Stephen Conway is innocent OK
a post for Safeguarding Sunday
This piece refers to the accusations made about his behaviour in 2013. I have no opinion about his suspension in 2026 and no knowledge of the facts behind it.
It is bad form to argue with profoundly traumatised people who have been damaged by their abuse. The victims of John Smyth all deserve our sympathy and so far as possible understanding. Many church officers failed to report what they knew or to do what they might have done to restrain John Smyth. These facts are undeniable and must always be borne in mind.
Graham is one of the highest profile survivors. He was introduced on Channel Four as the man who first revealed the abuse to the Church and he describes himself on Twitter as “the victim that reported John Smyth’s abuse”. He was obviously a major source for Andrew Graystone’s ground-breaking exposé, Bleeding For Jesus. I have never met him in the flesh, but we have emailed and spoken on the phone. He was, according to Graystone, beaten twice by John Smyth but only as an adult, after he had left Winchester.
One would not normally subject the statements of a man who has suffered so much to a destructive scrutiny. But in his role as spokesman for the survivors, Graham has launched a ferocious campaign against Stephen Conway, the former bishop of Ely who is now bishop of Lincoln.
Graham told the Telegraph that “If a single person is responsible for the failure of finding and stopping Smyth, it is Stephen Conway”; he has said on twitter that “I really do not see how anyone, anyone, can defend Bishop Stephen Conway. Diocese of Ely failed me, failed young men in South Africa, failed the Church of England.”
I have no trouble defending Stephen Conway. In fact I feel compelled to do so and will set out the reasons. But, first, is it true to say that Graham was “the victim who reported John Smyth’s abuse”? He was certainly a victim who reported the abuse. Calling him the victim who did so is problematic.
Two things might count as reporting the abuse — simply telling a bishop about it, or making a formal complaint under safeguarding procedures. Whichever definition you prefer, Graham does not qualify as the first man to do it.
According to Makin, the first time a serving bishop was told of Smyth’s abuse was in 1983, thirty years before Stephen Conway was told:
“The Chair of a selection conference for ordination for a victim of John Smyth, was informed of the abuse and there is no evidence of any follow-up or action because of this. The Chair, Reverend John Trillo, the Bishop of Chelmsford at the time, is now deceased.”1
What makes Trillo unique is that he was a bishop when he was told, and in the formal context of a meeting to decide whether one of Smyth’s victims was fit to be a vicar. He still did nothing. Like so many of those who knew and could have exposed Smyth he is now dead; this makes him an unsatisfactory candidate for a human sacrifice.
There were several bishops who 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 course. He says he never saw it2. All of 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.
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 and simultaneously those who disclosed it within the narrow evangelical circles that they trusted. This was done with the express intention of stopping him from further abuse and keeping him from positions of power in the church. Sometimes the disclosure was extremely vague, as when the young Justin Welby was warned Smyth was a bad man. Sometimes it was excruciatingly detailed, as when the Ruston report was sent to George Carey — and, later, also to some of the clergy opposed to Smyth in Zimbabwe.
But all these disclosures were made within a circle of upper class trust, and only on a need-to-know basis. There was no question of telling the outside world, let alone the police. That would damage the work of the Iwerne camps, as David Fletcher told Makin3.
These snobbish blinkers explain why Alasdair Paine, the victim who had first shopped Smyth to Mark Ruston in 1982, described the reactions to that first disclosure as “brilliant”. They had put an end to the beatings of his English victims. That they left Smyth a free man, despite knowing, and putting in writing, that he was a sadistic criminal, doesn’t seem to have troubled Paine at all.
Any or all of those people could fairly be described as “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 that failure to stop Smyth. But not one of those guilty bishops or priest is Stephen Conway, who had never even heard of Smyth until 2013 when the worst of the abuse was decades old.
All these others could be said to have reported Smyth’s crimes — if in the wrong way and to the wrong people — but Graham might have been the first person formally to report Smyth’s crimes within a modern safeguarding framework in the hope that they would be passed on to the police. That’s how his claim is naturally understood and that’s how it seemed to me when I first read, and reviewed, Graystone’s book. It was only when I checked the appendices of the Makin report and read the warning letter that Stephen Conway sent to the bishop of Table Mountain that I saw it couldn’t be true. The victim described there had not come across Smyth before he went up to Cambridge and definitely did not think that the one beating he received had ruined his life:
“X describes himself as coming from a happy and supportive family. He was not a vulnerable adult, as some others may have been. He went overseas for a while ‘got over it’; and moved on with his life. He remembers the time with a sense of thankfulness that he was not damaged by it, although he feels embarrassed and stupid at having been taken in.”
