Teacher accused by DJ Campbell ‘admits’ to abuse
A RETIRED teacher accused of child abuse by broadcaster Nicky Campbell has admitted abusing schoolboys in Edinburgh, the BBC reports.
Radio 5 host Campbell, 61, broke down in tears last week as he told of witnessing abuse by the unnamed teacher at school half a century ago.
Officials have applied to extradite the pensioner, who cannot be named for legal reasons, to Britain to face charges – and South Africa’s minister of justice has agreed.
The man, who now lives in Cape Town, has lodged an appeal which will be heard in October.
He taught at Fettes College and Edinburgh Academy, where Campbell says he witnessed the sexual abuse of a fellow pupil.
In documents related to extradition proceedings, the man is reported to have said that while teaching at Edinburgh Academy he had ‘urges to touch the students inappropriately and on occasion I did so’. The BBC also states the pensioner, who previously taught at two primary schools in Cape Town in the 1960s, admitted he had urges to touch pupils in South Africa.
The documents, understood to have been signed by the man in September 2019, are also said to show that the man admitted the charges against him were serious but added: ‘I feel absolute remorse for what I have done to the boys.’ He is also said to have argued it would be ‘unjust, unreasonable and too severe a punishment’ to be extradited to Scotland.
Fettes has made a ‘full and unreserved apology’ to anyone abused there. Edinburgh Academy has also ‘wholeheartedly’ apologised.
The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service has said the case against the pensioner is ongoing.
My WIFE Ruth and I were on a guided tour of my old boarding school, Ashdown House. We had told the headmaster we were thinking of sending our daughter to this famous prep school, a feeder to Eton College. But the true purpose of our trip was to confront my demons, still lurking in that beautiful 18th-century building in the East Sussex countryside, 45 years on.
We passed the classroom window beside which Thomas Keane, the maths master, sexually assaulted me, and the brick fireplace at which I had stared while being beaten by the drunken headmaster: nine years old, weeping, my pyjamas around my ankles.
‘Al, you’re hurting my hand,’ Ruth whispered, as I held on to her for dear life.
I’ve been trying to unravel the story of my time at Ashdown House since that visit in 2014. So far I have collated more than 50 allegations of abuse, psychological and physical, at Ashdown, from the 1940s to the 1990s. They go with nearly 900 allegations of serious child abuse committed at 300-odd other residential schools, fee-paying and state-run.
I have written articles, made TV and radio series, and published a book about what I found out — the secrets and crimes of the schooling of the ruling class.
Survivors of other schools, state and private, contact me frequently. Broadcaster Nicky Campbell, with his vivid recollections of sexual abuse and violence at Edinburgh Academy, is one of the latest. I was able to tell him that others had made similar complaints — and that the key abuser at the school was living in South Africa.
On the radio and his BBC podcast, Different, last week, Campbell spoke for the first time of the harrowing violent and sexual abuse he witnessed at his old school. He had been moved to do so after listening to my Radio 4 series In Dark Corners, broadcast last month. It explored boarding
The rule not to tell tales was drilled into us
school abuse and featured a former pupil at Edinburgh Academy describing the abuse that teacher ‘Edgar’ — so-named for legal reasons — had perpetrated.
In a halting voice, crackling with a lifetime of unresolved anger, Campbell couldn’t bring himself to describe exactly the horror that he had seen ‘Edgar’ mete out to his friend in the rugby changing rooms. He could only say ‘I can never unsee it’.
The teacher was known as a sadist and a predator but Nicky laments not speaking up at the time — he was just ten years old.
But now, at 61, he has confronted that story. We have found that ‘Edgar’ continued a career in education in Scotland and South Africa. Now he is living in a gated community in Cape Town and yesterday admitted to abusing schoolboys ‘on occasion’ at Edinburgh Academy. But I will come to him later.
IN SEPTEMBER 1969, I was an eight-year-old boy quivering with excitement and anxiety as I arrived for my first day boarding at Ashdown House.
