In the late 1970s, when many of my contemporaries were pogoing to the Sex Pistols, others of the same age—all public schoolboys—were being beaten on the bare buttocks until they bled, in the name of Christ and for the sin of thinking about masturbation. That they were groomed to allow this to happen, that this took place over several years, that the perpetrator was allowed to leave Britain unpunished, that his own children were unprotected and that the issue was not reported to the police, had nothing to do with Justin Welby—except in the most tangential way. But a contemporary head had to roll and his wore the biggest mitre.
The report published last week that led to his fall was commissioned by the Church of England itself and written by Keith Makin, a former director of social services and chief executive of an independent childcare company. It is an admirable document, 253 pages long, and also constitutes one of the most fascinating insights into recent establishment history that I have ever read. It brings together the conservative evangelical movement in the Church of England, the public school system, upper middle-class attitudes towards parenting, British toleration of corporal punishment and the pathologisation of sex by religious moralists. Put them together with an “old boys” desire not to let the world in on the shameful secrets of your associates, and you have the Smyth scandal.
John Smyth, who died in 2018 aged 77, was born in Canada to parents who were members of the cultish Plymouth Brethren. The family emigrated to the UK in the late 1940s and Smyth was sent to a minor English public school and then to Cambridge, where he fully graduated in law in 1964.
In the Easter of the same year Smyth attended a Christian camp for young people organised under the auspices of the Iwerne Trust. These camps were run from the premises of a private school in the Dorset village of Iwerne Minster and had been set up in 1933 by a young conservative evangelical cleric, the Reverend Eric Nash (whose nickname was Bash). Attendees had be invited to the camps and Nash and his associates were to be known as “commandant”, “adjutant” and “officers”.
The object of the camps was to take pupils from the top 30 public schools and indoctrinate them into conservative Anglicanism while inculcating a sense of fellowship. To paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie, give me a public schoolboy at a tender age and he’s our idea of Christ’s for life—and may become prime minister or even an archbishop. Makin records one of Smyth’s victims as remembering that “as a child at the Iwerne camps, it was all about getting people into the Church of England and looking to hold sway on opinions within the Church, and that wasn’t hidden from us as teenagers. That was very much the emphasis, that you have been chosen, and you will go on to do great things for Jesus within the Church of England. That was part of what they were selling to us.”
Many future church leaders and theologians attended these utterly elitist camps at one time or another, including David Sheppard, bishop of Liverpool from 1975 to 1997; the celebrated conservative theologian John Stott, who had heard Nash preach at Rugby school in the late 1930s and went on to become a chaplain to Elizabeth II; and a young Old Etonian called Justin Welby. There is no evidence that any of these people knew what John Smyth was doing with older boys and young men beginning some time in the early 1970s. Indeed, sufficient faith was placed in Smyth, by all accounts a charismatic and outwardly spiritual man, that in 1974 he was appointed chairman of the Iwerne Trust.
So able did he seem to others that five years later he was appointed the youngest QC in the country. And whereas men like Nash and Stott, as bachelors, might be subject to some scrutiny if they showed too much interest in young men, Smyth by then was “happily married” and would eventually become a father of four. When the abuse happened a great deal of it took place in the garden shed at the Smyth home, where the young men had been invited to dine with the family.
That home was in the village of Morestead, a 10 minute drive from the centre of Winchester, and had almost certainly been chosen because of the access it allowed to the various buildings of Winchester College. Makin notes that “Winchester College allowed John Smyth easy and unsupervised access to the boys at the school and did not see their attendance at his house as being in any way questionable”.
In 1982, according to one account of how the first report into Smyth came about, a Cambridge student sought guidance from his vicar, the Reverend Mark Ruston, another evangelical associated with Iwerne and with the Scripture Union—of which Smyth was a trustee. Many of us students in the 1970s encountered members of the Scripture Union as they proceeded from door to door, wishing to give us the good news.
What Ruston heard was not good news. His parishioner wanted to know whether being beaten by his religious mentor until he bled represented good theology. Ruston, in no doubt that it wasn’t, decided that he should investigate and held an impromptu one-man inquiry.
