John Smyth

John Jackson Smyth QC (; 27 June 1941 – 11 August 2018) was a British barrister, judge (recorder), and serial child abuser who was actively involved in Christian ministry for children as chairman of the Iwerne Trust which raised funds for, and in practice ran, the influential conservative evangelical Iwerne camps. He acted as lawyer for Mary Whitehouse, a Christian morality campaigner.

In 1982, the Iwerne Trust was informed that Smyth had performed sadistic beatings on schoolboys and young men associated with the Iwerne Camps and with a Christian group at Winchester College. Smyth moved to Zimbabwe in 1984, where he continued to run children's camps. The police were not informed of the 1982 report until 2013, and it became public in 2017. Church of England bishop Andrew Watson disclosed that, as a young man, he was a victim. Smyth's son in an interview reported that Smyth would sadistically cane him as a child.

Early life John Jackson Smyth was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, on 27 June 1941. He attended Strathcona School.

He and his family subsequently moved to the Isle of Wight in England, and he was educated at St Lawrence College in Kent. In 1960, he went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study natural sciences, but switched to law in his second year. He received his BA (later MA) in 1963 and his LLB in 1964. He also initially acted for Whitehouse in her failed private prosecution of the National Theatre production of Howard Brenton's play The Romans in Britain in 1980, but withdrew from the case in 1982, which was stated at the time to be due to illness, but was later documented in the Makin Review to have been part of his agreement with the Iwerne Trust after they became aware of his abuse.

Smyth moved to Zimbabwe in 1984 and to South Africa in 2001. While living in Cape Town, South Africa, he ran the Justice Alliance of South Africa (JASA) for some years. JASA describes itself as "a coalition of corporations‚ individuals and churches committed to upholding and fighting for justice and the highest moral standards in South African society".

Smyth represented South Africa's Doctors for Life, and, as an amicus curiae of the Constitutional Court in May 2005, unsuccessfully opposed the legalisation of same-sex marriage in South Africa in Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie.

It emerged on 3 February 2017 that the board of the Justice Alliance of South Africa had asked Smyth to immediately stand down as the head of the organisation. His standing down was described as temporary, but his return was not thought likely.

Christian ministry, children's work and abuse The Iwerne camps took place at the Clayesmore School from the 1940s until the early 2000s. Having moved his family to live in Winchester, they attended Christ Church, Winchester, an evangelical Church of England church. From November 1973 to May 1974, he trained as a lay reader and, having completed his training, served at Christ Church. This made him an "office holder" in the Church of England, although readers are not ordained and remain part of the laity. Smyth first attended the camp as a university student in 1964 and acted as a leader, dormitory supervisor and lecturer. Smyth was arrested in 1997 during the investigation into the drowning of Nyachuru. Smyth always said that his death was an accident. The Makin Review revealed that he had continued his abuse of boys, including "beating with table tennis bat, enforced nudity, naked swimming, and showering" and that he had given "regular lectures about masturbation".

In 2001, the Smyth family moved to South Africa. The Makin Review suggested that there "is some evidence of John Smyth continuing to groom and potentially abusing young men in South Africa".

Smyth's career in Africa was funded by millionaire Jamie Colman, son of Sir Michael Colman, 3rd Baronet, and his wife, the Revd Sue Colman. Sue Colman told the Makin Review she was aware of the allegations against Smyth, Sue Colman was at the time safeguarding minister at Holy Trinity Brompton.

First reports An internal report from the Iwerne Trust in 1982, compiled by Mark Ruston of the Round Church Cambridge and Iwerne camp leader David Fletcher (employed by Scripture Union), referred to "horrific" beatings of "young men". According to Ruston:

The scale and severity of the practice was horrific. Five of the 13 I have seen were in it only for a short time. Between them they had 12 beatings and about 650 strokes. The other 8 received about 14,000 strokes: 2 of them having some 8,000 strokes over the three years. The others were involved for one year or 18 months. 8 spoke of bleeding on most occasions ("I could feel the blood splattering on my legs" – "I was bleeding for 3 1/2 weeks" "I fainted sometime after a severe beating"). I have seen bruised and scored buttocks, some two-and-a-half months after the beating. Beatings of 100 strokes for masturbation, 400 for pride, and one of 800 strokes for some undisclosed "fall" are recorded.

In February 1989, John Thorn, the headmaster of Winchester College during the years that Smyth was active, released his autobiography, which included the following:

The independent review commissioned by Winchester College and published in January 2022 included the above passage from Thorn's autobiography and indicated that it was a reference to Smyth. "'I haven't handed over a sex offender to the police - because I was told in confidence': A leading agony aunt makes an explosive confession" (Daily Mail, 20 October 2012). The article included the following paragraphs:

Smyth was first publicly named as an abuser by an article in The Daily Telegraph published on 1 February 2017. The article indicated that Channel 4 News would be broadcasting a report on Smyth's violent physical abuse of young men. The report aired the next day and showed Smyth being doorstepped by reporter Cathy Newman, while on a Christmas and New Year visit to friends in Bristol, England. Smyth commented that he was "not talking about what we did at all" and said some of the claims were "nonsense".

Shortly after the report the Bishop of Guildford, Andrew Watson, disclosed that he was one of Smyth's victims.

After the abuse became public, Graham Tilby, national safeguarding adviser for the Church of England, said: "Clearly, more could have been done at the time to look further into the case."

