Changed Times?

The John Smyth Scandal

Always Worth Saying, Going Postal
Idyllic?
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John Smyth was a Canadian-born British barrister and Christian evangelist born in 1941. Son of Colonel Edward Smyth, after prep school in Canada and public school in England, he completed his education at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, specialising in law. Called to the bar in 1965, he became a Queen’s Counsel in 1979. During the 1970s and early 1980s, he lived in Winchester while practising law in London.

He gained prominence in the 1970s as a respected figure within evangelical protestant circles, not least through his work with the Iwerne Trust, which organised Christian gatherings for boys from elite schools. These were ‘Bash Camps’, aimed at public school pupils and named after Founder E. J. H. Nash (“Bash”), who first ran such holidays in 1930. From around 1940 they took their name from being hosted at Clayesmore School in Iwerne Minster, Dorset.

The holidays came under the auspices of the Scripture Union (SU) with the Iwerne Trust as a fundraising organisation. However, by the time the founder stood down in 1965, they were an independent operation. In his book The Evangelicals, author John C King wrote,

“Many ‘Bash campers’ went from school to Cambridge and became pillars of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. So that it was possible, when the movement was at its zenith for a boy to go from public school to Cambridge, to ordination, to a curacy and to a parish of his own without encountering the kind of life lived outside those particular circles…”

Smyth was a leader at the Iwerne camps from 1964 (when he would have been 33) to 1984 and chair of the Iwerne Trust from 1974 to 1981. Between 1971 and 1979 he was also an SU trustee. One such camper was young Etonian Justin Welby, a dormitory officer in the 1970s, who was to rise to be Archbishop of Canterbury before a fall due to his links with Smyth and inaction regarding allegations made against him.

But were Welby and others who rose to senior positions within the Church of England victims of their own complacency or of changing times, changed morals, and the contemporary frenzy of enquiry, blame and cancel? We must investigate!

What can’t be denied is that during his time in leadership, Smyth abused youths under the guise of discipline and religious purity, often beating them in his garden shed in the idyllic Hampshire village of Morestead. With a Svengali-like power over boys and young men, he became a father figure to school pupils who he invited to the home he shared with his wife Ann and their son and two daughters.

Speaking in anonymity to the Daily Telegraph in 2017, one victim recalls boys being divided into small groups to share secret things; ‘Building up a circle of trust in which we all held responsibility, not just to him but also to each other. Looking back, it was like being invited into an exclusive adults club, and I fell hook, line and sinker for it.’

Smyth formed a Christian Forum five miles from Morestead at Winchester College, the 700-year-old seat of learning which is the alma mater of former prime minister Rishi Sunak. The Daily Telegraph piece continued that in 1977, when he reached 16, Smyth introduced the topic of being beaten to the boy. Taking advantage of teenage sensitivities about intimate personal issues, while quoting from the Bible – Hebrews in particular – Smyth said it wasn’t enough to repent of your sins; that they needed to be purged by beatings.

At Winchester, about 12 boys were being beaten by Smyth. Although they were friends they never talked about the assaults outside of their tormentor’s presence. This continued after the interviewee left Winchester, with him still consenting to being beaten when a 21-year-old. Reports of Smyth’s actions arrived at Iwerne Trust in 1982, whereupon the practice stopped.

The trust carried out an internal inquiry, compiled by Mark Ruston, vicar of the Round Church, Cambridge. A former chaplain of Cheltenham College and also chaplain of Jesus College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Ruston’s involvement with the Irwine trust lasted for 50 years. One of the ecclesiastical great and good, Canon Ruston MA QHC was also an honorary Chaplain to the Queen between 1980 and 1986.

Upon his passing in 1990, aged 73, and following 32-years as vicar of the Round Church (therefore 65 when compiling his Smyth investigation) from an estate of £250,000 Ruston left £100,000 to the Iwerne Trust. His death announcement even suggested gifts might be sent to them in his memory. The report he compiled detailed abuse against 22 young men, and led to Smyth’s removal from involvement with Iwerne.

But the findings were not communicated to the police until 2013, and the report was not made public until 2016. Forty-three years on and in different times, Ruston makes interesting reading. Hand typed, it consists of 22 paragraphs contained on two and a quarter sides of A4. Rushton begins by saying one of those involved came to see him in mid-February 1982. Between then and when the findings were to be presented on 16th March, Ruston talked at length to 13 of the 22 young men implicated.