My parents had kissed me goodbye at the school’s front door, where princess margaret had done the same to her son David Linley a few minutes earlier, before her car crunched away on the gravel path. I would not see mum and Dad again for six weeks.
I was to share a dormitory with the future Earl of Snowdon — for decades Ashdown had been one of the select prep schools for the children of the rich and powerful.
Blond-haired and blue-eyed, I was small for my age and not sporty: I learnt quickly that it was best to keep your head down. I hunched over books and Airfix models, and ran a side-hustle selling comics and illicit sweets and biscuits. We were always hungry.
A few staff were kindly, in a distant way; but most of the men, starting with Billy Williamson, the grand old headmaster, seemed to my child’s eye to be monsters. I have had no reason to change that view as an adult. They should never have been allowed near children. Violence and anger was their normal way of functioning.
Williamson, a huge man who was even angrier when drunk, would beat children until they were bruised and bleeding for petty things — being stupid at Latin, making a noise after lights out, crying. On a whim, he once beat every boy in the school.
He told school assembly every morning his scorecard from the night before. One day he announced he had punished three boys the previous evening. ‘Two of them took it like men but Renton blubbed like a baby!’ But there was worse. The maths and history teacher, Thomas Keane, was one of the younger staff who seemed to enjoy inspiring terror. He would throw boys down the short flight of stairs outside his classroom for minor misdemeanours in lessons. We shrank from him in the corridor.
I found myself alone with him in his classroom one day, this angry man with dark hair swept lavishly to one side. A large window in front of us looked out to the school’s golf course. He drew me to him and I felt the rasp of his hairy tweed jacket against my cheek.
While embracing me with one arm, he put his other down my corduroy shorts. Terrified and confused, I stood still. I’d heard that mr Keane did this kind of thing and if you just let him do it, he’d give you a sweet afterwards.
Once he had finished fondling me, he presented me with an orange fruit gum. I don’t recall him threatening me to keep quiet. I don’t think he cared — he was as brazen as he was sociopathic.
Years later, my mother told me I’d complained to her during halfterm that mr Keane had touched me in a way and a place I didn’t like, though I can’t remember telling her.
I’m surprised I did speak up, because the rule not to tell tales out of school was drilled hard into us. Boys must never sneak, even to their parents — the headmaster made that clear, cane in hand.
This was the instilling of the private-school rule of omerta — don’t tell the ordinary people, the outsiders. It was the rule that protected the schools’ all-important reputations, and it served Britain’s ruling elite then and now.
And a sense of guilt and shame weighed heavily on us, as it does on so many who went through this. How could we disappoint our parents, who had promised us we’d have the time of our lives? Some of them had scrimped and saved to buy us this great start in life. perhaps it was our fault it wasn’t working out as advertised.
Mr Keane did leave at the end of the 1970 school year. But that was not much help to me.
Until I left in 1974, I was bullied unremittingly by the headmaster, Billy Williamson. I was the ‘filthy minded boy’ who had to sit alone, presumably because my allegations had deprived him of a teacher.
I was told not to speak to my friends, denounced as the school liar. This was psychological abuse, as I learnt to call it years later. And I know from all the accounts I’ve been sent that for many who went to boarding school, loneliness, continual fear, random cruelty and an existence without love have been just as damaging as more physical forms of abuse.
There were many boys who suffered far worse at Ashdown House. Sexual abuse was rife, by adults and children — though it started with the teachers.
Former pupils, especially from the years two or three below mine, have told courts and the police stories of rape, of orgies organised by a teacher who watched as they pleasured each other in the ways he had taught.
As I collected stories from ex-pupils, I realised that more than half the staff there in the mid-1970s had serious allegations against them. Sussex police’s inquiry into the school, Operation mitre, is still running after eight years.
Children deprived of love, of any adult they can trust, are uniquely vulnerable — and that has always been a problem in institutions providing residential childcare, whether it is posh and paid-for or run by the state for the unwanted, the mentally ill and the young convicted of crimes.
