HARSHEST LESSON OF ALL
Falsely accused of sex abuse by a boy he never met, this popular teacher lost his job and good name. But it’s the way he was presumed guilty from the start that is his...
JERKED from sleep by the trill of the doorbell at his Suffolk home one crisp December morning, Simon Warr felt puzzled. At just after 7am, it was still dark outside and too early for a delivery. Never in his wildest dreams could he have predicted who would be at the door: five police officers who proceeded to place him under arrest. The charge? Historical child abuse.
The complainant was a former pupil at a school where Warr, now in his early 60s, had taught 30 years previously.
Warr had never met him and had certainly never taught PE, the lesson during which the ‘abuse’ supposedly happened.
He says: ‘I was horrified, of course, but it was clearly a ridiculous mistake. I thought it would all quickly be cleared up.’
Yet that rude dawn awakening would mark the start of a two-year ordeal which would, to Warr’s bafflement and despair, take him all the way to court – in a case driven by a police force apparently determined to build a case against him.
A jury would later find him not guilty in less than 40 minutes. But by then the damage had been done: the man once labelled ‘one of the outstanding school masters of his generation’ had lost not only his profession and his livelihood, but his good name.
He says: ‘Two hundred years ago if you were a criminal, they’d paint the word “criminal” on your forehead. Now, due to the internet, you just need to be accused of a crime to be for ever branded.’
How, then, could a man of unimpeachable character have found himself subjected to almost two years of agony on such flimsy ‘evidence’?
It is possible that Warr’s profile as a ‘TV headmaster’ in a successful Channel 4 series made him more vulnerable to false accusations.
Then there is Warr’s concern that Suffolk police officers effectively ‘canvassed’ for evidence to build a case against him.
He says: ‘If it was not actually a witch-hunt, it feels pretty close.’
Most of all, however, he believes that our system of criminal justice has been seized by a collective madness following the exposure of Jimmy Savile, and that the innocent are paying the price
Warr loved teaching, and in June 1981 he arrived to teach O-level languages at St George’s in Suffolk, a boys’ boarding school (now Finborough School) whose grand Georgian facade gave no hint of its somewhat austere atmosphere.
Nearly 30 years later, the headmaster, Derek Slade, would be sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for sexual and physical abuse of children in his care. It is this, Warr believes, that laid the groundwork for his own subsequent arrest. After two years at St George’s, he moved to the Royal Hospital School, also in Suffolk, where he remained for what he calls ‘30 very happy years’, dividing his time between school accommodation and a flat he owns in Osterley, West London.
‘I loved my time there,’ he says, and it seemed the school loved him back. In 2007, the then headmaster, Howard Blackett, labelled him ‘one of the outstanding school masters of his generation’.
Warr was, then, wholly unprepared for the knock on the door of his house at the school that chilly December morning.
At the police station, he was told that a former pupil, known as ‘A’, had alleged that after a PE lesson at St George’s, when Warr was supervising showering, Warr had asked the pupil to part his buttocks to check they were dry. The former pupil, who said he was 11 at the time,
A ridiculous mistake that would quickly be cleared up
Exonerated… but damage to my reputation is irreversible
would also claim that Warr had once touched his genitals. ‘The first thing I said was that I had never taught a single lesson of PE in my life,’ Warr says. ‘I also didn’t teach juniors. I’m a senior teacher – my pupils were 14 and over – and even with them I never supervised showers. It was patently nonsense.’
Basic checks, he assumed, would corroborate his account. Yet after an exhausting 13 hours in the police station, he was released on bail and told he could not return to his school quarters at the Royal Hospital School.
It was to prove only the start of his ordeal. Initially bailed for three months, it would be nine agonising months before Warr would learn his fate. In the meantime he was left in limbo: temporarily suspended from school while the investigation proceeded, he struggled to fill his days.
With his name now made public, he found himself the victim of vicious trolling by a small number of former pupils and their parents.
He was called a ‘f****** paedo’ and told to kill himself in a sewer.
He says: ‘I can’t describe the desperation. I couldn’t eat and, though I was dead tired, I couldn’t sleep. I felt utterly alone.’
At his lowest moment, two weeks after his arrest, he recalls contemplating jumping in front of a Tube train, and was only stopped by the thought of the impact on the driver.
The climate was febrile: a month after the arrest, the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, announced that people reporting child abuse ‘must be believed’. Warr says: ‘I knew then I was in trouble. It is not for police to believe or disbelieve. Their job is to collect evidence.’
