The paedophile headteacher who escaped justice for 50 years
He was a revered rector of a prestigious high school – but the kids knew him as ‘Fred the Fiddler’ and abuse complaints spanned half a century. Yet no-one took action. Steve Kilgallon reports.
He was an exceptionally good teacher who brought history to life, who could spark teenage boys’ interest in Aristotle, Plato, Marx and the Reformation.
He taught in some of New Zealand’s best-known schools, and rose to be rector of one, St Patrick’s College Silverstream, a prestigious boys’ school near Wellington. He lectured at Victoria University. He died with a glowing reputation, eulogised as a ‘‘brilliant and inspiring teacher’’.
Francis ‘‘Frank’’ Durning was ‘‘a very fine scholar’’, Sir Tipene O’Regan recalled in his autobiography; Durning’s Christian theology classes were ‘‘one of the most liberating intellectual experiences of my life’’.
Another former pupil always credited Durning as the teacher who transformed him ‘‘from an average student to a boy who topped his class’’.
But Durning was a lifelong paedophile. His record was so lengthy that it seems incomprehensible his behaviour was not known at the highest levels of Catholicism.
The present head of his order, Tim Duckworth, now denies ever telling a survivor of Durning’s abuse that his nickname within the Marist Fathers was ‘‘Fred the Fiddler’’. Several former students, however, recall Durning being widely known as ‘‘The Fiddler’’ and ‘‘The Groper’’. Durning never faced the
courts, police or even internal sanctions for his behaviour before he died in April 1999 at the age of 84. His story illustrates how entrenched paedophilia was in some Catholic schools, and the generational impact the abusers had even after long retired.
Durning was rector of Silverstream, and then vice-rector of its brother school, St Patrick’s College Wellington (known respectively as Stream and Town), both owned by the Marist Fathers.
Former pupils say his behaviour was common knowledge.
‘‘Everyone knew what was going to happen when you went up to Fred Durning’s room,’’ says Roy*, now 76, who was a thirdformer at St Pat’s Town in 1957, where Durning had moved a year earlier from Silverstream.
Every new arrival was given an appointment to visit Durning in his study-bedroom for a facts-oflife talk. When Roy arrived, Durning fondled his genitals. ‘‘It almost seemed an acceptable thing. I never said anything to my parents . . . It’s a wonder someone didn’t. Maybe they did?’’
Mike Nicholas also had the summons. Durning pulled him close, pressing his erect penis against him, before Nicholas broke free and ran from the room.
‘‘I felt so uncomfortable. What did I do to cause that? Durning was a very intelligent man, and he deliberately cultivated this image of being a holy priest . . . it must have been me, I thought [that caused his behaviour].’’
Only after counselling many years later did Nicholas come to terms with the incident.
Another former pupil recalls: ‘‘I was outside his door once and a student came flying out of his room and said, ‘You’re not going to get your hands on me, you dirty old bastard.’ ’’ Roy wondered why nobody had complained. But perhaps they already had.
Before his arrival at Town in 1956, Durning had been rector – headteacher – of Silverstream from 1950 to 1954.
One of those he abused in those years was Pat Cleary. Cleary gave evidence, albeit posthumously (he died aged 82 in July 2020), to the royal commission currently inquiring into sexual abuse by the state and religious institutions.
Cleary, who said Durning had molested him when he was a thirdform student in 1951, and that another Marist Father, Patrick Minto, had kissed and cuddled him, was convinced two contemporaries had ‘‘blown the whistle’’ on Durning to the authorities, and Durning had been swiftly removed from the school to avoid further controversy.
The Catholic Church failed in an attempt to have much of Cleary’s testimony struck out and the names of Durning, Minto and others suppressed in the commission’s transcripts.
Tim Duckworth said they wanted five names – including Minto’s – suppressed because they had no cases of abuse upheld against them and they ‘‘considered it similar to a person having name suppression in a court hearing until the evidence is heard’’. He said he would welcome anyone with complaints about Minto to contact him.
