John Smyth was a evangelical Christian barrister who was subsequently claimed to be a serial abuser who targeted as many as 130 boys until his death in 2018.
His alleged abuse spanned five decades and three different countries, subjecting victims to physical, sexual, and psychological attacks that permanently marked their lives.
He died aged 77 in Cape Town in 2018 while under investigation by Hampshire Police and so was ‘never bought to justice’, according to a recent review.
A famous barrister, who’d acted for morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse in blasphemy and pornography cases against Gay News, Channel 4 and the National Theatre, Smyth also chaired the Iwerne Trust, a charity which ran Christian summer camps in Dorset each year.
His annual retreats, at which largely well-bred young men swam, played sports, and attended Bible study classes, were designed to attract ‘future leaders’ who might go on to greater things.
John Smyth died aged 77 in Cape Town in 2018 while under investigation by Hampshire Police and so was ‘never bought to justice’, according to a recent review
They ranged from the Reform Party leader Richard Tice to the Right Rev Andrew Watson, who later became Bishop of Guildford. Today’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, volunteered as a dormitory officer for several years, while the broadcaster Anne Atkins spent the summer before she went up to Oxford as one of a handful of female volunteers, who were allowed on-site to peel spuds in the kitchens.
Smyth, who was married with two children, seemed ‘handsome, brilliant, charismatic’, Atkins later recalled, dubbing him ‘a Christian role model for many’.
Yet as scores of teenage boys who crossed the eminent QC’s path later discovered, there was a dark side to his beguiling personality. For Smyth would turn out to be a prolific child abuser, who used the Iwerne Trust’s seaside camps to target potential victims.
He had a particular penchant for pupils from Winchester College, the famous public school (and alma mater of Rishi Sunak) near his idyllic family home in Hampshire.
Young members of the school’s Christian Forum, which sent a delegation to the camps, would be invited over for Sunday lunch and a swim in the pool, before being lured into Smyth’s shed, where they would be instructed to confess various sins.He would then instruct them to strip naked, before undoing his trousers and using a garden cane to inflict brutal punishment beatings.
‘He made me strip off my clothes and he got out a cane and started to beat me,’ recalled Mark Stibbe, who went on to become an Anglican vicar.
‘He said, ‘This is the discipline that God likes, it’s what’s going to help you become holy’.’
Another victim, Richard Gittins, was beaten so hard he needed to wear a nappy to cover his wounds: ‘He said it wasn’t enough to repent your sins; that they needed to be purged by beatings. I had to bleed for Jesus.’
A third later told reporters: ‘After ten strokes, I felt my skin burn. After 20, I felt blood trickling down from my buttocks to my legs. At 30, he stopped and embraced me from behind, leaning against my back, nuzzling his face against my neck and whispering how proud he was of me.’
Not every boy who attended Iwerne camps ended up being beaten (there is, it should be stressed, no evidence that he targeted Mr Tice). But Smyth had abused roughly 30 boys before rumours of his revolting abuse reached the authorities.
In 1982, the Trust was informed that a 21-year-old student at Cambridge University had attempted suicide after being contacted by the QC and ordered to visit Winchester to submit himself to one of his sadistic attacks.
The charity instructed a vicar named Mark Ruston to investigate the student’s complaint. His written report, submitted later that year, found that at least 13 young men had been violently assaulted by Smyth. Smyth had ‘conned men into accepting’ the ‘horrific’ beatings after confessing to a variety of sins. They would be given 100 strokes of the cane as a punishment for masturbation and 400 for exhibiting the sin of pride.
