Changed Times? Part Two

The John Smyth Scandal

Always Worth Saying, Going Postal
He departed for Africa with his family and, by me, has not been heard of since.
Image generated using GROK AI

Despite claims of a cover-up that cost Archbishop of Canterbury Welby his job, close to the time of the scandalous behaviour of Evangelical Christian barrister John Smyth, the following appeared in the February 1989 biography of former Winchester headmaster John Thorn:

“I was told the extraordinary news that the neighbouring barrister [Smyth] had gained such personal control over a few of the senior boys in the group, and had kept it after they left the school, that he was claiming to direct their burgeoning relationship with girls and was, with their consent, punishing them physically when they confessed to him they had sinned.

‘The World of Conservative Evangelism was reft in twain. Absurd and baseless rumours were circulated that he was an unhinged tyrant, the embodiment of Satan. He must be banished. And – quietly but efficiently – he was. He left the Winchester district and then the United Kingdom. He departed for Africa with his family and, by me, has not been heard of since.’

The following June, Canon Ruston of the Round Church, Cambridge, gave a public sermon on the matter. The next month, the trustees of a charity set up in Zimbabwe by Smyth resigned en masse. Despite rumours about a possible embodiment of Satan, neither headmaster Thorn, Canon Ruston, nor anybody else thought fit to contact the police – or the newspapers – and wouldn’t do so for over a quarter of a century.

Beyond this, Thorn’s summary is prescient. As we discovered last time, from the garden shed of his idyllic home in the Hampshire hamlet of Morestead, five miles from the exclusive Winchester College, Smyth was administering beatings to 22 pupils. Eight received severe punishments, in total running to many thousands of strokes each.

It was Ruston, commissioned by the Church of England in early 1982, who compiled a confidential report. His hand-typed two-and-a-bit pages of A4 castigated Smyth, upon which he showed remorse, stopped the floggings, and within 18 months had left the bar to be a missionary in Africa. Despite Thorn claiming he had not been heard of since (attached to the face-saving caveat ‘from me’), from the outset, the victims, their families, and the recipients of Ruston (eight senior esclesiastical figures) and their confidents were aware of Smyth’s behaviour.

A back and forth ensued between England and his new home in southern Africa regarding Smyth’s suitability to be involved in the church work over there, albeit much of it couched in euphemistic terms. For instance, lawyers in Zimbabwe were advised it would be unwise to engage with John Smyth, as there was active talk of concerns about something that had “gone wrong” in the UK.

By 1986, Smyth had set up the Zambesi Ministries, a mirror of the Irwine movement whose boys’ camps he had been connected with before his exile. Zambesi held its first boys’ camp at Peterhouse School, the educational establishment attended by Smyth’s own son, who had also been a victim of beatings.

More worries emerged in endless umming and ahring between Britain and Africa, which rumbled on but below the law enforcement and media radars. Smyth continued to fundraise and take part in the Zambesi Ministries’ children’s camps in Zimbabwe and, in between times, made occasional visits to England. Back here, the rules regarding safeguarding were tightening in response to a never-ending tide of child sex scandals, some involving the church. By 1997, enhanced criminal record certificates began for all those at church who had contact with children. Every place of worship would have a named safeguarding officer.

In October 2012, Operation Yewtree, an investigation into Jimmy Savile and others, raised the profile of sex abuse further through a ‘Yewtree effect’, increasing the number of historic crimes being reported. At this point, journalist Anne Atkins writes an article for The Mail on Sunday. mentioning abuse from ‘an eminent lawyer, with considerable influence in a well-known public school’. Floodgates opened further, with Smyth’s victims renewing contact with each other and with the church authorities.

It was in July 2013 that a new generation of top-level church leaders found out about the 20-year-old Ruston report. Justin Welby, then only two months into his position as Archbishop of Canterbury, had also been an attendee of the Irwine camps when an Etonian and dormitory supervisor as a young adult.