This is not Graham. In fact, closer reading of Graystone confirms that it was Alasdair Paine, by then the vicar of the Iwerne church in Cambridge. So does the angry response of Paine’s churchwardens when I used his name in a review of Graystone’s book. He had been asked by Graham to find him psychiatric help — not to report anything to the diocese. Failing to find a psychiatrist who would treat Graham, he had asked the diocese for help, and, as a result, made a formal disclosure of his own abuse.4
Why should this matter? Logically it makes no difference to Smyth’s guilt, or Conway’s responsibilities whether Graham is the first, the second, or the 98th victim to come forward. It makes no difference to Graham’s sufferings either. But the claim that he was the first victim to come forward is used to lend moral authority to his denunciations of Stephen Conway and that is unjust.
Three questions need be answered if we are to judge Conway’s guilt or his responsibilities:
What did he know?
When did he know it?
What did he do once he knew?
The first and second are easily answered: when he reported the abuse to South Africa, he knew nothing of what was in the Ruston report, and nothing of what Graham might have told him had Graham, and not Alasdair Paine, first disclosed the abuse to his DSA. He had never heard of Iwerne, or Mark Ruston, and misspelled both in his letter to Cape Town.
None the less, he acted as soon as he was told of Paine’s disclosure by his DSA, Yvonne Quirk. He wrote to the bishop of Table Bay (the Anglican dignitary who looks after the administration of the Church in Cape Town) the very next day. He gave Smyth’s name, address, email, and even his date of birth5. His letter ended:
“A basic Google search shows John Smyth to be in a prominent and influential position in Christian lobbying of the government and in church life; it would appear that no information about the risk he poses to children and adults has followed him from the United Kingdom to Zimbabwe or South Africa.”6
“I am not sure whether Mr Smyth is worshipping as an Anglican these days. I draw this to your attention, none the less, because both the known historic cases and potential current circumstance need to be investigated further and dealt with appropriately. When you reply, perhaps you would identify Yvonne Quirk’s counterpart in the Diocese of Cape Town so that they can liaise about how to take this matter forward in co-operation with our respective authorities.”
So — the next day after hearing of Smyth’s abuse— he writes to Cape Town. He says 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 Counsell. What more could he possibly have done?
As we know now, the police did not investigate in either country 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 had been informed, and that the Bishop was in contact with the rector of Smyth’s parish. No further action was taken. The next two letters Conway wrote to chivvy them on weren’t even acknowledged. Meanwhile, 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?
You can come up with explanations for the inaction of the diocese of Cape Town. Smyth was by that time worshipping in a Brethren church over which the Anglican authorities had no jurisdiction, let alone any power. But even so they made no effort to pass on their suspicions. It is clear from Yvonne Quirk’s later efforts to follow up that no one in South Africa wanted to know7. Why should that be Stephen Conway’s fault?
We do know, though, one reason why the Cambridgeshire police did not take any action. This is because the first report that the diocese made was based entirely on Alasdair Paine’s disclosure. Yvonne Quirk rang Detective Sergeant Lisa Pearson8 of the Cambridgeshire constabulary as soon as she possible could — the day after she had spoken to Alasdair Paine, and the same day as Stephen Conway wrote to the bishop of Cape Town. The police were told that no blood was drawn on either occasion and in the absence of blood their legal understanding was that this had been a transaction between consenting adults, thirty years before. They had better cases to pursue.
This all came up in the first, informal discussions that Quirk had with Pearson the day after Alasdair Paine had disclosed his abuse. Although much is made in the Makin report of the failure to lodge a formal report with the Cambridgeshire police I don’t see how this would have made any difference at all. It would have been dismissed just as the informal report had been and for the same reasons.
There is a brutal irony here. Graham, rather than Alasdair Paine, had in fact been beaten until he bled in January 1982, by Smyth and Simon Doggart acting in tandem9. This was clearly a criminal act. Had Yvonne Quirk been told of it, she would have had the ammunition she needed for the police. She maintained to the Makin review that she had not been told; Andrew Graystone wrote of this period that “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.”10 However, Graham has since posted to twitter a screen grab of a record made by YQ of their first conversation which refers to victims stripping naked and being beaten to the point of bleeding. I had relied on Makin and Graystone. In the light of this evidence I was wrong to do so, and I apologise.
Whether the police would have acted on a formal complaint of a criminal assault that was even then thirty years old is not clear. The next year, 2014, both the Hampshire and the Metropolitan police were handed copies of the full Ruston report by the Titus Trust. This was unequivocal evidence of criminal abuse. Neither force did anything until an enquiry was opened by Hampshire police in 2017, after Channel Four had broken the story.
