The big story, following publication of the Makin Report and the resignation of Justin Welby, is clear: a corrupt Church of England knowingly sheltered a terrible abuser, in the shape of John Smyth, for decades and even now is denying justice to his victims. Although Smyth’s abuse was “an open secret”, no one said anything until a single brave survivor spoke out in 2013. But the cover-up continued until 2017, when noble journalists working for Channel 4 News exposed the whole corrupt mess. Now, at last the Church is being held responsible for its crimes. From the archbishops downwards, all the guilty men must go.
But apart from the awful, overwhelming fact of John Smyth’s long campaign of abuse, almost every part of the grand narrative is wrong. This matters. It has led to a vicious and unjust scapegoating of largely innocent men and women, while those who are much more clearly guilty are either dead or being ignored.
This matters most in the case of Stephen Conway, the former bishop of Ely, of whom one of Smyth’s victims, known as Graham, said: “If a single person is responsible for the failure of finding and stopping Smyth, it is Stephen Conway.” Conway has been held up for execration on Channel 4, and on the front page of the Telegraph. One prominent safeguarding lawyer even accused him of responsibility for the death of a 16-year-old boy in Zimbabwe in 1992, in a tweet since deleted. That death happened 21 years before Conway had even heard Smyth’s name. There is nothing in the Makin Report, or in Andrew Graystone’s 2021 book about the case, Bleeding for Jesus, which could justify that verdict, but the narrative has bundled all of the inconvenient facts out of the way.
The inconvenient facts are these.
Conway first heard about John Smyth in the summer of 2013, at least 30 years after his abuse had first been reported to a serving bishop. The Makin Report says that John Trillo, then the bishop of Chelmsford, was told about it when he was leading the interview panel for one of Smyth’s victims who went on to become a priest. The fact that the victim’s faith had survived his scourging was counted in his favour. Nothing was done to report Smyth to the outside world.
There were several bishops who had learned about Smyth’s abuse before they became bishops and said nothing—David Conner, who had been a chaplain at Winchester when Smyth was exposed there, and who later became Dean of Windsor, is one. Andrew Watson, who was himself a victim and is now bishop of Guildford, is another.
George Carey, who rose to be archbishop of Canterbury, was sent a dossier detailing Smyth’s abuse when he was running the theological college where Smyth took a correspondence course, but says he never saw it. These bishops had (or in Carey’s case, could have had) knowledge far more detailed and damning than was revealed to Stephen Conway. None did anything.
Any of those people could be accused of being “responsible for the failure of finding and stopping Smyth”. Each of them must have had a moment when he decided to keep silent about what he knew, and in that moment you could call each one “the single person” responsible for the failure to stop Smyth. But Stephen Conway is not one of them.
Leaving those bishops aside, it is one of the paradoxes of the story that a lot of the people who were responsible for covering up Smyth’s abuse from the wider world were also those who disclosed it within the narrow evangelical circles that they trusted. This was done with the express intention of stopping him from committing further abuse and keeping him from positions of power in the Church.
These disclosures were only made within a circle of upper-class trust, on a need-to-know basis. This is important. Makin writes that by 1989, “The information about the abuse was now out in the ‘public domain’, albeit to a relatively small public but certainly now widely known within Church and other circles.” In evidence he cites a letter written that year by Mark Ashton, then vicar of the Iwerne church in Cambridge, to Smyth. Ashton had earlier been a chaplain at Winchester, and so had known about the beatings since 1982.
Makin reads the letter as part of the cover-up, and it is certainly that. It is cast as an appeal to Smyth’s better nature, swathed in assurances of respect and affection. It was wholly ineffective. But one thing it makes clear is that even when the abuse was in some sense known, much of what made it most horrifying was not. Ashton clearly knows Smyth is a danger to young people and should not be allowed anywhere near them. He twice writes that the new trustees of Smyth’s Zimbabwean charity in England must be made fully—a word he underlines—aware of what Smyth had done. He is writing to explain why he won’t himself become a trustee and why the old trustees have resigned.
It appears that Ashton was relying on Smyth to inform the new trustees of his sins—which of course he didn’t and would never do. There’s no sign that Ashton was prepared to contact them himself. That is culpable. But the letter shows something else, which is that the knowledge of the violence and severity of Smyth’s beatings was still held within a very limited group even among his evangelical peers. That’s why Ashton stressed the necessity of full awareness. Ashton was one of only seven men who had seen the Ruston Report, a dossier drawn up by his predecessor at the Round Church in Cambridge which detailed the savagery of Smyth’s beatings—the blood, the shit, the nappies, and the insistence that all was motivated by love. The underlining of the word “fully” is there to show that much less serious and largely sanitised accounts of Smyth’s abuse were circulating.