The case against Warr was flawed from the start. Police documents would later reveal to him that ‘A’ had first approached the police in 2011 when he made the allegation that Warr had asked him to part his buttocks. The police declined to act – until eight months later, when ‘A’ returned and now said Warr had touched his penis.
Warr says: ‘In police documents it says they arrested me following further evidence. In fact it was an embellishment of his original statement, which was translated by the police into further evidence. How can a totally uncorroborated allegation be put forward as evidence?’
He now knows that, in the wake of Derek Slade’s imprisonment, website forums were openly making accusations, mainly unsubstantiated, against all kinds of former teachers, himself among them. Warr says: ‘The police had approached the man who ran one of the websites to canvas for more information regarding my case.’
He accepts that his parallel career as a broadcaster might have marked him out as a target. By 2003 he had been given the role of headmaster in Channel 4’s That’ll Teach ’Em, in which 30 children experienced life as it would have been at a 1950s boarding school.
Nine months after his arrest, Warr was told that he would be charged and that the accusations against him had multiplied.
Another ex-pupil, ‘B’, a very close friend of ‘A’, was making similar claims – which Warr also vehemently denies. And a third boy, ‘C’, a former pupil at the Royal Hospital School, had alleged that Warr had chased him and attempted to pinch his bottom and had, on occasions, endeavoured to remove his towel in the changing rooms.
Warr accepts he may, on occasion, have done the latter – in full public view and in nothing more than teasing locker-room spirit. It is an interpretation accepted by ‘C’, who told police he felt it had been done as a joke. Nonetheless, Warr now faced seven charges of abuse against three different children – four counts of indecent assault and three counts of indecency with a child.
‘It was an effective strategy,’ says Warr. ‘A case of a few teaspoons of truth mixed with a whole ladle full of falsehoods, suggestions and innuendo.’
By the time the case came to court, nearly two years later, Warr had resigned of his own volition, believing that as he was near retirement age, it was in the best interests of the school. On the day of his trial, in October 2014, Warr set eyes on his accuser, ‘A’, for the first time. ‘A’ was not a convincing witness. Warr says: ‘His testimony was an embarrassing shambles, full of inconsistencies.’
Asked what Warr had been wearing to supervise the showers, ‘A’ stuttered that it was red tracksuit bottoms and white T-shirt.
‘B’, in his testimony, said he was wearing a suit and gown – ‘an odd thing for me to wear to supervise PE’, as Warr points out.
An astonishing courtroom revelation was to follow: ‘Y’, a witness produced by the prosecution to corroborate the accounts of ‘A’ and ‘B’, would inadvertently dismantle a key part of the case.
‘One of the first things he said was, “Everyone knows Simon Warr didn’t teach PE,”’ Warr explains. ‘If the stakes weren’t so high it would be comical.’ After a seven-day trial, he was declared not guilty on all counts. ‘The relief was indescribable,’ he says. ‘I’d waited 672 days for that moment. I’m not ashamed to say I cried.’ But he remains incandescent at the way he was, in his words, ‘hung out to dry’.
‘It seems that all that is now required to devastate someone’s life, because these public arrests do exactly that, is an uncorroborated allegation. The only thing that kept me sane and prevented me from killing myself during the period after my arrest was the knowledge that I was innocent.
‘But this didn’t stop agents of the state stripping me of my good name, my home, my career, my happiness. From the start the onus was on me to prove my innocence, not for the police to prove my guilt,’ he says.
It is one reasonrea he has written a book in whichwhic he lays bare the devastating nature of his ordeal and makes an i mpassioned plea for us to reconsider how our police handle historical child abuse cases.
Warr says: ‘The furthestt thing i n my mindm when writing thist book was to drive victimsv of sexual abusea back into the shadows for fear theyh will not be believed.be My purpose is to convey a clear messagem that all state agenciesag must also be mindful that there is a possibility that the complainant might not be telling the truth.
‘I may have been exonerated by the court but the damage to my reputation is irreversible while the identities of the people who peddled untruths remain protected by the courts.’
A spokesman for Suffolk Police said: ‘We carried out a thorough investigation after receiving complaints of alleged child abuse. We collated the evidence and presented it to the Crown Prosecution Service who chose to charge the individual with the respective charges. They also shared our view that it was in the public interest to prosecute the individual. The evidence was presented to a jury who returned their verdict. This is how the criminal justice system operates.’
Presumed Guilty: A Teacher’s Solitary Battle To Clear His Name, by Simon Warr, is published by Biteback at £20. To get your copy for £15, order at www. mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640 until March 12, 2017.