The result, now called the Ruston Report, is a remarkable document for many reasons. The first was that he took it upon himself to conduct it at all rather than alerting either the police or the Church authorities. The second was that Ruston was pretty thorough and appropriately shocked. We’ll come to the third reason later.
The Makin Report includes the full Ruston Report from 42 years earlier. And quotes from it liberally. As in this summary by Ruston: “The scale and severity of the practice was horrific. Five of the 13 I have seen were in it only for a short time. Between them they had 12 beatings and about 650 strokes. The other eight received about 14,000 strokes: two of them having some 8,000 strokes over the three years. The others were involved for one year or 18 months.
Eight spoke of bleeding on most occasions (’I could feel the blood splattering on my legs’—’I was bleeding for 3½ weeks’ ’I fainted sometime after a severe beating’). I have seen bruised and scored buttocks, some two-and-a-half months after the beating. Beatings of 100 strokes for masturbation, 400 for pride, and one of 800 strokes for some undisclosed ’fall’ are recorded.”
Victims were quoted at length: “I know that my bottom bled from the beatings…. I would need to wear nappies for three or four days afterwards. Then I would have a scab that needed to heal and that might take another week or so”; “I don’t think it was long before I was having to wear nappies. It might have been the fourth time. Something like that… Smyth supplied the nappies, but I don’t remember where he got them from.”
Ruston shared his report with seven other clergymen and associates with the Iwerne Trust and the Scripture Union. All but one of them and Ruston himself are dead. At least one meeting of this all-male group took place at the Carlton Club. Makin says of the Ruston group that: “The decision was made that the authorities will not be informed (most importantly the police) and that the matter will be ’held secret’ by this small group.
The reason given for this is that it will be in the best interests of the victims, as their lives would be ruined by the abuse being made public. Canon David MacInnes has told reviewers that he was called by a parent of one of the victims. He made it clear that their family did not wish the reports of abuse to be taken any further.“
Makin concludes that the author and recipients of the Ruston Report, though horrified, saw the abuse as in essence a private matter: “The recipients of that report participated in an active cover-up to prevent that report and its findings—including that crimes had been committed—coming to light. There is no excuse or good explanation that justifies that decision.”
But by now others were becoming aware that something bad had been going on, not least because Smyth was still active and individuals privy to the report felt it necessary to warn others to steer clear of him. Those warned include a housemaster at Winchester College; the Scripture Union; the vicar of All Souls, Langham Place; George Carey, then principal of Trinity Theological College and within a decade to become archbishop of Canterbury (Carey denies seeing the report, but Makin finds this hard to believe); and the bishop of Chelmsford.
By September 1982, the headmaster of Winchester College, John Thorn, had “consulted” with an unknown number of parents of Smyth’s victims, who he said had agreed that the abuse should be kept a secret. As a consequence he refused to allow the subject to be discussed at a governing body meeting, but he did ban Smyth from college premises.
In essence, those most involved agreed that their first task was to persuade Smyth to stop the abuse, and their second was to get him to disappear, preferably by leaving the country. Their attempts to force Smyth to realise that the game was up—in Britain at least—are painstakingly detailed in the Makin Report. And as Makin all too poignantly observes, no one at any stage seems to have had any concern for Smyth’s own children. In fact his son was regularly beaten, later recalling that: “Trips to the shed were never quick. Quick beatings happened in the house, in his study or the upstairs bathroom. The shed was about the experience. The experience often began days before. My dad was often away all week and returned at the weekends. Mum would write my wrong-doings in ’the book’ in the kitchen ready for my dad to read on his return. I had days of waiting. Days of anticipating my next visit to the shed.”
Smyth was gradually but unofficially blackballed from his positions of authority. He ceased to be chair of the Iwerne Trust in 1982. Letters were sent, phone calls were made and generally where he popped up doors that were previously open were closed. Makin details several of these instances. In 1983 Smyth had attended an Evangelist conference in the Netherlands where he had met the presumably unwarned head of a Christian charity called African Enterprise, who invited Smyth to join his work in southern Africa. The next year the house (and shed) near Winchester were sold and in July of 1984 the Smyths relocated to Zimbabwe, where Smyth was supported by African Enterprise in setting up his own charity, the Zambezi Trust. This was finally accomplished in 1986. The “council of reference” included George Carey.