In any case, even if Graham had known there were criminal assaults involved, he was under no obligation to tell anyone. It is safeguarding orthodoxy that no one has a duty to reveal their abuse until and unless they decide to do so. When Graham first approached Alasdair Paine he had written “I am not sure if I want justice: I have many many times considered the police or the press. Or just acknowledgement, an admission. Or, above all, just to sort myself out and get this behind me. I do not want to talk to you or anyone else involved. I want to take up Mark Ruston’s offer and talk to someone independent about this.”11 He had not intended to report the matter to the diocesan authorities until Paine reported his own abuse and put Yvonne Quirk in touch with him. All this is perfectly understandable. We cannot blame him for failing to get in touch with the police himself.
But what this account does make clear is that Stephen Conway was not told of the seriousness of the abuse.
Graham’s repeated claims in the papers, on television, and even on twitter have done real damage to Conway’s reputation. “If a single person is responsible for the failure of finding and stopping Smyth, it is Stephen Conway”, wrote Graham. Any normal person, knowing nothing of the case beyond the headlines, would read this as meaning Conway could have stopped the floggings and the deaths. Very few people, would realise how absurd it is to suggest that Conway — who only learned of Smyth’s existence in August 2013 — could have stopped Smyth’s floggings in England before 1982, and in Zimbabwe before 199512. Even Martin Sewell, a General Synod member who is regarded as an expert on abuse, claimed in a now deleted tweet that Guide Nyachuru, the boy Smyth (probably) killed in Zimbabwe, might be alive if only Conway had acted 21 years after the murder.
As George Orwell once wrote,13 “One favourite way of falsifying history nowadays is to alter dates ... Sometimes you can give an event a quite different colour by switching its date only a few weeks. But it doesn’t matter so long as we all keep our eyes open and see to it that the lies do not creep out of the newspapers and into the history books.”
Ely, Safeguarding Sunday 2024
Makin 12.1.157and 12.1.10(w)
Andrew Graystone finds this denial plausible. Smyth was on a distance learning course, not in college. I do know that Carey acted promptly and properly when I exposed, for the Independent, a nasty establishment scandal involving abuse, embezzlement, and the guilty knowledge of the most senior civil servant in the Church, in 1991 or thereabouts.
Fletcher was of course right. Had the truth come out earlier, the Iwerne network might have been thoroughly discredited. They might never have got their candidate, Justin Welby, into Canterbury; they might not now be in a position to split the Church of England over homosexuality. Let’s not confuse nastiness with stupidity, or history with justice
Makin 14.3.2 -6
Compare Graham’s repeated claim that Conway was responsible for the failure to find Smyth.
Minor note here: this clause shows that Conway did not know that Smyth had (very probably) killed a boy in Zimbabwe, nor that strenuous efforts had been made by Zimbabwean Christians to close down his operation. All he mentions is a vague reference, drawn to his attention by Alasdair Paine, to a story in the autobiography of a Zimbabwean cricketer, called with a hideous irony Blood, Sweat and Tears.
“Regarding contact with South African counterparts, Yvonne Quirk has explained to reviewers that she made attempts to establish contact with the Bishop’s safeguarding adviser in South Africa; “I think there were 3 emails, none of them acknowledged”, that the Diocesan Bishop told her he had attempted several times to make direct bishop-to bishop contact and had no response either. She also explains that ‘at some point I resorted to online searching to track [John Smyth’s] progress from the UK to Zimbabwe and then on to South Africa, trying to identify paths to disclosure. I could not find any safeguarding adviser in Zimbabwe’ and that she had ‘tried to make contact with the journalist who had reported on the case, or may have been the author of the book’. Yvonne has also advised she’d tried ‘unsuccessfully to find a contact in the South African Government to ensure someone knew JS’s background. During this time I made so many futile attempts to contact so many people that in the end, I think I gave up even noting them, still less trying them all again and again’.” Makin 14.3.15.
a woman who would in time herself become the safeguarding officer for Ely diocese
“Graham travelled to the house party with Simon Doggart. On the way they stopped at Smyth’s house in Winchester, where he was beaten fiercely by his friend, before they drove on to Iwerne together. It was the second of two severe beatings Graham received. He had been beaten by Smyth alone on his first visit in November, but this time, Doggart and Smyth worked together until Graham’s backside bled. Then Doggart dressed his wounds, and drove him home.” — Graystone, page 62
Graystone, Page 140
Graystone, page 139
And though he was clearly practising spiritual abuse in South Africa, there’s no evidence that he flogged anyone there.
Tribune, 17 November 1944
Thanks very much for such a well ordered and clear article that engages with the facts. Great point about the failure of the Iwerne group after the Rushton Report and their subsequent influence. In Cambridge in the mid 1980s I saw the way they operated close up.
What are your thoughts on this given recent events?