Scandal of sex abuse at charity children’s home

‘He punched me in the face’

THE head of a charity that ran a Scots children’s home has apologised after it was claimed girls and boys were beaten and raped in a campaign of cruelty spanning decades.

The harrowing allegations – including claims that the youngsters were passed to strangers to be abused – centre on the Lagarie Children’s Home in Rhu, Argyll.

Opened by charity the Sailors Society in the years after the Second World War, the home was meant to provide refuge for the children of down-ontheir-luck seafarers.

But an investigation by BBC Scotland’s Disclosure programme, to be broadcast tonight, has revealed accounts of children being punched, having their mouths washed out with soap and allegations that some girls were raped ‘hundreds of times’.

According to the documentary, victims were abused over two regimes, from the early 1960s to 1982.

It comes less than a week after Lagarie, opened in 1949, was announced as one of 17 additional institutions which will be investigated by Judge Lady Smith as part of the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry in Edinburgh.

The documentary will feature testimony from former resident Angela Montgomery, who was sent to the home along with her sisters Mary and Norma after their mother died young while their father was working away at sea.

During the 40-minute programme, she tells Disclosure that she and her sisters were subjected to sustained sexual abuse at the hands of the Reverend William Barrie and his wife Mary, who took charge of the home in 1972.

She said it began when his once-comforting night visits turned sinister, with the minister claiming she was not kissing him ‘properly’, adding: ‘He stuck his tongue in my mouth, and I gagged. I made the fatal mistake of spitting at him.

‘I paid dearly for it because in front of the other girls, he punched me in the face.

She said she and sister Norma were also taken on weekends away and abused by people they had not met before – and girls were also abused at conventions outside Lagarie.

The Montgomery sisters left Lagarie more than 40 years ago and each of them has struggled with mental health problems.

Disclosure also reveals testimony from alleged victims who claim to have been physical abused by the home’s management during an earlier regime.

Those allegations centred around Matron Anne Millar, who ran the home until 1970.

Former resident, Philip Donald, said Millar would pick him up by the ears, throw him into a cold bath and put her soap-covered fingers down his throat.

He alleged the matron would take him to the home’s gardener, Norman Skelton, who would sexually abuse him.

Mrs Barrie was questioned, and a report was sent to the fiscal, but she was never charged and died in late 2017, her husband having died years earlier.

Miss Millar is now dead and Mr Skelton died in 1999.

Stuart Rivers, chief executive of the Southampton-based Sailors Society, told the programme: ‘I’m not blaming the police, I’m saying they didn’t do a thorough investigation.

‘That doesn’t mean that we don’t have responsibility because clearly we do.’

Disclosure: Suffer The Children is on BBC One Scotland at 10.40pm tonight.