Victims’ fury at Welby as child abuse QC dies
‘Horrendous level of crime’
VICTIMS of a former QC accused of brutally thrashing boys at a Christian holiday camp say they have lost their chance at justice with his death.
John Smyth, 77, is thought to have died of a heart attack at his home in Cape Town on Saturday.
Smyth, an evangelical Christian, was known to the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, as ‘charming, delightful, very clever’ and a ‘brilliant speaker’.
But he allegedly handed out up to 800 lashes to more than 20 young men during a four-year period in the late 1970s to ‘purge’ them of minor sins.
Andrew Morse, who twice tried to take his own life after years of savage beatings, told the Daily Telegraph: ‘I’m a generally very forgiving person but Justin Welby was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Jesus would not have silently protected the abusers, he would have stood with the abused.’
He said the abuse at Smyth’s hands mostly followed a pattern of ‘five minutes of prayer ... followed by a beating, the brutality of which still haunts me to this day’. Another victim, who uses the name Graham, said he was angry that the archbishop did not do more when he learned of the allegations.
‘I am incandescent with rage that the opportunity to bring him to justice,’ he said. ‘It was a wasted opportunity to address the most horrendous level of crime that has been known about for many years.’ An inquiry was launched last March by Hampshire Police and the force is thought to have made a request for Smyth to return to Britain for questioning.
Boys were said to have suffered the abuse after he recruited them into a ‘cult’. He met them at evangelical camps for public schoolboys run by the Iwerne Trust, of which he was chairman.
Mr Welby worked at the holiday camps in the 1970s but said he was ‘completely unaware’ of any abuse at the time and first knew of the allegations in 2013. The summer camps, held in Dorset, were described as religion’s Sandhurst, intended to produce the next generation of elite Christians.
But a secret report carried out by Iwerne trust in 1982 described ‘horrific’ beatings, sometimes until the boys bled. Smyth used the garden shed at his home to carry out many of the canings. The report’s findings were not passed on to police.
Mr Welby has said he ‘wasn’t in his (Smyth’s) inner circle’ and issued an ‘unreserved and unequivocal’ apology on behalf of the Church of England. He admitted the church had ‘failed terribly’ to tackle institutional abuse.
Winchester College, whose pupils were among the alleged victims, was informed of the beating allegations but also failed to contact police.
Andrew Graystone, who has worked as victims’ advocate in the case, said of Smyth’s death: ‘The victims are terrifically saddened. But, there’s also anger that the police, the church and the Titus Trust [which took over Iwerne Trust in 2000] had taken so long to start to engage with them. So, the opportunity for any justice has been lost.’
Last year, Smyth repeatedly rejected the claims against him as ‘nonsense’.
He left the UK decades ago, to work in Africa. In Zimbabwe, he was accused of physically abusing boys in his care at holiday camps he ran.
After the death of a 16-year- old boy found in a swimming pool at one of the camps in 1992, he was arrested but the case was dismissed in 1998. He called the death an ‘unfortunate incident’.
Last year he faced claims of inappropriate behaviour and ‘heavyhanded leadership’ at a church in Cape Town.