Durning definitely left Silverstream midway through the 1954 academic year. In 1955, his Rector’s Report in the school magazine thanks a Mr Watson for ‘‘accepting my invitation to come to our assistance when I was going on leave’’ and also, ‘‘I owe a special debt of gratitude to Father George who deputised for me during my absence from the school early in the year’’.
Duckworth said he had no information that complaints were made about Durning in 1954. ‘‘I am happy to receive information that you are able to provide.’’
Among the others Durning abused was Albert Lewis*. ‘‘Durning was 43 when I was at St Pat’s,’’ says Albert. ‘‘If he was abusing boys at three or four a year, he would have abused 200 boys.’’
Now aged 83, Lewis says Durning’s is a name discussed when old boys gather. ‘‘This is a topic that can now be discussed around the barbecue,’’ he says. At one of them, a former classmate said at least 15 of his friends knew of Durning’s activities, or had been abused by him.
Lewis is convinced that Silverstream at the time was ‘‘like a crime ring’’, citing Durning, Minto – who he says was aware of Durning’s abuse of him – and the theologian Michael Shirres, later accused of multiple cases of abuse. He also named another teacher of that time, also a Marist Father, as an alleged abuser.
Responding to Lewis’s testimony at the royal commission, Tim Duckworth said: ‘‘I’m absolutely convinced when I read [his] evidence he believes we all knew about it all of the time. But I can and I would, if you wanted me to, and will subsequently show you that that’s not true, and couldn’t have been true.’’
Asked by Stuff about that declaration, Duckworth said he would not comment on individual cases.
Durning would later teach at St Bede’s in Christchurch, spend time in Samoa (which later prompted former provincial David Kennerley to promise to alert officials over there), and at Holy Cross College, a Catholic seminary in Mosgiel. Mike Nicholas was studying at Holy Cross when a now elderly Durning arrived to deliver a lecture on the Reformation.
He says
Durning carefully avoided him. ‘‘I can really understand why people rave about Durning . . . he drew you right into it. It gave me a great appreciation, but I was still wary of the bastard.’’
Durning was later appointed chaplain at Rochester Hall, a Canterbury University hall of residence, and lectured history part-time at the university.
Even as an elderly man, Durning continued to offend. Another former Canterbury student remembers arriving as a first year student and being asked by Durning to dress a ‘‘carbuncle’’ on his inner, upper thigh. ‘‘I got out of there as soon as I could, and when the veterans arrived, I was warned immediately about him . . . told it was not unusual, and I’d had a lucky escape.’’
Nicholas recalls one former Rochester student saying they had pranked Durning by turning on a communal shower then using a stopwatch to time how long it would take Durning to arrive to catch a glimpse of a naked student.
Nicholas also remembers hearing a speech by the late Craig Larkin, a student at St Pat’s Town from 1956 to 1960, who was Marist Fathers leader from 1997 to 2002, in which he alluded to being abused by Durning (Larkin died in 2015).
Albert Lewis lodged his complaint with the Marists in 2002. He says the investigating priest, Neil Vaney, told him his experience was not criminal. (Vaney told Stuff he had no recollection of making that comment.) After engaging a lawyer, he was eventually offered $5000 compensation.
A few years later, Pat Cleary complained about Durning. Cleary met with Kitty McKinley, a Wellington social worker who handled many of the complaints made to the order.
He says McKinley told him the Marists had fielded 30 complaints about Durning. Cleary’s daughter, Tina, recalls the meeting and how they ‘‘definitely confirmed, heads bowed, that they had received many statements about Durning’’.
The Cleary children date that meeting to 2006 or 2007. McKinley said she had a policy of never talking to media.
Durning had been dead only a few years by then. When he died, there was no reference to any abuse. An obituary in The Press called him ‘‘gifted but modest’’. The official Marist Messenger newsletter said he was ‘‘remembered as a brilliant and inspiring teacher’’ and described him as a ‘‘man of profound integrity’’.
But the Messenger obituary concluded with a quotation from former Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem Felix Randal, a line often interpreted as asking God for forgiveness: ‘‘Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended.’’
Tim Duckworth said he was not the author of the obituary, but wouldn’t say who was. He said he didn’t know of
Durning’s paedophilia when he was alive.
