Colman’s heir used charitable trust to pay QC accused of child abuse

Justin Welby’s opponents shouldn’t use a terrible tale of exploitation for their own political ends

THE heir to the Colman’s mustard dynasty has admitted funnelling hundreds of thousands of pounds to a barrister at the centre of a child abuse scandal, despite knowing he had brutally beaten teenage boys.

Jamie Colman, who will become a baronet upon the death of his father, Sir Michael Colman, used a charitable trust to send donations of up to £12,000 a year to John Smyth QC, who is accused of abusing teenagers in Britain and Zimbabwe.

The Charity Commission yesterday launched an investigation into the Zambesi Trust, which Mr Colman began chairing in 1989, after he admitted it funded Mr Smyth for nearly 30 years, despite Mr Colman knowing that the barrister had admitted beating boys and showering naked with them.

Mr Colman, a partner at Plexus, a London law firm, is also being investigated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority over claims that he failed to act with integrity and undermined public trust in the legal profession.

Mr Smyth, who ran holiday camps attended by The Most Rev Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the late Seventies, is being investigated by Hampshire Police over claims he beat 22 teenagers he met at the gatherings.

He moved to Zimbabwe in 1984 after victims reported the assault claims to Church leaders, and founded Zambesi Ministries. It ran Christian camps that are also the subject of abuse allegations.

Mr Colman admitted that he had been told about the British claims in the late Eighties, and said he was informed in the early Nineties that Mr Smyth was “using corporal punishment and engaging in nudity with teenagers” at the Zimbabwe camps.

The Daily Telegraph has seen documents showing that Mr Colman flew to Zimbabwe to meet the parents of alleged victims in July 1993.

Minutes of the meeting show that he accepted that Mr Smyth had beaten boys and showered with them. The doc- uments now disputed by Mr Colman, record him saying that “the beatings and nudity were justified in the context of a weak church; Zambesi Ministries was aimed at portraying Christianity as a rugged, manly religion”.

Mr Smyth was charged with culpable homicide in 1997 after a 16-year-old was found at the bottom of a swimming pool. Several boys then made abuse claims, although the cases against him collapsed.

Despite this, the accounts of the Zambesi Trust show that until 2001 the charity spent its entire income on supporting Mr Smyth, his wife Anne, and their Zambesi Ministries project.

The most recent trust accounts appear to show direct funding of around £12,000 a year from the trust to Mr Smyth, until 2001. Thereafter around £6,000 a year until as recently as February 5 this year.

Mr Colman said: “I consider I have met my obligations and duty of care both as a solicitor and as a trustee.”

In recent years, there have been so many child abuse accusations that this column has developed a resistance to them. I never believed the lurid claims made against Field Marshal Lord Bramall, Lord Brittan, Sir Edward Heath and Harvey Proctor. I am also convinced that the Church of England was wrong to state that the late Bishop George Bell abused a young girl in Chichester nearly 70 years ago. The process by which Bell was posthumously condemned without proper evidence is now, I am glad to say, being reviewed.

The claims that John Smyth QC, the former chairman of the evangelical Iwerne Trust, savagely caned publicschool boys in the Seventies and early Eighties seem to come into a different category. Named accusers have related what, they say, happened to them. Even more important, it emerged that a horrifying contemporary report on the accusations, made on behalf of the Iwerne Trust, had detailed them and concluded they were true. The report was never sent to the police. Instead, Mr Smyth hurriedly left the country for southern Africa, where he later ran into further trouble.

So I feel almost as confident that Mr Smyth is very bad news as I do that the various accused mentioned above are innocent. Even so, the handling of his case reveals so many of the pitfalls of innuendo, anachronism and false conclusions that beset this subject that it is worth scrutinising.

First is the plight of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. He has “links” (how we journalists love that word) with Mr Smyth because he was a dormitory officer at Iwerne’s evangelical camps, a junior among about 60 “leaders” when Mr Smyth was there. With rash honesty, he says that Mr Smyth seemed “charming” at the time.

Archbishop Welby has apologised, on behalf of the Church, “unequivocally and unreservedly”, saying that it “failed terribly” in this matter. Actually, he did not need to do this, personally or in general. He was only 21 years old when he was a dormitory captain, and heard nothing against Mr Smyth at the time. Nor was the Church of England, as such, in charge of the Iwerne Trust: it was a “para-church” organisation, mixing denominations. Nor was – or is – Mr Smyth a clergyman. (Strictly speaking, since he is a QC, perhaps the Bar Council should apologise for him.) The 1982 Iwerne Trust report was not a Church document, though written by a Church of England minister.

