Morris dancer ‘preyed on girl aged 12’
‘He said we would live on a boat in Greece’
A KEEN Morris dancer sexually abused a 12-year- old girl and promised to whisk her away to a Greek island so they could start a new life together on a boat, a court heard yesterday.
Married businessman Clive Royales embarked on a secret two-year relationship with the schoolgirl after they met at a cricket match he was sponsoring, it was alleged.
The father-of-two, now aged 50, would have sex with his young lover three times a week – including on a Sunday morning at his home after he dropped his wife and children at church, a jury was told.
He is also accused of having sex with her on his desk at his engineering firm and in his car after collecting her from school during her lunch break.
Royales bought his young lover a mobile phone so they could contact each other and he saved his number in it as ‘ Mr Floppy’ in the hope no one could identify him, it was claimed. The alleged relationship broke up in 2000 after Royales left his wife Gillian for another woman.
But although the girl confided in loved ones, police were not called in until 2014 when the accuser – now a married woman in her 30s – was hit by anxiety attacks and blamed them on her alleged relationship with Royales, a court was told.
It began in 1998 when she bumped into Royales – then 30 – in the pavilion of a cricket club at Heyside, near Oldham, while she was drunk on Smirnoff Ice alcopops, the jury heard.
Afterwards they went back to his home where they kissed in the kitchen, Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester was told. In an interview with police, she said: ‘I remember him telling me that I looked really beautiful.’
She said she accompanied him to pick up his mother from the airport following a holiday and that after dropping her off they had sex on his desk at work.
The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, continued: ‘We would always have sex on a Sunday morning when his wife and children went to church and we started telling people we were going jogging. We would go to their bedroom. He used to drop his wife off at church at about 10.15 and then pick me up. Then he would drop me off and pick her up.’
They would also have sex in his car on a little-used track after he picked her up during her school lunch break, she said. They chose Groovejet by Spiller and Sophie Ellis Bextor as ‘our song’.
She said: ‘I was a virgin when I had sex with him the first time. He said we would move to Greece as soon as I was 16 and live on a boat. It sounds so stupid now.’ She told the jury: ‘I believed we were in love, that he loved me as well as I loved him and when I was old enough we would leave together.’
Simon Blakebrough, prosecuting, said: ‘She didn’t think she was being abused at all. She’s now an adult and she now knows it was indeed very wrong. Some people keep things locked up for years.’
When questioned, Royales, from Springhead, Oldham, denied any sexual contact with the girl.
He denies three charges of indecent assault. The case continues.