Does Makin finger Justin Welby?

Questions arising from the Makin report

This is going to be a disorganised series of notes for the moment. I have vented in the Church Times about the awfulness of much of the press coverage. And I am shocked by the persecution of Stephen Conway and Jo Bailey Wells. A cultural or bureaucratic problem is not solved by ritual sacrifices. Both did their best when acting on inadequate information. None the less, some questions arise in no particular order, from a close reading of (parts of) the Makin report.

At one point in his report Keith Makin writes

There is definite evidence that many Church Officers, including a Bishop knew of the abuses in the UK [before 2012]. In addition, it is probable that another Bishop knew of the abuse, with a further Bishop being told a partial account of the abuse by a victim. (e) A significant number of those that were aware of the abuse at this time were very senior figures within the Church of England, or went on to very senior positions including Archbishops and Queen’s Chaplains.

So who are these guilty men? The Queen’s chaplain and one of the Bishops would be David Conner, who was a chaplain at Winchester when Smyth was first exposed. Another bishop would be the late John Trillo, in Chelmsford, who presided over a selection panel at which the ordinand talked about his ordeal. But it’s the plural “Archbishops” that sets the juices flowing.

Now, one Archbishop is certainly George Carey who was sent an edited version of the Ruston report when he was running Trinity Theological College and Smyth was a pupil there. He says he never read it, but he lost his PtO for a while anywhere. But who is the other, if not Welby? Hardly Sentamu or Rowan. Hardly Stephen Cottrell or David Hope. There are no other Archbishops in the relevant period. So it looks very much as if Makin has concluded that Welby is lying about his role in the affair.

Is this fair?

The defence of Justin Welby — to which I largely subscribe — is threefold.

(1) He didn’t know what was happening

(2) even if he had known, he couldn’t have stopped it

(3) Whatever his guilt or responsibility, there are others who were incomparable more guilty and more responsible.

Point (3) is beyond doubt. According to Makin “Several Church officers and ordained persons, including a Bishop knew of the abuse by mid 1984.” This was nine years before Welby was even ordained, so he can’t be included in that group. The Bishop appears to have been John Trillo, then Bishop of Chelmsford, who was chairing the selection panel for one of the victims who wanted to become a priest. But the Inner Ring at Iwerne are all dead by now, except for one man now facing criminal charges. They all got off scot free — unless, of course, they were right all along about hell.

Point (2) looks solid. Welby could have talked more and much earlier to the survivors. But by that time Smyth was dead. No one has suggested this, but I suppose he might have had a quiet word with the Home Secretary or the Attorney General about Smyth’s visits to England (if he’d known of them) some time after 2015. But he thought the police were on the case, and five police forces had in fact been warned.

Point (1) — that he didn’t know until too late — is what Makin seems to dispute. So is it true? It is certainly completely true at the time of the abuse in Winchester and for some years afterwards. He must have learned, later, that there were suspicions around Smyth: he was warned as a young man working in Paris that Smyth was “not a nice man”, without any details being given.

I think it’s reasonable to assume — especially after Smyth moved to Zimbabwe — that by 2000 Welby knew Smyth had done something wrong in England, even if the details were unknown. Others in the Iwerne movement certainly did. Paul Perkin, the vicar of one of the first and largest HTB plants, warned one of his congregants against working with Smyth in Zimbabwe, and Perkin is credited in Welby’s 1992 thesis on structural sin as the man who alerted him to the possibility of corporate, not merely individual, sin.

But none of this rises to the level of proof of anything concerning detailed guilty knowledge. Welby’s knowledge of what had gone on in Smyth’s shed, such as it was, can only have been vague. I’m sure he didn’t want to know more. He did downplay to the point of dishonesty his contacts with Iwerne circles when first interviewed by Cathy Newman. But that’s a proof of embarrassment, of shame, not guilt.

What we know he knew was this:

In 2013 he was told that one victim had made a formal report to the diocese of Ely. This is complicated because there were in fact two victims involved in Cambridge (which comes under the Bishop of Ely). One, let’s call him AP, was by then ordained and the Vicar of a big student church in Cambridge. He had in fact been the first of Smyth’s victims to blow the whistle on him to the Iwerne hierarchy back in 1982. And he described the actions then taken to remove Smyth from Winchester and expel him from the Iwerne inner circle as “brilliant”. The coverup he took for granted.

The other, known as Graham, had been at Winchester and later worked in finance. He is now the loudest voice among the survivors. He had asked AP to help him find a therapist and to get someone to pay for it nine months before. AP eventually suggested that he contact the diocese. Once that was done, AP asked Graham to stop emailing him.

At this point AP himself reported his experiences to Yvonne Quirk, the DSA. It is AP, not Graham, whose experiences were reported to Lambeth Palace and South Africa. He had himself only been beaten twice, as an adult, and no blood was drawn.

The day after AP made contact with the safeguarding officer, she told the Bishop and the police. The very next day the bishop wrote to the relevant bishop in South Africa, about “a serious historic safeguarding situation” with the police involved, and the day after copied this letter to Welby’s chaplain. She send a copy to Welby with a note: “He may just know JS personally”.

This is described by Makin as the moment when

“The Church of England knew, at the highest level, about the abuse that took place in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s personal Chaplain (a Priest) and the Bishop of Ely were all made aware of the abuse, and Justin Welby became aware of the abuse alleged against John Smyth in around August 2013 in his capacity as Archbishop of Canterbury.”

But what had been reported to them was a situation in which consenting adults were beaten and no blood was drawn. That is what Yvonne Quirk had been told had happened to him by AP.

It was very much short of all that would later be revealed by Andrew Graystone. It is certainly not what we would now call “the abuse alleged against John Smyth” — the nappies, the blood, and the astonishing scale of the floggings. By allowing that impression to arise, and using “the abuse” to cover two very different actions, the report is entirely unfair to Justin Welby.

One naturally assumes that if only Graham had been asked for his testimony, the full horror of the beatings would have emerged. But again, this can’t be true. Andrew Graystone, for whom Graham has obviously been a major source, writes that

“Graham had not wanted or asked for his case to be [reported to the safeguarding authorities] but nevertheless the safeguarding officer at Ely Diocese who contacted him at the end of July dealt with him with some compassion. She certainly began to recognise the scale of the problem … Graham told Quirk what he knew – that he had been beaten twice in the shed; that at least half a dozen other Cambridge undergraduates had been in the same programme; that they had all been Wykehamists. 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.”

Again, this is very far short of what we now know, and what’s in the Ruston report. It’s not even clear when Graham reported this. There is throughout this story a constant blurring and difficulty over timelines. Graystone writes elsewhere that when Graham told a therapist in January 2014 what had happened to him “It was the first time he had spoken about it in 35 years.” That’s six months after Justin Welby had been told of AP’s abuse.

So it is quite clear that Stephen Conway was not told of the full seriousness of the abuse before he reported it to Welby, to the police, and to the South African church. The man who didn’t tell him then is now demanding that the bishop be sacked for not knowing what he was not told. Indeed, Graham goes further than that when quoted in the Telegraph, “If a single person is responsible for the failure of finding and stopping Smyth, it is Stephen Conway. There was a failure to stop the most prolific abuser the Church of England has ever seen and the buck stops at Stephen Conway.” There, he is described as “the victim who reported the concerns”.

That’s not true either — see above.