At this time one of the directors of African Enterprise, a Michael Cassidy, was contacted by people in Britain with knowledge of the Smyth scandal. Cassidy replied to the effect that the Smyth deal was already done but that an eye would be kept on him. Cassidy refused to give evidence to the Makin review.
And so John Smyth set about ministering to the young Christians of Zimbabwe, organising events and camps at which Smyth and the participants were often near naked and where corporal punishment was administered. It’s estimated that whereas Smyth abused up to 30 boys and young men in Britain, the victim total in Africa in the years after 1984 was around 85.
Makin concludes that: “In the period between 1984 and 2001, at which time John Smyth relocated to Zimbabwe and subsequently South Africa, Church officers knew of the abuse and failed to take the steps necessary to prevent further abuse occurring. Throughout this period—and particularly given the Church’s adoption of formal safeguarding policies from 1995—the Church had sufficient knowledge of the abuse to have taken those steps.”
But reading the report you can’t help being struck by the total informality of the whole business. At no stage—aside from the Winchester College ban—is an institution as such required to officially consider the Smyth case. Smyth’s abuse, meanwhile, was causing a stir in Africa, not least after 1992 when a 16-year-old boy attending one of Smyth’s camps was found dead one morning in a swimming pool.
Astonishingly, Smyth was still being protected and funded by people associated with the evangelical movement in Britain. By the end of the 1980s the trustees of Smyth’s Zambezi Trust were in revolt and in July 1989 several resigned. A new Zambezi Trust was set up chaired by the wealthy lay evangelical, Jamie Colman—whose father (the mustard heir) Sir Michael Colman was first church estates commissioner from 1993 to 1999. Jamie Colman’s wife Sue is an ordained priest and trustee at the church of the Holy Trinity Brompton in London, arguably the spiritual epicentre of the conservative evangelical movement in Britain.
For the next decade and more Colman, despite all warnings (many of them detailed in the Makin report), continued to fund and support Smyth, batting off the charges made against him and at one point even seeming to defend the abuse by referring to the need for “rugged Christianity”. Colman, incidentally, was a contemporary of Justin Welby’s at Eton. He only stopped in 2017 when Channel 4 broadcast a major exposé of the Smyth scandal. Colman refused to give evidence to the Makin review.
In the late 1990s, the Zimbabwean authorities took Smyth to court on various charges of abuse and one of culpable homicide. The cases eventually collapsed but in 2001 Smyth was forced to relocate to South Africa.
Welby as a young man knew Smyth personally, though does not seem to have been a close associate. They exchanged Christmas cards. At the age of 34, Welby was still attending the occasional Iwerne Trust camp, was himself a conservative evangelical in his early church days, and was ordained at the recommendation of the then vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton. In his evidence Welby recalled hearing a very imprecise rumour about Smyth in 1981, several years before Welby was ordained. It wasn’t then his responsibility to take action. The criticism of Welby that has led to his resignation had to do with how the Church—when the office of the archbishop became fully aware of the Smyth scandal in late 2013—failed to act.
But this was now just under 40 years after Smyth had left Britain. He was by then in his mid-70s (he had four years left to live) and it is possible to see—without excusing it—why Welby and his office might have lacked a sense of urgency when compared with other more pressing issues. Makin suggests that Welby demonstrated a lack of curiosity about the case, and I suppose one implication might be that the matter involved a part of the Church with which he had been closely associated as a young man.
Either way, it is hard for me not to see in the targeting of Welby a desire to find a contemporary figure to hold responsible for the sins of the past—a sin-eater, if you like. The big cover-ups in the case of Smyth had happened decades before Welby took office.
And also, the departure of Welby seems to allow everyone to forget the central question of the Smyth affair: how on earth was it all allowed to happen in the first place?
I wondered at the beginning of this essay at how it could be that boys and young men—some in their twenties—could largely voluntarily allow themselves to be repeatedly beaten on their bare behinds until they bled.
