Mike took his own life after his school days at Ampleforth
Dinah Mears tells how her brother’s time at the scandal-hit Catholic boarding school left him unable to talk about his experiences
Last Thursday, while driving along the A21, I began to cry and had to pull over when I heard the headline news on the radio. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) report on Ampleforth and Downside schools was out. And it was shockingly, sickeningly bad.
My older brother, Quentin Michael Sillars (later known as Mike) went to Ampleforth in the Sixties; he was at the preparatory school at Gilling Castle from the age of seven. He had blue eyes and blond hair, and a quietly happy disposition. He took with him a quilted blue paisley dressing gown with his name tag in it, and an Airfix rocket he made himself, called Fireball XL5, which he liked to play with under the bedclothes. Mike was fascinated by the stars, and wanted to be an astronaut: he was an ordinary, rather sweet little boy, of whom people would say “he’s no trouble”.
On August 18, 1990, Mike drove a rented truck deep into woodland outside Bournemouth and killed himself. He was 35, and his suicide note said that ever since school he had “always suspected it would one day end like this”.
My father had been at Ampleforth in the Thirties and believed that it offered the very best Catholic education in the UK. Mike understood how important it was to “go to daddy’s school”, and to jolly well stay there, whatever happened.
The whole tradition of boarding in this era has developed a certain reputation, but Ampleforth really was in a class of its own.
Located on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, 20 miles from the nearest town, reports have shown that many of those charged with running it were merciless in the abuse of little boys in their care. Though monks who worked there have since said they were unaware of anything untoward happening between their colleagues and pupils, it has always been hard for me, and I assume families in a similar position, who suspected their loved ones of being treated in this way, to believe that really is the case.
By the end of Mike’s second year, the headmaster, Father Hilary, phoned my parents to tell them to remove Mike from Gilling, as he had stopped talking and eating. Fr Hilary also said that another monk had “possibly bullied” Mike, and he thought this may be why he had become so withdrawn. When he got home, my parents arranged for Mike to see a psychiatrist and it was thought that he may have autism. However, at the end of that summer, when it was decided that he would not return to Ampleforth, his immediate symptoms diminished.
My father found it difficult to understand what was the matter with his much-changed son and, given the lack of understanding back then around mental health issues, I suspect that he was privately ashamed of the whole situation. He would have found it impossible to consider that the monks who had been like parents to him could have damaged his child.
Although the monk accused of bullying Mike was never convicted of sexual abuse, my brother was absolutely terrified of him, and the IICSA report suggests that many others were, too. Another boy who attended Ampleforth five years after Mike left told me that the man in question was particularly sadistic in his behaviour; the one that everyone avoided in the shower. He had a close connection with Father Piers Grant Ferris who, in 2006, was convicted of 20 counts of indecent assault at Ampleforth, and the pair would each threaten boys with being sent to the other if they misbehaved. Though I could name him here, I do not want to tarnish any remaining family he might have. Both men have since died.
Mike never talked about what he had gone through – in fact, he hardly ever talked about Ampleforth at all once he “escaped”. Between the suicide note and the full report that
Mum had this growing sense of anger that something much worse had happened to Mike
has emerged, though, Fr Hilary’s casual reference to “possible bullying” takes on a whole new meaning. I began to suspect that the abuse was sexual when I started working in a social services child protection team in the mid-nineties, learning about the symptoms of child sexual abuse, around which time my mother began to send me articles about former Amplefordians telling their stories.
She had this growing sense of anger that something much worse had happened to Mike than we had been led to believe, and eventually asked me to contact North Yorkshire Police after reading that they were investigating cases of abuse in the Eighties. Mum wanted them to go back to when Mike was there, and they agreed – though the school’s consistent obfuscation and lack of cooperation, as documented in the report, caused enormous challenges.
It is a tragic irony that the way Mike died, by taking his own life, is seen by the Catholic faith as a mortal sin “for which the sinner cannot repent”. Yet the same Church has been comparatively quiet about what was done to young boys by the monks at Ampleforth. Mike did his best to live; he had a job and a flat in London in his early twenties, working as a line engineer for British Telecom. As far as I know, he never had a relationship and was desperately lonely, struggling to meet women, though when I had my three sons, he became a proud uncle, visiting them often, and always with a new, scientific toy in tow.
But he remained constantly anxious, as if waiting for something to pounce on him. It would probably now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder. The last conversation we had on the phone was one in which he talked about how much he doubted himself, and he sounded very low: by this time, he had attempted suicide twice already over the previous two years, and both times been “found”. I remember telling him to go and look in the mirror and tell himself what a kind, intelligent, honest, loving person he was. He rang off in tears.
My father died of cancer in 2000, having never spoken his son’s name in those 10 years. The only comment he ever made on the matter was the day after Mike’s body was found in the woods. We had met up to start dealing with Mike’s effects, and were sitting in a trendy Italian restaurant, trying to find words. “This must be my fault,” he said. I tried to comfort him, but neither of us knew what to do with the shocking grief of it all.
My mother mourned for the rest of her life, collecting every newspaper article about Ampleforth – her guilt and grief at handing over her son to these monstrous monks a burden to her until her death in January.
She would phone me and cry about it regularly during the 28 years since Mike died. Always the same questions: “Why didn’t I realise? How could I have let them break my little boy? Who will do something to stop them?”
She wrote to Abbott Cuthbert Madden, of Ampleforth, in 2006, telling him that she was now certain that the monks abused her son, and wanted someone to apologise. She received a non-committal response acknowledging nothing.
The damage wrought by Ampleforth is now known, to some extent at least. Yet whatever had happened to Mike there, he was left to deal with the tatters his life had been left in alone. And he just couldn’t.