What help are the police?
The innocent would also have paid if Smyth had come to trial
In any sane world, the Makin report would have discredited both independent safeguarding and mandatory reporting as remedies for all safeguarding problems. They’re not necessarily bad ideas, but they won’t do what is claimed for them. If reporting had been mandatory, it would have been simply ignored by the police, as in fact it was in the absence of any victims prepared to come forward and testify about 30-year-old crimes. If an independent reporter can spend five years on the job and still fail to understand that the Church of England is not an organisation with a central administration to which branch offices are responsible, then the money spent on him was wasted and almost anyone could have done a quicker and better job.
We know that mandatory reporting would have been no use in 2012 and subsequently, because Smyth’s abuse was reported to five different police forces in the years before 2017 — six, if you count Anne Atkins’s daughter — and none of them did anything. The case was by then thirty years old, the criminal lived out of the country, and none of the survivors were prepared themselves to report it or to allow their names to be shared with the police. Not until Channel Four blew the story open did the Hampshire police force act.
Would it have made any difference if the police had been brought in when the crimes first came to light in 1982? Makin is clear:
“The starkest fact is that the UK abuses should have been pursued further, reported to the UK police and pursued by them. David Fletcher and others were still continuing to cover-up and to draw a veil over the abuses they knew about in detail from the late 1970s until 1982… David Fletcher and others, deliberately and knowingly, stood in the way of that investigation.”
From our perspective, after 42 years of immense social change in the attitudes both to Christianity and to homosexuality, it looks obvious that the abuse should have been reported to the police. But the social climate was very different then. 75% of the public thought homosexual acts were in themselves immoral. The Eighties were the years of Section 28, of the first great Aids1 panic, and, in the Church of England, of the Higton amendment and the evangelical revolt against tolerance which has since then split the church to its foundations.
There might well have been a trial, but it wouldn’t have been the one that people now imagine. The police would have seen Smyth’s crimes as consensual homosexual sadomasochism, and some at least would have been keen to prosecute on that basis. If enough of the victims were prepared to go forward the DPP might well have acted.
The irony is that in 1982, liberal opinion was all on the side of consensual homosexual sadomasochism, and the people who opposed it were Mary Whitehouse and her supporters, as the Operation Spanner2 case would reveal. So the knowledge that it was her favourite QC who stood accused of these abhorrent crimes would have made a great story for the papers.
If the survivors have been retraumatised today by having to deal with the bureaucracy of the Church of England now — and some have claimed that it was worse than the original beatings — it’s difficult to find words for what they would have suffered under hostile cross examination in a public court in 1983.
Later that decade I watched with horror and incredulity from inside the courtrooms the Jeffrey Archer trial and Brandon Jackson’s trial by a church court in Lincoln. Both cases were grotesque miscarriages of justice. In both the legal establishment closed ranks to protect the respectable abuser so that the women they had abused were disbelieved and shamed in public.
Smyth had a support network within the legal profession and we can’t be sure he would have been found guilty. He might have been. His victims weren’t women, and they were the social equals of their abuser — and of the judges and lawyers who’d have dealt with them. So they might have been believed and the physical abuse established. Even so, their time in the witness box would have been an appalling experience. A trial would have spread out their entrails for the vultures of the press and public to devour. Speaking as an old hack, the headline writes itself: “Mary Whitehouse’s QC flogged the son of the governor of the bank of England — and he kept coming back for more!” Such a headline is of course viciously unfair, though factually true, but that’s showbusiness.
Even assuming the physical abuse was proved, the spiritual abuse — the hold that Smyth had over them — would have been shaming to explain and difficult even for the victims to understand. To recall these things in a therapeutic setting is difficult and painful enough. To do so in a courtroom under hostile cross-examination would have been an experience quite as excruciating as the original beatings.
Against this is what seems to me the undeniable fact that if Smyth had been brought to trial before he left England it would have stopped him for good. Even if he had been acquitted, the imputation of homosexuality would have finished his career as a mentor of youth in southern Africa. To that extent Makin is entirely right. And — what may seem to us more just and Christian — the price of stopping Smyth would then have been paid by privileged English young men, not adolescents in Zimbabwe. Makin may overestimate the willingness of Wykehamist parents to sacrifice their own children for the sake of helping African strangers but perhaps he does not. One of the families of a boy beaten at Winchester did want the police brought in even if they yielded to the judgement of the headmaster and of the other parents and gave way.
Graystone and Makin are also right that there were entirely self-interested motives for the public silence and the refusal to involve the police back when Smyth’s crimes were fresh and he still had not fled the country. It would have discredited the Iwerne movement, Winchester college, and Christianity more generally. But I don’t think we should discount the fear of what a public trial would do for the victims. It would have been a martyrdom as much as a vindication. I’m not sure that I’d have had the courage to testify against Smyth in court myself. And if I had been in a position to force the young men into court against their will I would have thought twice at least about doing so.
Once the decision to keep the matter secret from the outside world was made, it became harder to unmake it with every passing year. The survivors were trying to get on with their lives.
The calculation changed — or should have done — when Smyth moved to Zimbabwe and it became clear that nothing would stop him working with young people there . Up until that point it was possible to believe in good faith that he had been cut off from all access to young men and boys in England and could do no further harm. After the move it should have been clear that he was bent on further harm and in a position to abuse adolescent boys. At that point someone should definitely have gone to the police in this country in the hope that he could be arrested when visiting here. That’s a moral obligation that applies at least to the seven men who had seen the Ruston report and thus knew exactly how terrible the floggings had been. We don’t know that the police would have responded but the attempt should have been made.
Smyth’s abuse was evil, and it is a quality of evil actions that they leave only bad choices in their wake. They tend also to produce the worst outcomes for actions which are normally blameless. We talk lightly about the banality of evil but one of the implications of that phrase is that most banal actions are not in fact evil and it is the context rather than the act itself which ensures the terrible consequence.
We don’t take this seriously enough. No one wants to hear that sometimes even the right choices are painful and inadequate. They certainly don’t want to hear that from the newspapers. To say that only grace can really heal the victims sounds hideously smug and pious, and perhaps it is, but I’m sure that nothing else can.
The easy scorn of all right thinking people, and the unthinking execration which would have been heaped on Smyth’s victims had the case come to trial, have now been redirected. They are poured on Justin Welby and everyone else who had to try and deal with the aftermath of Smyth’s crimes. This is undoubtedly cathartic. It might even save the careers of the bishops now rending the carcase of their fallen brother. But it isn’t justice.
I remember one of the girls at the Spectator trilling happily as she stood on the staircase: “Have you heard about the miracle of Aids? It turns fruits into vegetables!”
Named, apparently, because “Your nuts tighten when you watch the videos, ”.
Dear Andrew, I admire your forensic focus on this, which is very different from others. I think what has been missed -although it's obvious - is the bizarre attitude of public schools to homosexuality, which as many have observed, was fundamental to the experience of going there, whether you liked it or not. (I found "In Memoriam" very moving in that respect, because it took it all seriously.) From today's viewpoint, as you say, it's easy to miss the public homophobia, but the weird 'see/not see' attitude of public schools to homosexuality at the time is even more obscure. But that was what was behind all the reticence, don't you think?
Thank you for this, Andrew. I agree with what you have written, with one small caveat. I’m not sure that, even in the culture of the 1980s, the abuses of John Smyth would have been seen as consensual sado-masochism. Almost all of the victims report blood having been drawn, which is one of the thresholds that separates consensual sado-masochism from GBH.