We waved our beloved boys off on Scout trips... where they plunged to their deaths
Three heartbroken mothers reveal shocking failings that led to clifftop falls – and call for a major inquiry to stop more lives being put at risk
BEN LEONARD, roy Thornton and Scott fanning never had the chance to meet. But the boys, aged 16, 15 and 11, would have got on well, their mothers believe. They were all bright, adventurous lads who loved being outdoors and spending time with their friends.
It was this that led each of them to join the Scouts, a chance — so their families thought — to meet new people and explore the world.
‘He loved it,’ says Janet Hollands, of her son roy. ‘I remember his first Cub camp: he went off on the coach with his bag, all smiling and happy. He never missed one after that.’
Ben, meanwhile, joined the Beavers when he was five, progressing through Cubs to Scouts like his older brother. His mum Jackie says Ben, who went on to lead two Beaver groups for younger boys, ‘loved the banter in the camp’.
Scott, too, joined The Scout Association with his brother. ‘They did everything together,’ says his mum, Sharon Collins.
unlike their sons, Sharon, Janet and Jackie have become firm friends over the years. But they are bound by tragedy. for all three of their beloved boys died after catastrophic clifftop falls on Scout trips: Scott in 1998, roy in 1999 and Ben in 2018.
for any parent to receive such news is the most unimaginable horror, but what compounds their grief is the response they received from The Scout Association, which they all feel has repeatedly shirked responsibility for their sons’ deaths.
Ben’s inquest, a harrowing eightweek ordeal, concluded last month, with coroner David Pojur finding that the Scouts had failed to ‘accept any accountability and understand any proper learning’ and were ‘ putting lives at risk’ through a series of shortcomings.
Jurors concluded that Ben, who plunged 200ft from Great Orme, a coastal headland at llandudno, north Wales, in August 2018, had been unlawfully killed in circumstances brought about by the ‘neglect’ of the organisation.
So distressing was the evidence heard at the inquest held at manchester Civil Justice Centre that members of the jury, the legal team and even the coroner himself broke down in tears on the final day.
mr Pojur, who has sent a 15-page dossier outlining the organisation’s failings to the Secretary of State for education and the Children’s Commissioners for england and Wales, is now calling for a public inquiry.
following the inquest, Welsh police are investigating claims that the Scouts (and one unnamed leader in particular) conspired to pervert the course of justice, by creating a ‘misleading impression’ about what happened.
One internal email was even found to contain the statement: ‘We hope that the family do not have lawyers.’
for Jackie, 54, a clerical officer from Stockport, her husband Dave, 57, and Ben’s brother Thomas, 26, it’s a verdict they have waited five and a half years to hear.
‘The inquest process is all we’ve known since Ben died,’ she says. ‘It has been soul- destroying. It has definitely prolonged our grief.
‘The whole time, the Scouts have been trying to sweep us under the carpet. At one point in the inquest, they told us there are 600,000 people in the Scouts and this was just one death — as if Ben didn’t matter. It felt like they were playing on the fact we were in a fog of grief and wouldn’t be able to fight back.’
If not for a revelation at Ben’s initial hearing, held in 2020, in which a representative of the Scouts admitted a fact which hadn’t been put before the jury, meaning the entire inquest had to be abandoned, Jackie and her family wouldn’t have had their day in court.
But then Jill Greenfield at fieldfisher, one of the country’s leading serious injury lawyers, took over their case, won legal funding and launched a civil claim against the Scouts in Ben’s name. She and her team waded through 36,000 documents, comprising emails, texts and notes, in what she says was ‘one of the most extraordinary and heartbreaking cases of my career’.
In her research, Jill uncovered other families whose loved ones had died on Scout trips — not just one or two, but 16 more deaths dating back 30 years.
SHe has now joined forces with Jackie, Sharon and Janet to encourage others to come forward and is petitioning for historic inquests to be reopened, external regulation of The Scout Association and a complete overhaul of the way it is run.
The response of the 114-year-old body, which boasts the Princess of Wales and the Duke of kent as its joint presidents, and adventurer Bear Grylls as its Chief Scout, has been harshly criticised — not least by the coroner, who branded the Scouts ‘institutionally defensive’.
