Boy, 9, abused by choirmaster for four years

A GRAMMY-WINNING conductor abused a choirboy who saw him as a ‘surrogate father’, a court heard yesterday.

Joseph Cullen, 58, called the nine-yearold his ‘special friend’ and assaulted him while serving as organist and choir master at Glasgow’s St Andrew’s Cathedral.

The father of three – a former director of the London Symphony Chorus – pleaded guilty at Glasgow Sheriff Court yesterday to lewd and libidinous conduct towards the boy between January 1981 and December 1984.

Cullen, from Leeds, abused the child in the cathedral’s organ room and told him to keep their ‘special secret’.

The victim came forward in 2015 after learning Cullen had targeted others. In July of that year, Cullen was jailed for 12 months at the High Court in Glasgow for abusing two boys in the late 70s and 80s.

Sheriff Martin Jones, QC, deferred sentence until next month and continued Cullen’s bail.