Rochdale and Beyond – Part 3 Paedophile Information Exchange PIE to 1990's

Jan 17, 2025

Anne Wade’s Rochdale and Beyond Article Part 3

The original article was first posted in 2017. Some additions have been made to text and photos and sources have been updated where possible.

PIE closes down – in theory

In 1986 Barry Stevens, Margaret Thatcher’s trusted personal police bodyguard, passed on to her the information that Peter Morrison was attending sex parties with underage boys. She still recommended him for a knighthood. Colin Smart, the excellent social services director of Sunderland, said about this in 2014: ‘Despite my hostility to many aspects of the political actions of Mrs Thatcher, the idea that she approved or condoned crimes committed against children is nonsense.’ He looked for some explanation from her biographer about her belief about what is in the public interest, as discussed by Norman Tebbit on the Andrew Marr show in 2014.

Perhaps there are other aspects to explore in this. One is an unconscious inclination to make allowances and put the best interpretation on the actions of one’s friends. Another is the double standard of truth that is accepted by some people between private and public parts of their lives, along with the double standard of truth implied in swearing oaths in court and similar formal settings. And yet others are expediency under pressure and one’s own comfort and convenience: Peter Morrison made Margaret Thatcher feel more comfortable and secure in a difficult job. But from a wider view, this deceit in their relationship served her badly. She would have done better to have faced up earlier to the difficulties in what her ministers and the public were telling her. For a picture of where this slide in truth and integrity in public affairs leads, we have only to look across the Atlantic at the moment.

The London borough of Lambeth was the home of Elm Guest House and some of the other paedophile party venues frequented by Cyril Smith, Peter Morrison and their friends. Grafton Close, Angell Road and other children’s homes, presumably including Shirley Oaks, whose survivors are currently very active, were used as reservoirs of children available for trafficking to parties as required. Cyril Smith used to visit Grafton Road in between parties, to rape boys. John Mann, MP from 2001, encountered this as a Lambeth councillor in the 1980s, and was told by police contacts that their inquiries had been stopped on orders from superiors.In 1987 Lambeth housing officer Tom Hosey [dead link, no archive, alternative [5], died in mysterious circumstances. At the time he was said by colleagues to be very frightened, having come across evidence of child sexual abuse. He was painting the front door of his flat when he ‘fell over the balcony’ to his death. As you do.

In 1989 an unnamed Lambeth caretaker, who was said to have tapes on ultra-violent sex parties involving children, suffered a suspicious death in an apparent arson attack in his flat, where the fire endangered his neighbours. It appears that this was the same Lambeth council caretaker who set up hidden cameras for the police in Streatham and other party venues in 1981, at the time when Cyril Smith and others were arrested and bizarrely released (see above).

Bulic Forsythe, murdered whistleblower

In 1993 Bulic Forsythe, a manager and senior housing officer in Lambeth, was very clearly murdered. He was beaten to death, his skull badly fractured and his flat set on fire, endangering other occupants in the block, like the caretaker in 1989. He had just produced a major report on child sexual abuse in Lambeth, and had said he would submit it the next day. All his files were stolen, nothing else.

As so often in this story, the police appeared to do nothing in all these cases, in a way that was in itself suspicious. It is unlikely that this was because they did not care. They have told politicians and journalists repeatedly that they are being prevented from speaking out. If they were given exemption from the Official Secrets Act, they might provide effective information. But the government appears to be too scared of what might come out to do this.

In the 1980s Peter Righton went freelance as a consultant. He helped Peter Barclay produce the Barclay Report on the roles and tasks of social workers; he was in demand as a speaker; he became a senior lecturer at the Open University, and designed courses for them; he got a job working on the Charter for Children, being paid £200 a day; he had much more of this sort of work for the next ten years.

Throughout the 1980s there are reports of Savile having been repeatedly investigated. He was alleged to be part of a paedophile ring in Scarborough [dead link], archive, which included the mayor, Peter Jaconelli. A police officer, retired now, investigated an attack a young girl reported at Savile’s caravan in a BBC car park, [dead link] At least seven women are known to have complained of such attacks before Savile’s death, and to several police forces. But there was no mandatory reporting, even by police to other forces, and no collation of complaints. Surrey police later complained that they would not have dropped their investigations into Savile had they known other forces were investigating him for similar offences. If complaints had been collated, their pattern and frequency would have indicated that Savile was a serial abuser, and he could have been investigated as such. Even so, evidence could have been collected if corruption and cover-up, especially among Yorkshire police and within the establishment, had not prevented it. A year after Savile’s death, hundreds of complaints had been reported, and the number went on rising.