Of course by “voluntarily” I mean only that they weren’t physically restrained or coerced and that theoretically they could have ceased association with Smyth without obvious consequences. It is hard for me to understand why any young man of that time wouldn’t have laughed off Smyth’s suggestion that fidelity to Jesus required corporal punishment. Which makes it all the more important to try to comprehend it.
Smyth was charismatic and clearly highly intelligent, if not brilliant. He was persuasive but also driven. Makin notes his obvious sexual interest in young men, but could also have contrasted this with Smyth’s firm belief that acts of homosexuality were a terrible sin. In other words, we are dealing with a terribly repressed man who sublimated his forbidden desires in acts of penitential brutality.
In 1977, as he was beating a portion of the gilded youth of Britain, Smyth appeared for the anti-pornography campaigner Mary Whitehouse in her case against the publication Gay News for the crime of blasphemous libel. Gay News had published a poem called “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name" by James Kirkup, which describes the feelings of a Roman centurion having sex with the dead body of Christ. At one point Smyth told the court, “it may be said that this is a love poem—it is not, it is a poem about buggery”. The case was a test of whether in the 1970s, “anything is to remain sacred”. Whitehouse won her case, the last of its kind in the UK.
Smyth was Whitehouse’s go-to QC until the Ruston Report in 1982, when he withdrew from Whitehouse’s attempt to prosecute the National Theatre for depicting anal rape in Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain. In South Africa, after his departure from Zimbabwe, Smyth became an adviser to campaigns to stop the legalisation of abortion and gay marriage.
“The bigger the front, the bigger the back”—Smyth’s victims were always naked from the waist down and Smyth sometimes administered the beatings when he too was undressed. To me, what was clearly being repeatedly beaten and physically punished was his own repressed homosexuality. Sadism stood in for love. But if that was his motivation, and even given his charisma, how did he get away with it?
Over half of Smyth’s estimated 26-30 British victims were pupils at Winchester College. Sixty per cent went on to Cambridge University. Most had been boarders, many of them from the age of seven. This week I heard one of Smyth’s victims—who had been sent to board at a prep school aged seven—tell Radio 4 that “I had loving parents, the best parents in the world, but they were distant”.
I am prepared to bet that the father of this boy had himself been sent to public school and therefore knew what could happen there. Everyone knew. In 1968, Royston Lambert’s The Hothouse Society, with its accounts of prep school and public school life, was published. As a teenager I read it a year later and was astonished at what people would pay to put their children through.
An independent clinical psychologist, Elly Hanson, worked with the Makin review. Makin writes: “Of note in Dr Hanson’s analysis is a reference to boarding school culture and practices, in which she describes how often very young children are separated from their families for long periods of time and therefore ’come to lack strong, secure attachments and an understanding of healthy relationships. This can make them more vulnerable’ to exploitation and abuse, ’especially when perpetrated by someone in the guise of a “father figure”.’ Dr Hanson goes on to explain the vulnerability and needs of those that were targeted by John Smyth, ’… needs are especially acute during adolescence, and become more so when children are placed in boarding school—and furthermore it appears that John targeted those that he perceived as having deeper unmet needs (in other words particular vulnerabilities)’. This explanation correlates to the experiences of several victims who described vulnerability because of family relationship breakdown and/or boarding school attendance.”
It can’t be said often enough. Parents who send their children away at the age of seven when they don’t need to are not the “best parents in the world”. They are among the most neglectful. So Smyth became a father figure and spiritual guide to dozens of poor little rich boys. And their schools more or less encouraged it to happen.
In 1989, Mark Ruston gave a sermon in Cambridge titled “Suffering and Glory”. In one passage he advised students: “Seriously, don't court trouble and suffering. The strangest thing, I think in all my ministry, was when I discovered that a group of students—they might be like you years ago—were voluntarily accepting severe physical chastisement, beating, in order for the purifying of the flesh. They were seeking something, you see, because they thought the pain and the suffering is what would help them.”
The idea of chastisement and physical pain as a path to redemption had a surprising purchase on the British upper-middle classes until very recently. Corporal punishment became illegal in British state-run schools in 1986, though many had already given up the practice. It was banned in public schools in England in 1998.