While extending a ‘wholehearted apology’ to Ben’s family, Jennie Price, chairman of The Scout Association’s board of trustees, said that ‘local leaders did not follow our safety rules and processes’ and insisted ‘many changes’ had subsequently been made. They have been given until April 18 to respond in full to mr Pojur’s damning report.
A spokesman added that the association has a ‘ team of staff and volunteers starting to work on our response to the coroner’s recommendations’ which would be monitored by a ‘sub-committee of trustees’ with ‘oversight by our full board’.
‘This is not,’ Jill insists, ‘ about destroying the Scouts. It’s about making sure the Scouts are safe and properly regulated, and that there are not repeated failures.
‘There will be lots of Scout leaders out there who are great. But they rely so much on volunteers — and that means that at every level you’re reliant on goodwill as opposed to paid skill.
‘I feel sorry for the parents who blindly trust, who send their sons off with the best intentions, and then never see them again.’
It was something Jackie never imagined when she said goodbye to 16-year-old Ben as he set off on a weekend trip with the reddish explorers to north Wales.
‘He’d got his GCSe results a few days before and he’d done so well. We were so proud,’ she says. ‘He was looking forward to going to college to study film-making — he loved creative writing and he was a talented scriptwriter.’
The group had planned to climb Snowdon but, because of bad weather, the leaders took the boys on what one Scout described as a ‘leisurely’ walk up the headland instead. Ben told the leaders he was in pain from a recent minor operation and, when he and his friends Alex and Chris suggested they take a separate path from the others, they let the trio go.
Shortly afterwards, a member of the public 200 ft below saw a boy in a black anorak take a few steps down the steep cliff edge — and then fall.
Jackie was at home 80 miles away when the phone rang. It was Sean Glaister, the Scout leader in charge of the trip.
‘He said Ben had had a fall. And so I thought he had twisted his ankle or something. But what worried and upset me was what he said next: “They’re working on him.” I said to Dave, “It’s not just a bit of a fall. Something bad has happened.” ’ Anticipating a trip to hospital, Jackie put Ben’s dressing gown in the tumble dryer in case he needed it. An hour later, the police knocked on the door to tell her he was dead.
Though she didn’t realise it at the time, the events culminating in Ben’s death — caused by head injuries suffered in his fall — comprised inexcusable failures. The boys on the trip weren’t warned about the dangers of going near cliff edges, nor did they — or the leaders — have access to maps.
THere was no participant list, no briefing given and, the coroner found, ‘no meaningful discussion between the Scout leaders’ about the plan for the trip.
for Sharon Collins, the mother of 11-year-old Scott fanning, it all sounds painfully familiar. Sharon, 60, a nurse from Saddleworth, Oldham, lives just 40 minutes from the leonard family and has spent almost every day of the past two months attending court to support Jackie — whom she had never met before. The two have become close, with Sharon unable to shake the guilt she bears for not doing more to uncover wrongdoings 26 years ago.
‘I apologised to Jackie the first time I saw her,’ she admits.
‘I said, “Sorry I didn’t do more after what happened to Scott. your Ben wouldn’t have died if I had.” But deep down I know they wouldn’t have changed.
‘I’ve kept a scrapbook of documents and the similarities are startling. The coroner at Scott’s inquest said more or less the same: they need to be clearer on ratios [of leaders to Scouts], do proper risk assessments, recce the area . . . all these things were key to Ben’s inquest, too.’
Sharon will never forget the last time she saw Scott, dropping her 11-year- old son off at the local parish centre in Oldham, where the Chadderton St Herbert’s troop met, in may 1998.
‘It was 6.30pm on the friday,
and he was sitting on the church wall, swinging his feet,’ she remembers. ‘It was his first proper camp without his dad — the leaders, who were in their 20s, said they didn’t want “old men” coming along — and I wasn’t happy about it, but he wanted to go.
‘ There were no big cuddles because I didn’t want to embarrass him, but then as I went to leave he ran over to hug me and said, “I love you.” ’ The following morning, Sharon got the call from the police: Scott had fallen 60 ft down a ravine from a narrow ledge, in an area known locally as Dead Man’s Drop.