Silverstream has a wall of portraits of past rectors, which included Durning and Minto (there are also honours boards listing them and other paedophiles).
Pat Cleary always wanted the portraits of Durning and Minto removed. ‘‘The presentation of the pictures is especially galling, lighting placed as if they are angels, a demeanour of superiority as if they have a direct line to God. A sickening hypocrisy for those who know better,’’ he wrote.
Minto’s portrait remains on the wall. In a 2019 email, Duckworth said the order had no complaints about Minto, who was entitled to his good name, and the suggestion of removing his portrait was a ‘‘really good example of people spreading ‘stories’ ’’.
But Durning’s portrait was withdrawn in 2019 after a long campaign led by the Cleary family. The Cleary children, Tina, Tim and Dan, first wrote to the school in 2008 asking for both portraits to be taken down. They say they received a ‘‘dismissive’’ letter in response.
Tina Cleary told the royal commission that the portraits were ‘‘there so children can look up and aspire to them as they walk through. And all Dad wanted was for Minto and Durning to be taken down’’.
Duckworth says ‘‘serious consideration was given to the question of honorifics’’ in the 2000s. ‘‘Rightly or wrongly, at that time the portrait was not removed based on those considerations.’’
However, Durning remained on display elsewhere. In 2021, abuse survivor Steve Goodlass visited the Marist-owned Mission Estate vineyard in Hawke’s Bay.
There he found a display of Marist history, which included a lectern with a folder full of biographies of deceased Marists.
Among those was a biography of Durning, which called him a ‘‘teacher of such excellence that he transformed the lives of many’’, but which omitted any mention of his paedophilia.
Goodlass posted on a survivors’ page on Facebook about the find, triggering an apology from the Marists, who ordered the biography be removed. He believes the material should remain, but annotated: ‘‘If they remove that stuff, they are erasing history.’’
The folder, Duckworth says, was ‘‘intended as a way of remembering our dead, and not meant to be on public display’’. It was removed, and apologies made. He says he is not aware of any remaining tributes to Durning which elide his paedophilia.
The priest factory
The Marist Brothers and Fathers have been the major providers of secondary education to Catholic boys since 1876, with a network of prestigious schools from Whanga¯ rei to Invercargill.
St Pat’s Town and St Pat’s Stream have traditionally been vital parts of the Marist machine, playing an important role in recruiting future priests.
The two most senior Marist Fathers officials at church headquarters in Rome now are Silverstream old boys John Larsen and Pat Devlin.
Town was also a fertile recruitment ground. In the book Men on a Mission, former Marist novitiate Phil Mahoney remembered the principal, Fred Bliss, pitching the idea to the pupils: ‘‘This school has a great tradition, every year many go off to the seminary. Some of you will be going there next year and should be thinking about it.’’
Mahoney, who returned to Town as a teacher after his training and went on to be principal at Silverstream, said that of the 17 recruits that year, 10 came from St Pat’s Town.
Frank Durning is far from the only stain on the collective history of the two schools, which between them have educated six bishops, more than 20 All Blacks, prime ministers of Samoa and New Zealand, several mayors, high court judges, army chiefs and champion sportsmen.
Among others to be accused are Minto, Shirres and serial abuser Alan Woodcock.
Michael Donnelly, nicknamed the ‘‘Phantom Feeler’’, was the subject of complaints in 2002 and 2005 of sexual abuse against St Pat’s boarders in the 1970s. In 2018, RNZ reported police were investigating complaints against Donnelly, last known to be in Asia.
Police told Stuff they did not comment on whether individuals were under investigation.
Asked if the Marist Fathers knew where Donnelly was, Duckworth said in a statement: ‘‘The society co-operates fully with any police investigation. I understand from media sources that about four years ago police interviewed two men in their fifties who alleged witnessing abuse in 1974, and take it that the matter is being pursued by the police.’’
Two other former Silverstream Marist Fathers were named to Stuff as alleged abusers during our reporting.
For those who were these men’s victims, the presence of those names on honours boards and portraits challenges the school motto: Sectare Fidem, or ‘‘hold fast to your faith’’.
* pseudonyms used.