The archbishop as scapegoat
The archbishop as scapegoat
Whoever is to blame for the Smyth abuse, it isn't Justin Welby
In the late 1970s, when many of my contemporaries were pogoing to the Sex Pistols, others of the same age – all public schoolboys - were being beaten on the bare buttocks until they bled, in the name of Christ and for the sin of thinking about masturbation. That they were groomed to allow this to happen, that this took place over several years, that the perpetrator was allowed to leave the country unpunished, that his own children were unprotected and that the issue was not reported to the police, had nothing to do with Justin Welby – except in the most tangential way. But a contemporary head had to roll and his wore the biggest mitre.
The report published last week and that has led to his fall was commissioned by the Church itself from Keith Makin, a former Director of Social Services and Chief Executive of an independent childcare company. It is an admirable document, 253 pages long and can be found here:
independent-learning-lessons-review-john-smyth-qc-november-2024.pdf
The Makin report also constitutes one of the most fascinating insights into recent establishment history that I have ever read. It brings together the conservative Evangelical movement in the Church of England, the public school system, upper middle-class attitudes towards parenting, British toleration of corporal punishment and the pathologisation of sex by religious moralists. Put them together with an “old boys” desire not to let the world in on the shameful secrets of your associates, and you have the Smyth scandal.
The background
John Smyth, who died in 2018 aged 77 was born in Canada to parents who were members of the cultish Plymouth Brethren. The family emigrated to the UK in the late 40s and Smyth was sent to a minor English public school and then to Cambridge where he fully graduated in law in 1964.
In the Easter of the same year Smyth attended a Christian camp for young people organised under the auspices of the Iwerne Trust. These camps were run from the premises of a private school in the Dorset village of Iwerne Minster and had been set up in 1933 by a young conservative evangelical cleric, the Reverend Eric Nash (whose nickname was “Bash). Attendees had be invited to the camps and Nash and his associates were to be known as “commandant”, “adjutant” and “officers”.
The object of the camps was to take pupils from the top 30 public schools and indoctrinate them into conservative Anglicanism while inculcating a sense of fellowship. To paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie, give me a public schoolboy at a tender age and he’s our idea of Christ’s for life – and may become prime minister or even an archbishop. Makin records one of Smyth’s victims as remembering that…
…as a child at the Iwerne camps, it was all about getting people into the Church of England and looking to hold sway on opinions within the Church, and that wasn’t hidden from us as
teenagers. That was very much the emphasis, that you have been chosen, and you will go on to do great things for Jesus within the Church of England. That was part of what they were selling to us.
Many future church leaders and future theologians attended these utterly elitist camps at one time or another, including David Sheppard, bishop of Liverpool from 1975 to 1997, the celebrated conservative theologian John Stott who had heard Nash preach at Rugby school in the late 30s and went on to become a chaplain to Elizabeth II, and a young Old Etonian called Justin Welby. There is no evidence that any of these people knew what John Smyth was doing with older boys and young men beginning some time in the early 70s. Indeed sufficient faith was placed in Smyth, by all accounts a charismatic and outwardly spiritual man, that in 1974 he was appointed chairman of the Iwerne Trust.
So able did he seem to others that five years later he was appointed the youngest QC in the country. And whereas men like Nash and Stott, as bachelors might be subject to some scrutiny if they showed too much interest in young men, Smyth by then was “happily married” and would eventually become the father of four. When the abuse happened a great deal of it took place in the garden shed at the Smyth home, where the young men had been invited to dine with the family.
That home was in the village of Morestead, a 10 minute drive from the centre of Winchester, and had almost certainly been chosen because of the access it allowed to the various buildings of Winchester College. Makin notes that “Winchester College allowed John Smyth easy and unsupervised access to the boys at the school and did not see their attendance at his house as being in any way questionable.”
The Ruston report
In 1982, according to one account of how this first report came about, a Cambridge student sought guidance from his vicar, the Reverend Mark Ruston. another evangelical associated with Iwerne and with the Scripture Union - of which Smyth was a trustee. Many of us as students in the 70s encountered members of the Scripture Union as they proceeded from door to door wishing to give us the good news.
What Ruston heard was not good news. His parishioner wanted to know whether being beaten by his religious mentor until he bled represented good theology. Ruston, in no doubt that it wasn’t, decided that he should investigate and held an impromptu one-man Inquiry.
The result now called the Ruston Report is a remarkable document for many reasons. The first was that he took upon himself to conduct it at all rather than alerting either the police or the Church authorities. The second was that he was pretty thorough and appropriately shocked. We’ll come on to the third later.