But it also shows how misleading it is to talk of “information about the abuse”, as Makin does when he discusses what was known in 1989. What information, and when? Most people who knew something about it did not know enough to justify a complaint to the police, and certainly not enough for the British police to act on. There is no evidence that any police force in Zimbabwe, where Smyth moved in 1984, or South Africa, where he lived from 2001, ever responded to reports of Smyth’s abuse.
In 1991 the Ruston Report was shown to some of the Christians in Zimbabwe who were trying to stop Smyth’s depredations there, but by that time he had secured the backing of powerful men in Robert Mugabe’s government, who were able to protect him even after the death of 16-year-old Guide Nyachuru, whose lifeless body, bruised around the buttocks, was found floating in the swimming pool of a camp in 1992. At his camps in Zimbabwe, Smyth liked to shower naked with the boys and boasted to parents of how he beat their children with a ping pong bat.
All these difficulties are ignored in the Makin Report. Makin writes as if it were self-evident that “any report of suspected abuse or safeguarding concern should be actively pursued until safety is ensured”, and never admits that this is sometimes impossible. Five separate British police forces refused to investigate complaints about Smyth in the years between 2013 and 2017. In part this was because no victims were prepared to testify. Under those circumstances it really was impossible for anyone in the Church of England to stop him.
The smooshing together of different degrees of knowledge and so of culpability runs throughout Makin’s account. But he does keep the chronology fairly clear. It is the media that has mixed up the timeline so the casual reader gets the impression that Justin Welby or other bishops knew more than they could have done, and failed culpably to do things that they couldn’t possibly have done.
The two strands come together in the attacks on Stephen Conway. They are complicated further by the animus that the victim “Graham” feels towards the bishop. Graham claims to have been the man who alerted the Church to Smyth’s abuse. This is not strictly true; that was the vicar of the Iwerne church in Cambridge, who was very reluctant to do so. As an undergraduate he had himself been beaten, once, by Smyth and after some days of anguished Bible study told Mark Ruston, then his vicar, what had happened. Until then the victims had not even shared their experiences with each other. At one stage two of them, Mark Stibbe and Andy Morse, drove down in the same car from Scotland to Norwich before Morse drove on to Winchester to receive another pre-arranged beating. Neither mentioned a horror that must have been on both their minds.
The physical cruelty may have been the worst aspect of Smyth’s abuse, but the psychological damage—the spiritual abuse, if you like—was also terrible. In England at least, Smyth’s victims believed that he loved them and was working to make them fit for heaven. After one beating, Graystone writes, the victim “lay face down on the bench in shock and agonising pain. Smyth kissed him softly on the neck. Then he massaged Savlon onto his buttocks and carefully wrapped them in a nappy to catch the blood. Together they walked back to the house. Every step was agony. When they got to the kitchen, Anne Smyth was smiling. She handed him a cushion.”
Getting such victims to testify publicly would take nearly 30 years, and most still wish to be anonymous. Graham, who is now the leading whistleblower, was asked to be the godfather of one of Smyth’s daughters. Yet another victim, Simon Doggart, graduated from being beaten himself to assisting Smyth to beat others. He later enjoyed respect and success as the headmaster of a prep school.
Back in 1982 Ruston was horrified by what he was told. Working with a Cambridge undergraduate, Andrew Watson, now bishop of Guildford, he collected and collated the evidence of all of Smyth’s disciples in Cambridge at the time, many of whom had not been to Winchester, but had fallen under Smyth’s spell through the Iwerne camps, where he was prominent. The resulting dossier, shown only to seven people in the leadership of the Iwerne movement, was used to cut Smyth off from the school and the camps where he had found his victims.
The vicar in Cambridge did not consider going to the police. In a statement issued after Andrew Graystone’s book was published he says, “I did not entertain any thoughts of speaking to the police. I thought I had become involved in this practice willingly, even though the reality turned out to be so horrible. I don’t recall any of us survivors discussing that. At the time, I wanted nothing more than to work for my finals and put the matter behind me.”
He never saw the report that Ruston had compiled. When he married, he told his wife about the beating, but he believed that the horror was all in the past until, a year into his Cambridge job, he had a letter from Graham out of the blue. Graham did not want the abuse disclosed either. He wanted therapy.
The vicar tried intermittently for nine months to find a therapist for Graham. In a sign of the way in which the Iwerne movement was and remains detached from the formal structures of the Church of England, he turned to the diocesan safeguarding offices only as a last resort. It was then that he reported his own abuse, as a necessary preliminary to putting Graham in touch with the safeguarding adviser, and it was the account of the abuse he had suffered that Stephen Conway was given, not Graham’s. He did not talk to the diocese until after Conway had reported the abuse to the Anglican church in South Africa, where Smyth was still living, in an effort to get Smyth found and stopped.