However, those church leaders stand accused of failing to act decisively or report to police – an omission which in Welby’s case was to cost him the archbishopric. Other senior figures did act, but received a mixed response from the legal authorities.

A victim came forward in Bishop Conway’s Ely diocese in May 2014. A Safeguarding Adviser, “discussed the matter with Cambs [Cambridgeshire] Police and they confirmed that they can do nothing because his actions, though clearly an abuse of trust and position, would be unlikely to reach the threshold for a criminal investigation and because of the out of time rules”.

However, different interested parties contacted different constabularies and received different responses. No fewer than five police forces in the UK were informed of Smyth’s abuse between 2014 and 2016. Hampshire said at the time the case could not be pursued because the party who reported the allegations would not provide more details of the victims or other information.

Further pressure upon the police became Operation Hydrant, tasked to coordinate investigations into non-recent child sexual abuse, in particular those involving public figures or institutional settings, including the church. Hydrant aimed to prevent duplication of effort by cross-referencing investigations and providing support to forces. Among the dog’s dinner, in 2019, the Church of England commissioned the Mekin Report. Led by Keith Makin, a senior figure in the discredited profession of social care, it was to run to over 500 pages and take six years to be published.

Although we are grateful to Mekin for a detailed timeline (which contributes to the above summary), we shall draw our own conclusions from his investigation.The Mekin report adds incidents in Africa to Smyth’s tally and, from Ruston’s couple of dozen, increases the number of victims to ‘up to 130’, which mainstream media morphs to an exaggerated ‘hundreds’ of cases of sexual abuse.

However, the original Ruston report claimed no sexual motive for the beatings and examination of the Mekin evidence shows that being admonished for bad behaviour by being smacked on the bottom with a table tennis bat counts as sexual abuse. As does obligatory nakedness during swimming and showering. Surely an exaggeration on Mekin’s part and an example of how child sex abuse can become a currency in modern-day investigations that at times come close to witch-hunts. These are characterised by an attention-seeking craze of historic victimhood, endless inquiries, and the cancelling of individuals and entire institutions.

Likewise, a tragic incident that happened at one of the African camps in 1992. In an interview on Channel 4 News with Cathy Newman, Smyth’s son, PJ, recalls being a dormitory leader of 15 boys. The boys and their leader went for a skinny dip at about 9 pm in the pool. The next morning, 16-year-old Guide Nyachuru was not in his bed and was later found by a gardener, drowned at the bottom of the pool. In a case that didn’t result in a prosecution, John Smyth stood accused of culpable homicide. The culpability being that Smith Senior was responsible for the safety of the children at the camp.

However, more recent media coverage segues towards giving the impression that Smyth killed a boy. Fifteen years after the death, the Guardian ran the headline, ‘British barrister accused of child abuse had been charged in killing of teen’. Beneath which the text begins, ‘John Smyth, who is alleged to have abused boys while running Christian summer camps, had been charged with killing a boy in Zimbabwe’. Not so.

As the police, Winchester College, the bar, the media (wary of homophobia and the sacred cow of consent) and the authorities in Africa ran for cover, it was Archbishop Welby who stood holding the exploding bomb, accused of, in 2013 (when made aware of the contents of Ruston), not complying with a present-day Safeguarding regime regarding events of over 30 years previous.

Interestingly, Welby’s three predecessors served as Archbishop of Canterbury for 10, 11 and 11 years, with Welby serving for 12. One cannot help but suspect Welby ‘ran out of road’, with the everyday churchy rivalries mounted over a decade and a bit, aided by contentious issues such as same-sex blessings (too far for traditionalists, not far enough for progressives), political interventions on Brexit, austerity and economic inequality, falling attendances, church reparations for slavery, the hollowing out the parishes etc.

Combined with the media’s obsession with cancel culture and their progressive hostility towards Christianity, although one hesitates because of the flippancy of the remark, it might appear to be Welby who received the final excessive beating from John Smyth.
 

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