‘I felt absolutely numb. There was no one I could tell’
► Geoff Smith speaks for the first time about suffering abuse at the hands of a paedophile with close links to the FA
‘It will never leave us – it happened – but I hope that getting it out there will now help others’
More than 40 years had passed but, when Geoff Smith saw a photograph of Ray Barnes beside a newspaper report detailing his arrest, something suddenly changed. And, for the first time, he thought that he would be believed.
Smith was indecently assaulted by Barnes at the age of 11 and the only person he had previously ever felt able to tell was his wife.
“I just pointed at the paper and said, ‘That’s him, there, the man who abused me’. I phoned the journalist. I said, ‘I don’t know what to do but this man abused me as well’. The journalist suggested I report it to the police and they then did a full video interview.”
Smith was in his late fifties by then but every awful detail was still lodged in his mind, right down to the car that Barnes would drive and the clothes he wore. They had met when Barnes befriended local children who would buy lemonade and crisps from the Bridge Tavern pub next to where they played football.
“He worked part-time and he would serve you and start talking,” Smith says. “Looking back, you can see the grooming and how it works.”
Barnes first offered to take Smith in his car to a local airport to show him how to drive. He then invited him to the Dell for a Southampton reserve match, serving up egg and bacon at his home before the game. “I remember he had a blazer with the Hampshire FA badge on when we went to the football – and he had a pass to get in,” Smith says.
The grooming continued for around a year before Barnes told him that he was an artist and suggested that he come into a flat. “He was like, ‘I’ll draw you, take your clothes off ’, and then came over and started touching me. I went back on the bus that night and felt absolutely numb. There was no one in my family who I could talk to. My parents had split up – and my dad was just not the sort you could tell.
“Ray Barnes would have died that weekend if my dad had known. And who would have believed my word against his back then? I avoided him after that. Christ knows what would have happened if it had carried on.”
Barnes and Smith still lived in the Southampton area and he would sometimes see his abuser refereeing football matches. Barnes became the assistant secretary of Hampshire FA in 1972 and then the paid secretary between 1976 and 2001. He was also a special constable and a magistrate. He worked with youth offenders and at other local sports clubs, remaining embedded in football administration until his trial at Bournemouth Crown Court in 2010.
His time leading the Hampshire FA also coincided with when Bob Higgins – one of the most prolific paedophiles in football’s entire child abuse scandal – was also working at local clubs. It raises questions about how many other victims there might be, and Barnes’s role in the failure to stop Higgins from offending.
As well as Smith, a third survivor also came forward after reading of the initial complaint against Barnes. He had been given a job by Barnes at the Hampshire FA and was 16 when he was assaulted on the M3 after Barnes used his position to get them tickets for the 1983 FA Cup final.
The police, Smith says, were meticulous in verifying the detail of his complaint even if some of the wider reaction provides a telling insight into how so many abusers were able to continue offending. “I was at a reunion with friends and they didn’t know what had happened to me,” he said. “They started talking about Ray Barnes and a few of them were, ‘I’ve known him for years, good lad, they’re having him on’. I said, ‘You haven’t got a clue’ and I just got up and left.
“I was put on my own at court. I didn’t see any other witness. It was hard – it’s embarrassing – but, if you don’t tell the truth, you’re never going to get this man convicted. It made me feel so much better to be believed. ”
Barnes was found guilty of five counts of indecent assault on three boys. Within a week, Barnes was found dead. He had been granted bail ahead of sentencing and jumped from the upper level of a multistorey car-park in Southampton.
Some of the reaction in football was again revealing. A minute’s silence was suggested by the Wessex League for the married father of four. A backlash meant that got shelved and Bob Purkiss, the current vice-chair of the Wessex League, has acknowledged that it was the “wrong thing to do”. In stressing the league’s commitment to safeguarding, he also told The Telegraph that lessons had been learnt.
Smith has heard nothing from the FA or Hampshire FA, even since football’s wider child abuse scandal was revealed. He has also heard nothing from the Fa-commissioned Sheldon Review, which was published last month. He had been ready to share his experiences in the hope that children could be better protected. The apparent lack of curiosity into the entire Barnes case, given both his senior administrative position and proximity to Higgins, has baffled and infuriated survivors.
“The apologies have not been personal whatsoever,” Smith says. “The FA could get all the names of the people who were affected and then send an apology individually. I knew people from the Hampshire FA. Never ever did I hear from them. Ray Barnes used football and sport. You just wonder if someone could have stopped a lot of this.”
Now 68, Smith knows the experience will never leave him.
Having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 26 years ago, he runs his own charity and has raised more than £1 million for people with the disease. “Our names were kept quiet at the time of the trial but I don’t mind now,” he says. “It hit me when I saw the other lads on TV in that BBC documentary. I thought ‘fair play to them’. It’s very difficult to come forward. It will never leave us – it happened – but I hope that getting it out there will help others.”