Predatory paedophiles make their way into these places, taking advantage of the fact that kids desperate for kindness can be easily manipulated.
The grooming extended to the adults as well: what head teacher or care home manager with staffing problems can easily sack the staff member who is most useful, most
liked? Easier to hush it all up. But it is the children who suffer.
At Ashdown the grand men in charge must have known what was going on. We knew they knew — though the one surviving headmaster denies it to this day — because parents did complain.
Teachers were ‘moved on’. But instead of the police being told, they got a reference. Thomas Keane, I later discovered, went on to teach at two more schools before he died in the late 1990s.
At Ashdown, some of the men seemed to feel they had carte blanche to do anything they pleased. Those whose sexual assaults were unthreatening went hardly noticed. Almost every former pupil mentions Harry Gabain, a fatherly, likeable French teacher. He was one of the nice ones. But before every sports lesson, he put his hand down the shorts of each boy to check he was wearing underwear.
Then there was the charismatic English teacher, who can’t be named for legal reasons, who lavished presents and attention on his favourites, who would then be granted the privilege of visting him in his bedroom.
The science teacher Martin Haigh, barely in his 20s, with thick pebble glasses and a pockmarked face, performed the most audacious abuse.
He lived on the same corridor as some of the dormitories. At night he liked to line up a group of naked boys and show them how to get erections. He moved down the line, laying a handkerchief on each penis.
No wonder we young boys thought it was commonplace to play sex games with each other. We had learnt from the adults.
By the time I left Ashdown House, aged 13, I had no faith in any adult system of authority. I went to Eton, the result Ashdown House was set up to achieve.
I didn’t last long — if there was a rule made by adults, my view was that the logical thing was to break it. I was unhappy, confused, a user of drugs and alcohol and prone to appalling eruptions of anger. I was expelled at 16.
But I didn’t bottle up my experiences of Ashdown House. I was open with friends because I didn’t feel the shame or embarrassment often associated with childhood sexual abuse, as I had no affection for my attackers. In that, I was lucky. I didn’t carry any guilt, just a lot of hate.
Within the private-school-going class, we are open with each other. Get a group of public schoolboys around a table and in the end they will share the most grotesque stories of abuse, one-up-manning the other: ‘You had it bad? Well, my head beat me till blood was running down to my ankles! And then he had a feel!’
Many women who went through boarding school have awful stories, too, often of psychological torture. But they don’t, in my experience, ‘boast’ about them.
Within this world, keeping a ‘stiff upper lip’ has always been a key philosophy. The schools were there to toughen children up and prepare them to run the Empire, and the country. Even sexual abuse has been seen as fortifying, and humour a coping mechanism. ‘Bit of buggery never did me any harm.’ How often have I heard that?
My life stabilised in my 20s. I found work in journalism. By my late 30s I was a writer and foreign correspondent for the Evening Standard and I married a fellow war correspondent, Ruth Burnett.
When our son reached eight, the age I was when I was assaulted, I thought to myself how small and innocent he looked. My heart ached for my younger self. I began to think more seriously about what had happened to me and its effects. I started going to therapy.
There was no question of sending my boy or my daughter to boarding school. Ruth — by now a child psychotherapist — and I enjoyed having them with us at home. We have worked to love and support them, stressing openness. Secrets are dangerous: I learnt that.
I had almost forgotten about Ashdown House until Boxing Day 2013. An Ashdown friend phoned, urging me to look at the front page of the Daily Mail. Splashed across it was a story that woke me up. ‘Boris school at the centre of probe into sexual abuse: Two teachers accused of subjecting children aged seven to 13 to “horrific” attacks during 1970s’ (the then Mayor of London was a couple of years below me at the school).
Police had opened an investigation. Arrests were expected.
I called my mother. We hadn’t talked about Ashdown House for 40 years, but it was then she told me about her complaint to the school. She had driven there and gone straight to Williamson’s wife after I’d told her about Mr Keane.
