Children’s home abuser made me call her Mummy
A FORMER resident of a children’s home yesterday told how he was locked up in a dark shed for hours by a woman he was forced to call ‘Mummy’.
Stephen Findleton, 60, told the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) he had ‘begged’ not to be imprisoned in a shed at Quarriers Village in Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire.
He said he had to call his housemother ‘Mummy’, though he had his own mother.
Mr Findleton told a hearing in Edinburgh that the woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, dragged him through the ‘cottage’ where the children lived to a shed at the rear of the property, while he yelled ‘Please Mummy’ to try to get her to stop.
Mr Findleton, who was admitted to Quarriers at the age of seven, said children were locked up in the shed for minor offences.
He said: ‘If you were talking, she would hit you and lock you up.’
Mr Findleton said he ran away twice because ‘we were being beaten and humiliated’.
A witness using the name Fiona, who was admitted to Quarriers in 1963, said one of her abusers was a woman the children called ‘Aunty’.
Fiona said she was sexually and physically abused during her time at the home, between the ages of eight and 12.
Children were ‘not allowed to cry’ and she agreed with the inquiry’s senior counsel James Peoples, QC, that almost every day was spent ‘in terror’.
Fiona, who later became a social worker, said she would be forced to scrub a floor with