She rushed to hospital, where she found him hooked up to machines, unresponsive.
‘Straight away I knew he wasn’t going to come back,’ she says. ‘There was nothing in his eyes; he’d gone.’
At the inquest three months later, Scott’s death was recorded as ‘accidental’. The coroner found that the adult who was with the boys, an untrained helper, was walking at the back of a group that was too large for him to manage. ‘There was nothing accidental that happened to my boy that day,’ says Sharon, unable to contain her anger.
She believes the leaders on the trip had been drinking the night before, and were sleeping it off in their tents when Scott’s group set out on the ill-fated walk. ‘It was not an accident. He died due to negligence at the very least.’
The impact on her family has been devastating. Scott’s father, Alan, never recovered from his son’s death and took his own life two years later.
‘It’s hard to describe what the grief is like; it never gets less, it becomes part of you,’ says Sharon. ‘You start every day with the shock that they’re not here, and that becomes normal because you get used to living without them.’
Janet Hollands says losing her son, Roy, a year later caused a ‘ripple effect through the whole family’. Roy, from North-West London, went on a trip of a lifetime with the 3rd Kenton Scouts Explorers Group to the Austrian Alps aged 15 in August 1999.
What makes his case particularly heartbreaking is that his mother Janet, 65, a council administrator who now lives in Dartford, Kent, was a Scout leader herself — and she was on the same trip. ‘Roy was the oldest of my three boys and I got involved in the Scouts because he loved it,’ she says. ‘We had a lovely bond because of it. He knew I was there but not as his mum. He could be himself and I was privileged to see that side of him.’
On the morning of August 20, the group climbed a section of the 7,000ft mountain Jochelspitze.
While Roy was in a group with the older Scouts, Janet was accompanying younger members of the expedition. ‘We all went up the cable car together, but by the time we got to the top, the older section had decided to carry on,’ she recalls. ‘We felt the route was too difficult, so we came back down. I never saw Roy again.’
Back in the chalet that evening, cooking dinner, Janet tried not to worry about her son, whose group still hadn’t returned.
Hours later, she learned he had plunged to his death over a treacherous cliff edge. The group’s assistant leader, Paul Beardmore, had instructed the boys to leave the path, instead sliding down wet grass on their buttocks. What he didn’t realise was that there was a sheer drop ahead. While the other boys were able to dig their heels in, Roy, a natural leader at the front, simply couldn’t stop.
HIS inquest recorded an accidental death. Beardmore, who had never led a Scout group before, was found guilty of culpable homicide through inadequate preparation by an Austrian court, and given a two-month suspended sentence. Today, Janet, who — like Sharon — wants her son’s inquest reopened, still feels aggrieved.
‘I feel very strongly that the Scout Association took advantage of my vulnerability,’ she says. ‘They didn’t advise me properly. I trusted them completely; whatever they said, I believed.
‘For a long time after that, I didn’t eat. I became very underweight. I felt so guilty that I had been sitting in that chalet eating my dinner and didn’t know something was wrong. I went through a black depression for eight years. My other two sons, who were ten and 12, went from being children to becoming young men.’
She says Scouts representatives who came to court didn’t even know Roy’s name. ‘ What happened in those courtrooms has been diabolical,’ says Sharon. ‘All these lives that have been lost — the graduations they’ll never have, the birthdays, the weddings, the children — that’s on their heads, not ours. And yet we’re the ones who end up in this terrible club no mother wants to join.’
Facing the Scouts, says Jackie, ‘has been like David and Goliath’.
‘We’re just small, ordinary people and they’re this massive organisation, playing on their history and reputation,’ she adds.
‘Well, they’ve come unstuck. There will be consequences and, hopefully, changes for the better.
‘Nothing can bring our sons back, but at least this way they will always be remembered.’
A spokesperson for the Scout Association said: ‘Keeping young people safe is our first priority and we have learnt from each of these tragic deaths.
‘We look closely at all incidents to continuously review and improve to ensure we are creating the safest possible environments for the thousands of young people who take part in Scouts every year. This includes making changes to the risk assessments, safety rules, training and support we give our volunteers.’