But Violet Williamson dismissed what I had said. How could such a thing happen at such a lovely place? Boys make things up, my mother was told. She felt she was bullied into silence.
When she told me what I’d told her aged nine, I felt huge relief — the years of bullying had left a terrible doubt. Had I made it all up?
I wanted to do something to help those who had pressed charges, so I rang Sussex Police. They travelled up to Edinburgh.
Sitting across from a detective inspector, a box of tissues by his side, I was gently coaxed into recounting what had happened at the hands of Mr Keane.
I folded into tears. I was crying because at last an adult was listening. Believing me. And also, perhaps, for the frightened, friendless little boy I had been.
A few months later, the police told me Mr Keane had died. So too had the headmaster Billy Williamson and French teacher Harry Gabain. But since there could be no trial, they could reveal that other witnesses had told them about Keane — the stories were the same as mine.
Clive Williams, though, who was deputy head during my time and went on to become head, was still alive. My journalist self kicked in. I found him and interviewed him.
Why had he hired and tolerated such patently unfit teachers? The English teacher was abusing the entire cricket team, I said.
‘Yes,’ sighed an elderly Williams. ‘If I knew then what I knew later, after we had to have training in child safety, I would have acted rather differently. But that team was the best we ever had.’
The English teacher had left but Ashdown House had given him a reference to go on to teach at Brockhurst School in Berkshire in the 1980s and 1990s.
Williams was later arrested, on charges including neglect in his office. But these were all dropped.
I know who I am most angry with
I was crying for the little boy I’d been
My mission is gratifying . . . a kind of revenge
now. Not the abusers, who were sick men (and some women) who could have been stopped. It is their enablers, in all the schools that tolerated predators — the grand head teachers and governors who cared more for the school’s reputation than for the safety of the small children in their care.
Ashdown House is not alone in that. In our BBC series, we looked at other famous schools that boast about pastoral care in their brochures. Yet instead of calling police when a vicious child abuser was uncovered, they had passed them on to get jobs elsewhere.
Of all the teachers at Ashdown, Martin Haigh seemed to be the only one who would see justice.
I sat in court in Brighton and watched as former pupils told of him lining them up and urging them to have erections, and of being taken to his room and ordered to go on all fours naked on his bed.
Haigh scoffed, as if these claims were laughable, but in March 2017 he was sentenced to 12 years for indecent assault and gross indecency against four pupils. He hadn’t stopped abusing — police opened an investigation at the Canterbury school he went to, with a reference, after being sacked by Ashdown in 1974. Privately, Sussex Police told me he preyed on young men and children all his life.
The former Ashdown teacher with most charges against him is now 76 and living in a retirement home in South Africa — 20 years after the police were first told about him, and six since he was first questioned there.
Also in South Africa, awaiting an extradition order that never seems to come, is ‘Edgar’, the man of whom Nicky Campbell and his schoolmates have spoken.
Police say 20 people have made allegations against ‘Edgar’ for assaults, some of which he has now admitted to at Edinburgh Academy and others at Fettes College. The English teacher has 43 pending charges against him, though neither man can be formally charged until he is on British soil — which their legal teams are fighting hard to resist.
Since I have been writing about Ashdown House and the wider issue of abuse at boarding schools, I’ve been inundated with reports from former pupils of the most hideous, barely readable abuse. A million British people alive today attended a boarding school: many have stories to tell. It has become my mission to record them.
I keep a spreadsheet, cross-referencing teachers, victims and schools, and try to assist the ‘mandatory reporting’ campaign that wants it made a crime not to report suspected child abuse in an institution to an outside authority.
I don’t believe children in schools like the one I attended are properly protected even today. And what about the care homes?
I put survivors in touch with each other so they can go collectively to the police, or simply talk. My data has helped start more than a dozen police investigations, and got some dangerous old men jailed.
It’s gratifying work. It is a kind of revenge.