It was announced on 12 Aug 2018 by the Church of England that there would be a review into the case of John Smyth. A year later in August 2019 the National Safeguarding Team commissioned Keith Makin to undertake this review into the Church’s handling of the conduct of Smyth. The review is set to be completed within nine months. The long-awaited announcement was welcome news to all those who seek clarification of the long-running saga of John Smyth, Iwerne Holidays, Titus Trust, Winchester College and the Scripture Union. This NST announcement was, however, almost immediately undermined by the announcement that one party, the Titus Trust, would not cooperate with the review for legal considerations. Then the Scripture Union made a similar non-cooperation statement without giving out its reasons. Winchester College announced that it would, ‘subject to the matter of any live litigation’, cooperate with the review.
The original August 14th Press Release from the Church emphasises the major role expected of the three organisations mentioned above to the Smyth review process. With the blanking of the review by two of the three participants, one might have hoped for a further Press Release to indicate how the review was proposing to overcome these obstacles being put in its path. Nothing has been announced and so we are led to conclude that the review will soldier on without the backing of some of the main institutional players in the Smyth affair. One way to go forward might be to approach the individual members of the Trustees of the Titus Trust. Some of them are licensed Anglican clergy and so they are under episcopal authority. Even if the corporate body refuses to cooperate, individual trustees can surely be required to respond to legitimate questions from an official C/E review. This of course assumes that Keith Makin has the full backing of bishops and other authorities in the church for his work. The names that come up from an internet search are Simon Austen, the current chair and Richard Dryer, Adrian May and Phil Parker. These are all clergy in the Church of England and so should be amenable to an episcopal requirement to provide what information they have.
A second suggestion would be to approach the known victims of John Smyth. Some I know are willing to be approached if this is done with proper safeguards. Back in May in a Church Times report, Andrew Graystone identified 26 individual Smyth victims in the UK, two of whom have reportedly died. Some of these survivors are active online so it is possible to gauge from their tweets an impression of what this particular group think so far about progress in the review. The answer to a question about the progress of the review up till now is that there has been, as far as they are concerned, complete and utter silence from the reviewer.
This brings us on to ask about the qualifications of the reviewer, Keith Makin. He was chosen by the NST for his 30 years of management in the social care field. He has already led on a number of serious case reviews. He is clearly a professional in this line of expertise but there is no indication of any background in the church. This would have given some insight into the tortuous political and theological aspects of the case. Anyone who has followed the Smyth case at any depth will know that it has become, over the passage of thirty years or more, enmeshed in the politics of a large segment of powerful Anglican evangelicals. Those of us who are watching this case realise that even with a great deal of background reading it is sometimes hard to disentangle all the subtle nuances of theology in this case. Also, the response of the Church to Smyth and its institutional failures in the years that followed were in part because of theological politics. It would be unfair to expect anyone from Makin’s background to be able to unravel all this complexity.
An Internet search on Keith Makin shows that he is no longer active in any of the five directorships that he used to hold. His main role now is to head up his own consultancy firm in Northumberland. His commission to conduct the review began on 19th August. By now we might have hoped for some visible signs of movement, especially if the review is to be completed in nine months. The original Press Release about his appointment did not spell out in any detail how the review is to be conducted, but we might have hoped that Keith would by now have set up a dedicated web-site for the purpose of reaching out to survivors and anyone else who has information on Smyth. If the review is to be strong in ways that use Keith’s areas of expertise, then, surely, he will be anxious to learn as much as possible from those who knew Smyth and suffered at his hands. I strongly sense a feeling of frustration coming from Smyth survivors that I am in touch with that they have not heard anything about the gathering of factual evidence. Although the review that eventually appears may not have any theological insight, this fact can be overlooked if it is professional, business-like and concerned to present all the facts of the case.
The silence that seems to pervade the Makin review process so far is also apparent in the information on Jonathan Fletcher. The Daily Telegraph report which appeared at the end of June opened a flurry of interest, particularly as it linked up to the Smyth scandal. Smyth and Fletcher knew each other and were part of the same networks of well-connected evangelicals in Church Society/Reform/Iwerne circles. It can also be suggested that the people who knew about the nefarious activities of both men were from the same circles. In short, there seems to have been a cover-up by well-connected and apparently honourable Christian individuals over a long period of time. In the period that has passed since June, there have been no new disclosures against Fletcher. The opposite seems to have happened. Old loyalties to conservative Christian networks, Christian Unions and Iwerne camps seem to have held firm that no new disclosures have been revealed. Loyalty to the evangelical tribe has taken precedence over a higher loyalty to the values of truth and justice. Silence on the topic has been almost total.