In 1988 a very junior police officer was called to a house in Stockport after a complaint that the occupier had been committing a lewd act in his window in view of a newspaper boy. The PC found the elderly owner having a party with Cyril Smith, an off-duty police sergeant who claimed to be there on other business, and two drunken underage teenage boys, one an absconder from the local children’s home. Smith, the sergeant and the other boy went off. The PC sent for a van to take the absconding boy back to the children’s home, and took the owner to the police station. There he discovered that the pensioner had a record dating back to the 1960s for sex offences and had spent half his life behind bars. Nevertheless, he was just given a caution for the latest offence – a decision the officer ‘found very strange’.

The next day he was called to a meeting with a senior officer and his mentoring officer, Don Mackintosh. ‘I was told I would break the Official Secrets Act if I told anyone. Mackintosh was my mentoring officer – in charge of all young bobbies. I was told don’t say anything – it’s all in hand. CID will deal with it. They knew Smith was there and knew who he was.’

Two months later, for saying nothing and ‘doing a good job’, he was rewarded with a police driving course. He said: ‘Normally you never got on a driving course when you were on probation.’ This is how corruption begins, with a stick and a carrot.

The same year 1988, this senior officer Don Mackintosh was accused of assaulting a boy himself at the Boys’ Brigade when the child attempted to commit suicide. His parents disclosed this to the host Platt Lane Methodist church in Fallowfield, a suburb of central Manchester, where the son of a church official was also a victim. The church covered this up as being only hearsay evidence and merely asked Macintosh to resign from the BB. Both sets of parents agreed not to report to the police for fear of increasing the children’s trauma.

Also in 1988, concerns about the sexualised behaviour of the children at Knowl View School were raised in a written report by Dr Alison Frazer, [dead link /ad wall] archive child psychiatrist at Birch Hill, the local psychiatric hospital, for example that children were working as rent boys in Rochdale and Manchester. Nothing was done – except that the Queen knighted Smith that year, on the recommendation of David Steel. Cabinet Office minutes show there was considerable debate beforehand with the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee about the wisdom of this. When people wondered later how it had happened, there was an attempt to refuse an FOI to hide Steel’s name, archive as described at the start of this account.

Michele Elliott, Kidscape founder and whistleblower

And also in 1988 the government denied that there was enough child sexual abuse to warrant including it as a reason for putting children on the ‘at risk’ register – ‘there might be in America, but not in England’ (quoted by Michele Elliott of Kidscape). The NSPCC, tied too closely to the government by their funding, were similarly disparaging. When, as directors of a voluntary organisation, Education Otherwise (EO), we asked the NSPCC in1988 if they could help us design a policy for child protection, we found they were worse than useless. They told us sarcastically that they were fully occupied with ‘real’ child abuse – neglect and physical abuse – and they did not have time for ‘irrelevant middle class sexual fantasies’.

The independent Kidscape, on the other hand, gave us genuine help. Michele Elliott gave workshops for our members, helping them to face up to child protection issues, gave our members places on her anti-bullying workshops, and gave us support as we were being targeted by paedophiles and sued for libel. With her support and advice from a Law Centre we successfully fought the libel case in 1989 and gradually created one of the first child protection policies. We needed to do this urgently because we were being targeted not only by paedophiles, mainly from what had been PIE, but also by extreme right wing libertarians who, whether or not they were themselves paedophiles, supported the abusers’ claim that children should be free to engage in intergenerational sexual relationships – as long as they were ‘non-coercive’. The power of grooming was not yet understood by most people.

When it became impossible to deny that child sexual abuse was happening throughout the country, the official line from the government and NSPCC became that it was 80% incest, and we shouldn’t worry so much about monsters outside the family. As child protection workers struggling to combat the predations of PIE, who were still targeting EO despite claiming to have closed down, we exasperatedly gave the government and NSPCC the benefit of the doubt, assuming they were just naïve and out of touch with what ordinary people were experiencing. We were very wrong.