By apologising, the Archbishop has won no peace. He has drawn the ire of critics, including one of his bishops, Dr Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham. Dr Wilson asserts, with no discernible evidence, that he is “absolutely sure” that young Welby discussed the Smyth case with colleagues at the time. All the work the Archbishop has done to improve “safeguarding” is ignored. It is suggested he lacks concern for “survivors”. One such, who told this paper on Monday that this would be his last word on the subject, popped up the very next day, writing an angry, rambling “open letter” accusing the Archbishop of being “on the side of the abuser”.

If Justin Welby had denied any Church connection, however, he would have been assailed for putting the interests of the powerful over the suffering of victims. He is damned either way.

Then there is Winchester College, the ancient public school. John Smyth never taught there; but he seems to have taken vulnerable boys from the school out to lunch at his house nearby and then thrashed them mercilessly – supposedly to purge their minor adolescent sexual sins – in his garden shed.

The then headmaster of Winchester, John Thorn, grew suspicious about Smyth’s lunches and banned him from any further contact with the boys. Winchester is now being attacked for not having contacted the police. But when I spoke this week to Mr Thorn, who is 92 but still strong in mind, he told me that parents concerned about Smyth’s activities had not wished to have the police drawn in. They wanted their children protected from the man, not subjected to the trauma of a court case.

Nowadays, going to the police in these cases is considered imperative, but they are overwhelmed with claims and are not necessarily investigating them efficiently. Though told about the Smyth allegations in 2013, they seem not to have turned up anything useful in the ensuing years.

Next come the Iwerne Trust itself and its evangelical camps, which were set up by the eccentric, saintly EJ H Nash (“Bash”) in the Thirties to foster the faith among promising boys from leading public schools. The BBC said that Mr Smyth’s alleged beatings took place at these camps. In fact, this has not been claimed: they were his revolting freelance operation in that garden shed.

It is also being said that the Iwernestyle religion has “an element of violence and nastiness” (the Bishop of Buckingham again) in its theology, as if John Smyth QC’s sadistic thwackings were an only slightly more extreme version of the type of Anglicanism which produced, among many others, the Left-wing England cricketer and Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard; the energetic leader of the Alpha course, Nicky Gumbel; and Archbishop Welby himself. This is a collective libel.

As an undergraduate in the late Seventies, I remember hearing about “Bash camps” from friends who went on them. As a (then) High Anglican who snootily disdained hearty evangelicalism, I would not have found Iwerne Minster my cup of tea, but the several reports I received were of an almost distressingly straightdown-the-wicket lot of good chaps.

One has always to remember that the past is another country. Nowadays an all-male camp, run on military lines to win boys from top public schools for the Lord might seem a bit rum. Then, it was the natural offshoot of a century where the ruling elites and the Christian faith itself had been severely tested in two world wars. In terms of producing leaders, it was the flagship, turning out 3,000 men for ordination or mission work. Ministry would have been almost sunk without it.

Finally, one needs to consider the agenda and timing of those taking up the cudgels in the John Smyth affair. Next week, the General Synod of the Church of England will vote on a report by the bishops on marriage and same-sex relationships. The report has reaffirmed the teaching of the Christian Church, virtually always and everywhere, that marriage is between a man and a woman – though it goes on to advocate much greater kindness to same-sex couples.

Enthusiasts for same-sex marriage are angry. For them, this subject is the great battleground, and they are uncompromising fundamentalists. Their most formidable opponents are the mainstream evangelicals who now provide the greatest drive and largest number of recruits within the C of E. If the gay marriage faction can convince the media and public that their opponents are all John Smyth-style weirdos, they are much more likely to prevail. Indeed, experts now think the bishops will lose the (advisory) vote on the report at the Synod because of the Smyth story. Yet more bitterness is injected into the debate.

Given how atrocious is the effect of sexual and/or violent abuse upon the victim, the desire to hurl blame is natural. But the counter point has to be made that the subject is incredibly hard to deal with fairly. To deal with it unfairly only adds to the pain.