Having written two pieces on the Jonathan Fletcher on my blog, I have been interested to see that my essays still attract a reasonable amount of attention. Most of my other blog essays are forgotten in a couple of weeks, but the two Fletcher articles have ridden high on a Google search and still attract around twenty hits every day. One of the reasons for this is that there seems to have been an attempt to remove Jonathan Fletcher’s name from all mention elsewhere on the Net. Sermons given by him have mysteriously disappeared. Mention of his presence and participation in the Commissioning of Andy Lines at Wimbledon was erased and the author who had written the piece, Chris Sugden, had not been consulted. The effort of this cleansing of the Net points to a considerable effort and measure of support in the face of evidence of immoral behaviour by Fletcher. All this suggests that Jonathan Fletcher still carries a great deal of support. The tribal attachments in this branch of the Church are alive and well but these loyalties also have the detrimental effect of corrupting those who hold to them.
Over the next months Keith Makin has the unenviable task of making some sense of the failures of the Church with regard to John Smyth and his felonies. We trust that his way of working will soon become clear. His review is important to the Smyth survivors, the Church as a whole and all who want to see good practice prevail in the institution. One area that he is unlikely to penetrate is the culture of secrecy, dishonesty and corruption that made Smyth’s (and Fletcher’s) behaviour happen in the first place. It is that poison that is the cause of so much harm to the Church of England both now and in the future.
Google redaction is the current equivalent of early 20th century document shredding. Plenty of it goes on. Of course it is possible to keep copies when viewing at the time. Worth bearing in mind for future research?
On 18th August the ‘Law and Religion’ website quoted these update statements from the Titus Trust and the Scripture Union:
TITUS TRUST
“The Titus Trust welcomes the Church of England’s review into the Smyth case and has already shared a significant amount of information with the Church’s national safeguarding team, indicating to them several weeks ago that ‘We are very happy to be involved in a review and seek to be as transparent and supportive as we can be’ but that ‘we remain restricted by on-going legal action.’ We look forward to being able to participate in the review process to an even greater extent once the legal proceedings relating to the case are over.”
SCRIPTURE UNION
“We remain deeply saddened by the accounts of abuse suffered by the victims of the late John Smyth, a trustee of Scripture Union from 1971 – 1979. That such acts were carried out by an individual who had been associated with Scripture Union is a matter of profound and sincere regret for us.
“We maintain high standards of safeguarding for the children and young people in our care and continue to handle all cases with the utmost seriousness. Our commitment is to learn from what has happened in the past and continue to develop our safeguarding policies and practices. We have contributed to arrangements for independent counselling support for those affected by this case.
“Having reviewed the Terms of Reference for the Church of England review, we decided not to participate and instead intend to conduct an independent review to learn lessons from our past connections with John Smyth. Initial extensive searches of our records show very little relevant information regarding the way in which the Iwerne camps were conducted in the 1970s and 80s.”
Don’t you think that there is a completely different possible reason (and/or a second reason) for removal of JF sermons? – namely that the institutions who remove them agree that the allegations are serious (albeit not criminal) and wish to show their disapproval of said activities.
That doesn’t explain why Fletcher’s participation in Andy Lines’ commissioning was deleted from Chris Sugden’s account – and without the courtesy of consulting (or even notifying) Chris Sugden. That looks much more like cover-up.
What we need here – and the victims and survivors deserve – is transparency, not the closing of ranks.
Further – if there have been no new disclosures, one of the possibilities (unmentioned – but why?) is that there are no significant new things to disclose.
Looks as though there are new disclosures. See below.
If you mean Anthony’s comment, there is nothing either at all new or specific in that. In a trivial sense, one never knows *everything* about anything – including oneself or one’s home or place of work. There are always more ever-smaller details to be prised out. Something that the tabloids and mags are all-consumingly interested in doing. When it gets to the point of ‘how many fingers on the knee?’ and that sort of thing, you can be sure it is indistinguishable from gossip, which (as a strong and widespread human instinct) will rear its head at the slightest opportunity. Whether that applies to the treatment of the present case remains to be seen.