On 10 April 2017, BBC News at Ten reported that the English first-class cricketer and Caldicott School headmaster Simon Doggart had been abused by Smyth, but he also had administered beatings alongside Smyth to other victims.

Personal life and death In January 1966, Smyth met Josephine Anne Leggott. They married on 1 June 1968, and had one son and three daughters.

Subsequent developments In June 2020, the Church of England removed final diocesan permission to officiate from George Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, having identified procedural failings either in his review of, or his failure to have other bodies review, allegations against Smyth. Permission was restored to Carey by the Bishop of Oxford seven months later.

Bleeding for Jesus Kingsgate House, Winchester College. Smyth would collect boys from this boarding house and drive them to his house in Morestead. A book documenting Smyth's abuse was published in September 2021. Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the Cult of the Iwerne Camps was written by Andrew Graystone, a journalist and theologian who had been involved in the exposure of Smyth. Graystone described how from 1976 onwards, Smyth developed an interest in boys at Winchester College's Christian Forum, a body that grew substantially in size during the so-called "evangelical revival" at the school in the mid-1970s, with 35 out of 50 boys at one boarding house – Kingsgate House (or "Beloes"), from where Smyth selected the majority of his victims and which according to one boy "was being taken over by Smyth" Smyth attended the Christian Forum nearly every week, giving a talk each term, and he would regularly pick up two or three boys from this group from outside their boarding house and drive them to his home, Orchard House in Morestead just outside Winchester, for Sunday lunch with his family and in summer to swim, often naked, in the pool. Not all boys who attended these Sunday lunches were beaten by Smyth;

Over time the number of strokes increased, and the caning would be undertaken not as punishment for any particular "sinful" deed or thought but as "prophylaxis; a spiritual discipline to keep the soul in order". Upon returning to school, some boys refused to use the communal showers as their wounds were so extensive, and one boy, Simon Doggart, a member of Kingsgate House, had to play an important game of Winchester College football in February 1978 with bandages under his kit to hide the severe lacerations he had received from a beating that Smyth had given him for the "sin of pride". In 1964, Smyth was invited to be an officer at Iwerne by its founder Eric Nash, despite the fact that Smyth's school, St Lawrence College, was not among those from which boys were selected, his charisma proving sufficiently attractive. In 1975, Nash elevated Smyth to the position of Chair of the Iwerne Trust. Smyth gave many of these, and a young Justin Welby also gave talks, with his text being thoroughly scrutinised by Smyth and others before delivery. According to Welby, Smyth was "charming, delightful, very clever, a brilliant speaker". He also visited Iwerne attendees at universities around England and now took the opportunity to meet other young men at university in Bristol, Cambridge and Durham. Smyth's relation with Simon Doggart developed at Cambridge, where a group of Iwerne men at Magdalene College met regularly at the Round Church in the city; Mark Ruston was preacher at the church and Justin Welby a regular attendee, with Welby soon starting to attend camps at Iwerne.

It was at the Iwerne camp at Clayesmore that one ex-Winchester boy, named only "Tony" by Graystone, was beaten by Smyth for a session that lasted 12 hours, to "crush his spirit"; the duration of these beatings was so exhausting for Smyth that he auditioned others to help him, settling on Simon Doggart. Doggart would be beaten by Smyth every two weeks, and at other times Doggart would beat the young men himself. Doggart was a left-handed batsman and he and Smyth occasionally conducted the beatings at the same time, delivering the strokes one after the other. In 1981, Smyth had a roster of 26 men whom, along with Doggart, he would beat, and sessions would extend up to 800 strokes at a time. Andrew Morse, son of Sir Jeremy Morse and one of the ex-Winchester "Bosloe Boys" who was beaten in Morestead every three weeks, was scheduled to have a special "double birthday beating" along with Doggart in January 1982 (they were both turning 21), but after five years of beating it was too much for Morse, so after writing and posting a letter to Smyth in which he said he would expose him to the press, on 4 February he attempted to take his own life at the University of East Anglia.

The review also concluded that Smyth had abused boys sexually as well as physically and emotionally, citing reports of Smyth forcing victims to strip naked, striking them on the buttocks and kissing their necks, as well as stripping naked in front of them and on one occasion grabbing a teenage boy's genitals. The review found the abuse had been covered up by a "powerful evangelical clergy", after becoming an open secret within the "Conservative Evangelical network" after the 1982 Ruston Report, and that senior figures within the Church of England were aware.

The review contained psychological analysis by Elly Hanson, which concluded that "the beliefs and values of the conservative evangelical community in which John Smyth operated are critical to understanding how he manipulated his victims into it, how it went on for so long, and how he evaded justice." This included "intrusive and intense one-to-one mentoring of boys and young men" and "a focus on personal sinfulness, producing a default sense of guilt, defectiveness, submission and indebtedness to God". John Smyth would consult a black book that was kept in the family kitchen, listing PJ's "wrongdoings", and then say, "Peter John, it's time to go to the shed." Stibbe recalled how he thought Smyth's beatings were so severe that he might be killed: " could not believe the brutality of each stroke . . . he was grunting with each blow." Anne Smyth, who started her relationship with Smyth when she was 16, described how she was helpless to stop him carrying out his abuse and that she was relieved when he died. She commented on how Christianity had shaped her reaction to her husband's abuse: "My faith had shown me and taught me that you have to focus as much as you can on the good." In the second of the two programmes, forgiveness was extended to her by PJ and Fiona, as well as by Smyth's victims. The documentary also described Channel 4's investigations into Smyth, providing a timeline of what was known by whom.