Almost unbelievably, a group of Christian private schools banded together to fund a challenge to the ban. In the case of R (Williamson) v Secretary of State for Education and Employment the schools argued that the ban was a breach of their freedom of religion. The law lord, Lord Nicholls, delivering judgment against them, summed up part of their argument in this way: “The claimants’ beliefs regarding the use of corporal punishment by both parents and teachers are based on their interpretation of certain passages in the Bible. For instance, ’He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him’: Proverbs 13:24. They say the use of ’loving corporal correction’ in the upbringing of children is an essential of their faith. They believe these biblical sources justify, and require, their practices.”
This was precisely Smyth’s argument to his victims, “I am your loving father and spiritual guide, and it is because I love you that you must be beaten and it is because you love me that you must go along with it.” For the most part the “sins” that required beating were ones involving perfectly normal sexuality such as masturbation or sexual fantasies. This low bar gave Smyth significant scope for justifying his violence. It is worth recalling here that Whitehouse’s idea of what was “filthy” was almost any recognition of human sexual behaviour outside a man and a woman having sex in order to procreate.
More than any other group the conservative evangelical wing of the Church of England was responsible for the nexus of beliefs and practices that gave rise to John Smyth. Makin reports that: “David Fletcher, an Iwerne trustee who oversaw an investigation into the alleged assaults, said he told the Church Society, a powerful voice on the evangelical wing of the Church of England, about the claims in 1982... David Jackman, then a senior minister at a leading evangelical church, also admitted he was told about the allegations at the same time. Mr Jackman went on to become head of the Proclamation Trust, which helps train evangelical preachers... Mr Jackman, who is a director of Keep Marriage Special, a group launched by the Church Society that claimed that letting same sex couples marry would lead to the legalisation of incest, said he believed he had acted correctly in not notifying police.”
Back in the day Eric Nash had gone about his business of recruiting future leaders to the evangelical cause by inviting Christian teachers at the top public schools to his camps. They would then go back to their institutions and recruit boys in their turn. Some of these schools were not particularly happy about this, fearing a reaction from parents. The evangelical John Stott recalls meetings at Rugby school being “strictly off the record and conducted with a good deal of secrecy”.
In 1989, the head of Winchester school at the time of the Ruston Report, John Thorn, produced an autobiography called The Road To Winchester. In it he gives his account of how Smyth came to be involved at the school, and how boys in its Christian Forum went to Smyth’s house for Sunday lunch. Thorn was inclined to be tolerant, not least because these boys didn’t smoke, drink or take drugs. And wasn’t Christianity a good thing?
He writes, however, “It was uncomfortable of course, they spoke so much of conversion, of ‘Becoming a Christian’, a phrase smacking of intolerance and doctrinal exclusiveness; uncomfortable that they were inclined to be secretive, that they would in their worship have nothing to do with those they called ‘unsound’, among them two of the chaplains, most of the local clergy, all the housemasters and the headmaster. They were public about it and would reason with you about it, but no discussion with them resulted in any change or view or policy.”
Thorn is describing what we would now recognise as a cult. And for some boys in his school the guru of that cult was John Smyth. But because it was a cult within the Church of England no one called it out.
Today the evangelical church of Holy Trinity Brompton (or HTB as it is called in the Church) is, in the words of Andrew Graystone, the author of a book on the Smyth scandal Bleeding for Jesus, “already by some distance the richest parish church in the UK. It has a budget of around £10m a year and a staff of 118, making it larger than several Church of England dioceses. Most parishes in the Church of England struggle to afford a curate. HTB has 28. In addition, there are no fewer than 14 ordinands—people in training to be priests or ministers. Together with four ministers, that totals 46 in leadership or training roles for one parish.”
Among HTB’s worshippers is the hedge fund multi-millionaire Sir Paul Marshall, who is on the board of HTB’s church outreach programme. As well as funding GBNews and the UnHerd website and recently acquiring the Spectator, Marshall is a donor to HTB’s theological training college.
Looking at the response of right-wing commentators to the departure of Justin Welby—commentators who themselves benefit from the largesse of Marshall—is to be reminded of the ironies involved in this case. The world they want and that Welby had escaped from is the world that produced Smyth in the first place. For their sins must ye be punished.
A version of this article was first published on Notes from the Underground with David Aaronovitch