From today’s perspective, we can see that the government and NSPCC were at best part of a culture of dissociation and denial, and some members of both were, and are, corrupt and lying. It is still striking how the reputations of whistleblowers are undermined with ‘dirty tricks’ typical of the secret services, and how Parliament rallies to the support of any member who has been accused of abuse, while sending to coventry those MPs who expose them. Do they think the public doesn’t take notice, and count it as bullying of whistleblowers?

One of the reasons I knew so much about PIE was that one of our members set up a group to offer counselling to paedophiles to help them stop offending, as the most effective way he could think of to stop the predations. The group found that many of these men were trying to escape from PIE because they were so frightened by the violence and murders that were happening. Our group were told that children were dying during sadistic abuse; survivors and paedophiles who might disclose names were being ‘suicided’; and they were warned that whistleblowers – judges, police, lawyers and children’s workers – were being harassed and murdered, while other members of these same professions were among the paedophiles. Their office was expertly robbed, the files stolen, nothing else, and whistleblowers and families were threatened. We heard from another police force that this robbery was done by a team from a paedophile network which at that time existed within Wiltshire police.

What my research over thirty years in Education Otherwise showed was that only 20% of the child sexual abuse we dealt with was incest, and 80% was targeting from paedophiles outside the family, none of them monsters and most charming and plausible. Some were very destructive, trying to wreck the organisation for challenging them, and some were helpful people who nevertheless were doing terrible damage to individual children, as solicitor Ivan Geffen did. The figures were small and I wondered if our families were unusually caring. I asked friends and co-workers in the field what they had found, and it was similar. It certainly looks as if it was similar in Rochdale. I question why so many experts have quoted the reverse. It is claimed to be the result of research with survivors, but to some extent perhaps it has just become accepted as a norm one does not have to confirm by up-to-date research, or think about or question. It obviously wouldn’t apply to boys within football clubs and girls within gymnastics clubs, for instance. It will vary between girls and boys in cultures where girls are kept secluded in the home after puberty, but less so in more liberal societies.

From 1988-1992 Rev Paul Flowers, the infamous Crystal Methodist who has since sabotaged the Co-operative Bank, was a councillor and vice-chair of Rochdale social services. He oversaw Knowl View, including receiving three highly critical reports: that already referred to from child psychiatrist Alison Frazer in 1988, another from AIDS consultant Phil Shepherd in 1991 and a third from clinical psychologist Valerie Mellor in 1992, both below. Not only did he do nothing about them, perhaps because he was complicit in the abuse of the boys himself, but he was also responsible for initiating the abuse perpetrated by the council over fallacious ‘Satanic ritual abuse’ (see below).

In 1990 MP Peter Morrison of the nearby Chester constituency was once again picked up in the public toilets at Crewe station having sex with an underage boy. The police had always been forced to drop these cases, as he was PPS to Margaret Thatcher and was protected by her, MI5 and other powerful figures. He was also named, both by boys and by MP and leader of the Welsh Tories Rod Richards as one of the men visiting Bryn Estyn and Bryn Alyn to abuse the boys. William Hague, who was Welsh Secretary at that time, later confirmed this to Gyles Brandreth, the next MP for Chester. Much more was alleged, like the Harting incidents above. Now Thatcher had retired and a deal was struck with Labour, local Tories, police and press, that this time the cottaging matter would only be kept out of court if Morrison stood down in the next elections. He died of a heart attack aged 51 in 1995, having never been brought to account. However, there is obviously much more to come out, particularly from Dickens’ second dossier, which John Mann was given again in 2015, see below.

In September 1990, an intruder, archive broke into Knowl View one night, plied some of the boys with cider and dope, and then molested and raped them. The staff member on duty was not on the premises as he should have been. The next night the intruder came back but was ambushed and beaten off. Rodney Hilton, a known local sex offender, was blamed, but this was a red herring. In the early 1980s, years earlier, Hilton had raped and beaten one of the boys in the woods in the grounds. But this intruder was identified as councillor Harry Wild. No-one was disciplined or prosecuted for this.

Phil Shepherd AIDS prevention worker and whistleblower

In 1991, when staff got a chance to make their anger known, during a much-needed training on prevention of AIDS by Phil Shepherd, they took it eagerly and the planned training had to be dropped: ‘most of the day was spent with the staff voicing very strong feelings about problems at the school, in particular concerns about the safety and behaviour of some of the 36 boys’. (The 48 bed school was never fully used.) One can imagine the scene.