The day after he learned of this abuse, Stephen Conway wrote to the bishop of Table Bay, the dignitary in charge of administering the Anglican church in Cape Town. It’s quite clear from this letter, which Makin reproduces, that Conway knew nothing of Graham at all when he wrote, and not nearly enough about the detail of the abuses. But even with this limited knowledge, he blew the whistle as loudly as he could.
He opened his letter with a clear identification of Smyth, his date of birth, his physical address, and even his email. So much for Graham’s claim that the bishop was responsible for a failure to find Smyth. Conway’s letter goes on to say that both the historic cases and the current situation need to be investigated further and dealt with appropriately. He looks forward to a police investigation both here and in South Africa, and expects a reply from Bishop Garth Counsell.
He also informed Lambeth Palace of the case. Formally, it was nothing to do with them, as all the dioceses are independent and the archbishop has no management control over them, but the knowledge that Conway had told Justin Welby’s chaplain, Jo Bailey Wells, of the case, and of the steps he was taking to bring Smyth to justice, has been used to suggest she, too, was guilty of something or other. Makin criticises her for telling an internal church investigation that safeguarding was not one of her formal responsibilities—which it wasn’t, and clergy are trained nowadays to hand all safeguarding questions over to specialist professionals. Makin writes that, “Stating that safeguarding is not a formal part of a role runs counter to the important maxim that ‘Safeguarding is everyone’s business’”. This is astonishingly unfair, since it confuses an exhortation to report suspicions (as Bailey Wells had done) with an organisational responsibility. Nonetheless, she has now been forced to step back from her current role after pressure from the media, the survivors, and the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, who wants everyone named in the report suspended until proved innocent.
What more could Conway and Bailey Wells possibly have done?
As we know now, the police did not investigate Smyth in either Cambridgeshire or South Africa, and neither did the diocese in South Africa. But it is wholly unjust to blame Stephen Conway for these failures. His letter was acknowledged by the South Africans, who said that the archbishop of Cape Town had been informed, and that Bishop Counsell was in contact with the rector of Smyth’s parish in Cape Town. No further action was taken. The next two letters Conway wrote to chivvy them on weren’t even acknowledged. Meanwhile, his safeguarding adviser, Yvonne Quirk, wrote three times to her counterpart as safeguarding officer in the diocese of Cape Town and did not even receive an acknowledgment. How, exactly, is Conway to blame for the inaction of the South Africans?
Yvonne Quirk had contacted the Cambridgeshire police the same day as her bishop wrote to Cape Town. She had a number of informal police contacts and told them what she knew. But the police officers she dealt with told her she had no crime to report: the priest in Cambridge told her he had been beaten as an adult, in some sense consenting, and that no blood had been drawn. Neither Graystone nor Makin are clear about when she talked to Graham in any detail, but Graystone writes, “The beatings that Graham was aware of were of the less extreme kind. All those Graham knew at the time were young adults, and he wasn’t aware that the actions had been illegal.” This, added to the fact that the events had happened 30 years before and a formal complaint was unlikely to get anywhere, meant Quirk decided not to press for a crime number. However, three former police officers now involved in safeguarding have told the Church Times that her report was properly made.
Makin says, and many have quoted him, that this was a chance missed to stop Smyth’s abuse in South Africa. But that’s a verdict that takes no account of the facts.
Would it have made any difference if any British police force had been told of the events that made Smyth’s abuse unequivocally criminal? One force was told details that met the standard for criminality and it made no difference at all. The incriminating facts are very clearly laid out in the Ruston Report, which states on the question of legality that some of the boys beaten had been under 18; and that even when they weren’t, when blood was drawn this overruled a defence of consent.
No one in Ely had seen the Ruston Report in 2013. No one even knew of its existence. Almost all the men who’d ever read it were by then dead. But one of them had passed a sealed envelope containing the report to his successor at the Titus Trust, the charity that ran the Iwerne camps, with instructions not to open it unless a scandal blew up about John Smyth.
Yvonne Quirk did contact the Titus Trust in November 2013, to ask if they would fund therapy for Graham. The sealed envelope was opened and solicitors consulted. In September 2014, an anonymised version of the whole dossier was given to Hampshire police. Graham had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with the Titus Trust, and the Trust felt they could not out anyone against his will. Without named victims the Hampshire police did absolutely nothing until the Channel 4 exposé three years later forced their hands.
This has been a complicated story. The grand simple narrative is much more satisfying and easier to understand. But as journalists we are supposed to care about the truth, and even about justice. The grand simple narrative is a travesty of both.
