I was battered after I caught lesbian nuns kissing in orphanage
Inquiry hears how child was beaten ‘black and blue’
A BOY at the notorious Smyllum Park orphanage was beaten unconscious by a nun after finding her in a lesbian clinch, an inquiry heard yesterday.
The man, who was admitted to the home in 1965 aged about four, said a savage beating was administered by one of the nuns when he discovered them.
He did not understand why he had been given a ‘really aggressive bad hiding’ when he was aged just six or seven – but later realised they may have been lovers.
Yesterday the man, known to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) as Jimmy, said he was beaten ‘black and blue’, as though he had been in a boxing match.
The incident in the boiler-room at Smyllum, in Lanark, left him emotionally and physically scarred.
The SCAI has heard an extraordinary catalogue of abuse allegations at Smyllum, including claims of Satanic sex abuse rituals.
Another former Smyllum resident said in his testimony yesterday: ‘I think they should have burned the building [Smyllum] down – but they turned it into flats.’
Yesterday Jimmy, born in 1961, recounted a horrifying incident, when he was six or seven, in which he walked past a boiler-room and went through an open door to have a look inside.
He said: ‘There were two nuns in there and one nun had her arms around the other one, at which point she turned around and gave me a right good hiding.
‘I’m talking about punching, kicking, pulling my hair.
‘I distinctly remember there was a boiler and it had a flame coming out of it... She put my face really close to that.
‘I can still remember my hair getting singed, my eyelashes and the smell of singeing stayed with us.’
When he ‘woke up’ from the attack, he had ‘blood coming from my ear, blood coming from my nose’, the inquiry heard. Jimmy said: ‘For days after that, I was black and blue, like being in a boxing match actually.’
He said he wondered for a long time what had caused the nun to be so ‘nasty’ until he found out about one of television’s first lesbian kisses on the soap opera Brookside.
‘She was obviously kissing another nun, that’s what I think,’ he said.
Asked about the impact of the assault, he said: ‘It was terrible, it was horrendous, really bad. I felt threatened all the time.’
He went on to describe another incident in which a staff member slapped him on the face and knocked him unconscious after catching him in an orchard.
He told how he was later moved to another institution in England. During his time there, he experienced sexual abuse at the hands of a trainee priest, the inquiry heard.
Jimmy told how the enforced move affected him, having ‘robbed’ him of his Scottish identity.
Another witness, called Steaphain, said he went to Smyllum after his mother committed suicide in 1965, when he was aged four or five, and the ‘callous’ nuns would taunt him: ‘Your ma has left you for good!’
He said the nuns would beat him, kick him and strike him with implements such as wooden coat hangers. ‘The punishments were frequent and the beatings were thunderous,’ he said. ‘Being there at Smyllum, it was physical, emotional and mental torture.’
Steaphain told the inquiry he has ‘an absolute fear of nuns’ and that he believed the Catholic religious order which ran Smyllum – now a housing development – still owned land in the area.
He said he believed the order was trying to sell the land and he wanted the proceeds to go towards ‘remembering the people who passed away in their care’.
The inquiry, before Lady Smith, continues.