According to Ruston, the practice began in 1978 with Smyth offering a 17-year-old the choice of a beating from him or being reported to parents and/or school for shoplifting. The boy chose a beating, with it being administered with a cane in the summer house of Smyth’s Morestead home. It must be remembered that corporal punishment was common at private and state schools in those days.

For a term or two, beatings continued with four seventeen-year-olds struck on the bare bottom with a gym shoe – volunteered as a deterrent to masturbation. Individual punishments varied from a dozen to 40 strokes. Ruston claims these were criminal offences under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861.

From the summer of 1979 the practice escalated in frequency, severity and the number of men involved. Note that Ruston refers to the seventeen-year-olds as men. Ruston states the motives seemed acceptable by both the operators and participants as ‘the sanctifying of young Christian men, and the blessings of fatherly discipline.’ Ruston believed this to be a true reflection of the motives of those involved, but added that he himself couldn’t understand it.

Note the use of the word ‘operators’ as a plural. It was not only Smyth who beat the boys – the boys beat each other. Ruston claims there wasn’t any of the slightest evidence of overt sexual excitation or interference involved; however, he goes on to add that ‘the psychiatrist’ described a suppressed masochistic sexual activity. Having been conned into accepting beatings by talk of ‘wholeheartedness’, boys thought they would receive ‘six of the best’ as they might at school, but the scale was ‘horrific’.

Five of the 13 boys interviewed were involved for only a short time. Between them, they had 12 beatings of about 650 strokes. The other eight received about 14,000 strokes, leading to bleeding (some of which continued for weeks) and fainting. Ruston uses scripture, church history and the condemnation of church leaders to debunk a spiritual case for such punishments.

Instead, he blames a cult-like environment within a powerful group dynamic. Although there were no overt sexual practices, there remained too many sexual overtones. All but one of those spoken to appeared ‘amazingly resilient’, but Ruston noted consequential suicidal thoughts and ‘pangs of conscience several years later’. He also wrote, ‘It keeps young men as children (the cane might be suitable between a father and a small boy), but it keeps them immature and unable to make their own judgments and fight their own battles.’ In conclusion:

‘The whole thing displays frightening blindness. In the operators who were blind to Scripture, to sense, to propriety, to possible consequences for Gospel work, to men’s welfare, to church history and to the very heart of the Gospel and in the participants who voluntarily accepted such treatment as God’s appointed way of blessing.’

Circulated to eight people within the C of E hierarchy, at that point the beatings stopped. One of the victims was John Smith’s own son, PJ, who was only 11 in 1982. In that year, after four years of abuse, his visits to the shed stopped. John Smyth visited the boy at his boarding school, sobbed and apologised for being a bad father.

Within months, the Smyths left Britain for Zimbabwe, the head of the family having left the law to become a missionary. Senior people in the Church of England must have thought the issue was ‘in its box’. They couldn’t have been more wrong. Interviewed by Channel 4, PJ says nothing untoward happened there beyond the boys at the southern African version of the Bash camps swimming naked.

However, in 2013, the British case flared up again as a victim came forward and provided a detailed account of the beatings inflicted by Smyth. This prompted internal investigations by organisations connected to Smyth, including the Iwerne Trust. Criticism of the Church followed later, for a tardy and opaque response once these revelations came to light.

The issue gained further public and media attention in 2017, following an investigative report by Channel 4 News. In the intervening eight years, this reviewer suspects a number of points hindered the investigation, particularly in light of the lowering of the age of same-sex consent to 16 and the ubiquitous sexualising of the internet.

First, the same sex nature of the accusations and second, consent given by those beaten. Publicising illegal sexual contact between men and boys and denying the supremacy of choice (no matter how bizarre the outcome) are strong taboos within the decadent, progressive London bubble that controls media, the law and politics. In 2019, a year after the death of Smyth, the dam broke with the Makin report, led by Keith Makin (a former director of social services), commissioned by the church.

That occupation whose reputation has been destroyed by innaction regarding child neglet oft within chaotic family settings (another taboo that can’t be challenged) and the never ending scandal surrounding Asian Muslim rape gangs. Instead of two-and-a-quarter sides of A4 compiled in a couple of weeks, the report runs to 253 pages, accompanied by 245 pages of appendices, and appeared more than five years after commissioning.

Although we will draw our own, rather than Mekin’s, conclusions, the author is to be commended for providing an excellent and detailed timeline of events to which we shall return next time. In doing so, we will shine a light both upon changing times and how a perhaps arbitrary application of recollection may be put to work in church and media politics.

To be continued…
 

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