Founder of ‘evil’ school jailed for child cruelty
HE ALSO ASSAULTED ANOTHER BOY AND THREATENED TO GOUGE HIS EYES OUT
THE founder of an ‘evil and twisted’ boarding school has been jailed for violence and cruelty against boys.
Derrick Cooper, 77, was a teacher at the notorious Knowl View School in Rochdale, where the town’s MP, Cyril Smith, is believed to be among paedophiles who abused boys.
There is no suggestion Cooper was in any way involved in that offending, and he has not been prosecuted in connection with his time there. But after he left Knowl View in the seventies, he founded a private school for boys, Underley Hall in Cumbria, where pupils were brutally treated - and he has now been jailed for 20 months for offences committed there.
Among pupils at the school was Joseph Ryan from Manchester. Mr Ryan, now 48, has campaigned for years for prosecutions to be brought against former staff at Underley Hall.
Cooper tried to gouge a pupil’s eyes out and smashed his face so hard into a dinner table that blood spattered into his food.
The pensioner - a former England volleyball player - went on trial at Carlisle Crown Court earlier this year, denying six actual bodily harm assault charges and two cruelty charges towards separate pupils at the school, which was for boys with troubled backgrounds, dating back to the 1970s and 1980s.
A jury convicted Cooper of assaulting one boy, Henry Gow, from Scunthorpe; and cruelty to another, Sean Hann, from Heysham. Cooper was acquitted of six other charges.
Mr Gow told jurors how the owner headbutted him and ‘gave me a few kicks.’ Cooper, he said, also tried to gouge him, saying: “I’ll take your eyes out.” Mr Hann told the jury how Cooper turned violent in a dining hall, ‘slamming’ his head against a table and ‘smashing’ it with a dinner tray.
Mr Hann said his blood ‘got into the meal and all over my face’ telling was forced to wear only a towel to sleep in sub-zero temperatures on other occasions.
In a victim impact statement read to today’s hearing, Mr Hann described Underley Hall as an ‘evil, twisted place.’
Cooper, of Hillberry Green, Douglas, Isle of Man, has said he is ‘devastated’ by the jury’s guilty verdicts. His barrister, Peter Wright QC, asked for Cooper, a man in ‘poor health,’ to be sentenced ‘on the basis of isolated falls from grace.’
But locking him up, Judge James Adkin, told Cooper: “Using violence towards these children was a huge breach of trust.”
Jurors were unable to reach verdicts in respect of two other assault allegations faced by Cooper. As a result, they were discharged by Judge Adkin, who recorded two not guilty verdicts.
Four other defendants in the case were cleared of allegations of actual bodily harm and cruelty.
Underley Hall was first investigated in 1997 and a former PE teacher there, John Wadlow, was charged with 12 sex offences against pupils at the school. Mr Wadlow, who denied the allegations, took his own life before the case started and police closed the case, even though there were allegations against other members of staff.
Det Superintendent Doug Marshall, of Cumbria police, said: “The verdict delivered in respect of Derrick Cooper shows it is never too late to report abuse and the police will continue to take all such reports seriously.”