There are many dimensions to the present case. The backdrop of 1970s/1980s heavy shepherding, as it came to be unaffectionately referred to. The social revolution which meant that young people increasingly lacked precisely what they most needed – firstly older role models and secondly life-discipline – something that the pastoring mentioned in the previous sentence (whenever it was purely motivated) seeked to address. The fact that it was for decades an extremely mainstream attitude in Christian and other circles for ‘self-abuse’ to be seen as shockingly selfish, debilitating and exceptional (an attitude quite different to what I found in Iwerne teaching though). The fact that those who were able to conquer other sins triumphantly and genuinely (completely stopping swearing; jettisoning dark music, much of which was deliberately, self-confessedly and blatantly dark) found this particular sin the last frontier and naturally expected it to be conquerable in the same way. The fact that sins or perceived sins become almost impossible to conquer when a society approves of them, whereas if it did not things would be different. The fact that Paul himself hints that celibacy is the best way. The fact that celibacy has been very widespread in Christian history and the present day is an exception here, not normal. The fact that it is indeed very much the case that a married man or woman will have less time for the gospel than an unmarried. Quality of analysis depends on how many dimensions are synoptically given due credit.
I believe the reviewer could make a lot of progress if only a very few key people were prepared to answer questions. Of course he has no power to compel them. David Fletcher is pivotal to the case. He ran the Iwerne camps at the time and would have been closely involved in the arrangements which led to Smyth supporters at the time (others of whom are very much still around) packing him off to Zimbabwe with money. He is retired and living in the Oxford area. His brother Jonathan was of course also prominent at Iwerne at the time, a curate at St Helen’s Bishopsgate. More on my encounter with him at a later date. As a former Iwerne senior camper, there was no machinery for keeping in touch, nor would I have wished to, but all officers in and around that time must have known that ‘something had happened to Smyth’. You don’t give up a glittering career at the Bar to go off to Zimbabwe to run look alike camps. He did of course, we believe, although it has been suggested that the diocese of Winchester records look somewhat flimsy, commence training to become a Reader in the CofE at some point, possibly during the period of abuse, at Trinity College Bristol, when I think one George Carey was Principal. I could compose a very long list of dramatis personae. Of course what people may or may not have known is a different matter. And as has been mentioned, there are the victims themselves, who should in any event be the focus of all this. The lessons to be learned will centre around why such a large group of people did nothing, in the knowledge of a rather good short report by Revd John Ruston, addressed to all the then trustees of Iwerne Trust, clearly concluding that crimes had been committed.
Thank you Anthony for your observations and information some of which is new to me. I have heard some of the things you mention but my sources are are not backed up by solid evidence so that I can print them as fact. What is fact since I wrote my piece is that Jonathan F himself realises that stuff is coming out into the public domain which is serious. We wait and see what this new information consists of.
It still seems to be the case (purely from Google searches) that there is no point of contact for the reviewer. As Stephen observes, already more than one out of the nine months’ timeframe has passed. The C of E website hasn’t been updated since 13th August when the Terms of Reference for the review were published. They are worth reading in full, and far too long to reproduce here. There are nine pages, and when I first read them I felt that Mr Makin faced a daunting task. Limiting to just two quotations from them, relevant to previous posts above:
“5.5 The Reviewer should consider making approaches for accounts and for documentary evidence to:
(1) Survivors and those who have brought forward allegations of abuse, whether formally investigated or not, including those who wish to remain anonymous”
“5.6 The Reviewer will need to take every reasonable step to obtain and review the following documents, so far as they relate to the material period. A reference to a document is to any document in hard copy or electronic form:
Rev. David Fletcher
Any documents in the control or possession of the Rev. David Fletcher which:
(1) Relate to the decision of the Iwerne Trust to instruct the Rev. Mark Ruston and the Rev. David Fletcher to undertake an investigation, including the instructions which they were given;
(2) Relate to any report given by the Rev. Mark Ruston and the Rev. David Fletcher following their investigation, including any action taken;”
From the above it appears (to me, at least) that it is Mr Makin who is tasked with making contact on the basis of existing reports held by the Church, police and others.