Martin Digan, child protection worker and whistleblower

Martin Digan, the senior residential social worker and head of care who had been trying to whistle blow ever since he came to work at Knowl View and began to discover what was happening, took the lead in these disclosures. Shepherd, appalled, wrote a damning report to the director of education, Diana Cavanagh, detailing the serious sexual abuse that was taking place at Knowl View, including boys as young as eight being groomed to work as rent boys, and warning her that it was about to become a public scandal. Shepherd made this report available to Operation Clifton and the BBC, claiming there was still a cover-up. This report will doubtless be available to IICSA.

At the time in 1991 Cavanagh told Shepherd to keep this confidential, archive, and assured him it was being dealt with. She sent it to acting director of social services Ian Davey, who wrote to Pam Hawton, chair of Rochdale’s health authority, discussing ‘a concerted approach to the problem involving police, education and social services’. A follow-up Council investigation was requested and refused. The AIDS team was not called back in to work with the boys, as they urgently needed. Nearly a year later, in February 1992, Valerie Mellor, a consultant clinical psychologist, produced a report purporting to deal with the problems. She said there was no doubt that up to a quarter of the pupils had been involved in serious sexual incidents and the activity had continued ‘over a very long period of time... It is very difficult to believe that this behaviour had not come to the attention of at least some members of staff.’

Valerie Mellor’s report was completely inadequate. Although it suggested that sexual activity was at an end, it was continuing as before, and five months later a pupil and a former pupil, both 14, were formally cautioned by police for soliciting in the town's Smith Street lavatories. It must have infuriated staff who had been trying to whistle blow for years, in the face of a council cover-up. As a response by a consultant clinical psychologist to the problems reported by Alison Frazer, Martin Digan and Phil Shepherd, this report can only be part of the cover-up. She tells them, belatedly, what they have already told the Council. She minimises the problem: ‘up to a quarter’ means fewer than nine pupils involved in sexual incidents. She blames the staff on the ground. And she implies the problems are in the past. This was just the same 20 years later when the gross neglect of the sexually exploited young girls was exposed: the head of children's services, speaking on Woman’s Hour, blamed the NHS sexual health crisis intervention team for having failed to alert social services to the problem although sexual health services had been banging their heads for years against the brick wall of council and police indifference. And all the way through, police and council kept assuring everyone, falsely, that lessons had been learned and the problem was being properly dealt with now.

Another official who culpably failed to do anything was John Pierce, the chief executive of Rochdale council. He has gone on record as claiming he knew nothing about the three separate reports in 1988, 1991 and 1992 that paedophiles were abusing children as young as eight years of age. Yet Pierce was sent copies and Paul Rowen, who was leader of the council in 1992, said he had a number of meetings with Pierce in which the abuse at Knowl View was discussed. Shepherd’s report then appears to have been buried. It was certainly withheld from DS Bob Huntbach when he was assigned to carry out a police investigation in 2000, and asked for all the papers.

Who else was responsible for this bit of the cover-up? And all this was covered up again in 2014.

But pressure was building on Rochdale’s paedophiles. They were no longer totally inviolate. Smith did not stand for re-election to Parliament in 1992 under the newly-formed LibDems. He was 63, too young to retire voluntarily from politics, and still with nearly twenty years to live. He was still active in local politics.

In 1993 Rochdale liberal councillor, John Heyworth, was convicted of indecently assaulting a 14-year old girl. He refused to resign from the council’s children’s sub-committee, and Smith publicly defended his right to remain on it (Private Eye 817).

As a school, Knowl View was the immediate responsibility of the LEA. Smith, having seen Shepherd’s report, aimed to circumvent supervision now by trying to change the school’s status under a policy called Local Management of Special Schools, which would pass full control of Knowl View from the council to him. This failed, largely thanks to Digan contesting it – no-one else would have bothered. The council just allowed Knowl View to drift on until pupils apparently took matters into their own hands in 1995, by setting it on fire.

