Son killed his father in ‘game of slaps’
Top public school bursar fatally hurt in horseplay
THE BURSAR of Wellington College died after his son struck him during a game of ‘slaps’, an inquest heard yesterday.
Malcolm Callender, 48, often played the game with Ewan, 19, and had just hit his son with a ‘stinging’ blow.
The former soldier then stood with his hands behind his back and told the teenager: ‘Right, you can have your free shot.’
Witnesses said Ewan clenched his fists before delivering a slap that sent his father reeling backward into the road.
As Mr Callender lay prone on the ground, his son was heard shouting: ‘Wake up dad. Dad, I love you.’
He was treated for an acute haemorrhage at the Royal Berkshire Hospital but died the next morning. Cause of death was given as ‘blunt force trauma
‘He wanted to make his dad proud’
to the head’. Ewan, then 18, was arrested and it was not until June this year, 14 months after his father’s death, that the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute.
The inquest at Reading town hall heard that Ewan, who spent three years in the Army, had been reluctant to slap his more powerfully-built father but ‘wanted to make his dad proud’.
The teenager wiped away tears as he gave evidence about the fateful night in April last year. He and a friend, Luke Key, went out with Mr Callender to watch his favourite team, Newcastle United, in a pub.
Ewan said: ‘ Dad slapped me around the face on the way out, just because we were messing around. It is just normal. There was nothing aggressive about it.
‘We started walking towards the station, we must have been in mid- conversation. Dad said “Right, you can have your free shot”. I knew exactly what he meant, I get to slap him now.’
Mr Callender’s wife, Catherine Morrison-Callender, also an Army veteran, said the family often played physical games.
‘We would wrestle with each other where we would try to grab the other person and take them to the ground. Another game we would play was slaps,’ she said.
‘When Ewan was about 15, he and Malcolm would progress to try to slap each other around the face. Malcolm would always be winding him up, saying “You reckon you can take me yet?”
‘Malcolm was very competitive so he would never let Ewan win, he would use it as a reminder that Ewan was not quite big enough yet.’
Mr Key told the inquest Ewan had a good relationship with his father and said the game of slaps was ‘a bit of an Army thing’.
The assistant coroner for Berkshire, Ian Wade QC, explained that legally the circumstances did not amount to unlawful killing.
‘The law recognises that consent is a legitimate concept in the law of assault and the application of force that is consented to, is not assault,’ he said.
‘You are allowed to consent to the application of force in sport. After all, if it were not so, then every contact sport and every martial art would be against the law. You are also allowed to consent to the application of force in what is a rather Victorian way called horseplay.’
He gave a narrative verdict saying Mr Callender died ‘engaging in non-aggressive, not hostile consensual horseplay’.
Mr Callender joined £41,000-ayear Wellington College in Berkshire in 2015. He had served in the Royal Engineers for 27 years and reached the rank of captain and then quartermaster.