the Cambridgeshire police in ?2013 they were ‘historical allegations’ having taken place approximately 30 years before. A small number of members of the Church of England had covered them up for all this time. Smyth was no longer in the country, and to make matters worse from a police perspective the victims were not willing to be named so they could not interview them to take witness statements. The alleged crimes had taken place in Hampshire and in Dorset, and normal police protocols would be to pass things on to… Read more »
Thank you. Very helpful. I have been hammering for years, not just on TA, about a detailed and accurate chronology being crucial. In my experience (never church-related) it was always the starting point in a claim for historical abuse.
A major UK national newspaper reported that no action was taken in 2013 in terms implying that Smyth was still in England and actively abusing. The Zimbabwe situation had been dealt with, largely by Mr Coltart, two decades earlier. Smyth appeared on South African television as virtually a legal celebrity in 2014 with his views on the Oscar Pistorius murder trial.
Thank you Susanna. I think the conduct of the police is a separate issue, and you summarise well the challenges they were facing. But the fact that police action did not materialise in no way removes the obligation of people in responsibility in the Church to still take action (for the protection of innocents) and to keep pursuing the matter, and in no way letting go and feeling that ‘the police will deal with it, so we can sit back and let them get on with it’. Smyth increasingly needed calling out and hunting down (as he should have been… Read more »
Susannah’s posting is so eloquent. Thank you for this perceptive analysis, especially the clear sighted last paragraph, which expressed my thoughts and feelings better than I could. I. Hope that message gets heard in the right places.
I suspect the Police at the time would have said that if the complainants did not support a prosecution (i.e. did not want to give evidence) then there was nothing they could do. In 2013 when the Diocesan Safeguarding Officer from Ely Diocese met two Cambridgeshire officers, they identified a number of problems. These included whether the injuries were severe enough to amount to actual bodily harm and what they seemed to think were insuperable difficulties in extraditing Smyth.
Also we dont know the level of what was reported. The level rushton documented or spme general stuff about some guy beating adults consentually. The police may have treated the latter like a carry on film. How many knew and reportef the degree of depravity ?
The Police have hugely failed too. However, the Police’s action or lack of it does not prevent or govern the actions of the Church in this matter. It is for the Church to decide who is fit and proper to be in positions of responsibility and what behaviour it tolerates. Reporting crimes to the Police doesn’t absolve you of your own institutional response. We’ve seen this play out now with the scandal around ++York. Claims he had no legal basis to remove the abuser from his diocese (which is highly debatable itself), as if that is sufficient to justify a… Read more »
Like the Methodist Church, in the United Reformed Church we now have compulsory Pastoral Supervision. If there is such a thing as an average minister, such a person didn’t entirely understand what Pastoral Supervision was, and resented something compulsory. After a few sessions, said average minister is now likely to say they don’t know how they managed without it.
I don’t know why, but I have been struggling with these issues. I’m not even a regular communicant nowadays. We now have a statement by Cottrell He said: “This morning’s news coverage incorrectly implies that no action was taken until 2024. That is not the case. In my capacity as Bishop of Chelmsford, I suspended David Tudor from office at the first opportunity, when a new victim came forward to the police in 2019. Up until 2019, there were no legal grounds to take alternative action.” i think it is an institutional or organisational or cultural issue. Jesus said ‘blessed… Read more »
OK, so let’s see how these excuses work in other contexts. We have, say, a mob which wants to drive a paediatrician out of his house. I say
Are these still weak excuses?
That the law will sometimes protect the guilty is the price we pay for a law which almost always protects the innocent.