– and Peter Righton

In April 1992 Smith’s teflon-coated friend and fellow PIE member Peter Righton was arrested, following the chance seizure of child pornography sent in the post from Holland. He was only ever convicted of this child pornography, but evidence of much more predatory behaviour was found in his possession. He held a massive cache of letters and diaries incriminating many other paedophiles as well as himself, detailing unbelievable quantities of child abuse over many years, along with boxes of child and baby pornography. According to Terry Shutt, a former detective constable with West Mercia Police involved in the arrest, there were five suitcases stuffed with letters at his property in Evesham, Worcestershire. And like the material from Peter Hayman and other incriminating files and dossiers, it seems to have conveniently disappeared. David Tombs, director of the social services involved, Hereford and Worcester, warned civil servants in the Department of Health about a Westminster paedophile network. They responded that he was wasting his time as there were ‘too many of them over there’. Ministers in the DoH were less forthcoming than their civil servants, but Sir William Utting, the Chief Inspector of Social Services for England, asked for a report.

Peter McKelvie, senior child protection manager and whistleblower

In 1993, Peter McKelvie wrote the report for Hereford & Worcester social services department about Righton and his connections with other child sex abusers and sent it to Bill Utting, for the attention of Health Minister Virginia Bottomley and the Department of Health. It explained that an extensive network of paedophiles had infiltrated the social services profession, and gave details. The report went on to give recommendations of how the Department of Health could deal with the problem, including a national investigation by a small team of experienced social workers and police. It recommended that the investigation should be jointly funded by the Department of Health and the Home Office. The basis of such a team had already been tentatively put together, and would be released to serve on it.

But when asked about it the following year by the media, the DoH said ‘We are not prepared to release the letter because it raises sensitive issues particularly about striking a balance between protecting children and civil liberties’. Whose civil liberties? What exactly does this mealy-mouthed phrase mean? Was the health minister Virginia Bottomley really saying that we cannot do anything about the problem of paedophiles subverting children’s services in Britain because such people are entitled to privacy for their criminal activities? This is far worse than the stupid behaviour of Harman, Hewitt and Dromey in NCCL, about which there has been uproar – at least they had the excuse of being young and naïve. Virginia Bottomley was flagrantly justifying a cover-up when she was old and experienced enough to understand precisely what she was doing. This is the same attitude as that shown in 1981 by Michael Havers when criticising Geoffrey Dickens for naming Peter Hayman in the House as a paedophile; and that shown by William Whitelaw and Leon Brittan in protecting the Home Office paedophiles, Steven Adrian Smith, Barry Cutler, and the unknown recipient of pornography because, for some unfathomable reason, ‘the confidentiality of the recipient must be upheld’. Havers, Whitelaw and Brittan are dead, and their offences should be publicised. Bottomley is not, and as well as being publicised, she should also be brought fully to account, both in IICSA and in the courts. She may say it was Home Office and Health Department culture, at least at the time (who knows the current position?) but it was not within the law.

Why would Virginia Bottomley want to protect the paedophile Peter Righton? Who else might he have implicated?

Legislation in the Data Protection Act 1998 did not change but clarified what should always have been obvious, that criminal activity must not be protected:

Section 29 contains 3 separate but related exemptions:

Section 29(1) - Personal data processed for specified purposes of crime prevention/detection, apprehension/prosecution of offenders or imposition of tax or similar duties - exempt from principle 1 and section 7 where application of either ‘would be likely to prejudice’ those purposes.
Section 29(2) – Personal data obtained from a body who had it in their possession for any of the above purposes in order to carry out a statutory function - exempt from the same provisions to the same extent.
Section 29(3) – Disclosures made for any the above purposes are exempt from the non disclosure provisions to the same extent.

The Data Protection Act 1984, which was then in force, said much the same in s28. Child protection trumps data protection. It seems overwhelmingly simple: ordinary decent people were never in any doubt about this.

Police and social services had all the material found at Righton’s house, and with that they could have excised much of the pernicious network that PIE had established. Instead, the scheme was not approved, Righton’s papers were removed and ‘lost’ and a golden opportunity to heal the nation was destroyed.

This blocking action by Virginia Bottomley was one of the most blatant of the government child abuse cover-ups, it is fully documented, and Bottomley is still alive to be called to account, both by IICSA and in court.

Peter Righton found sanctuary on the Henniker family estate when he fled society with his partner, convicted paedophile Richard Alston, after his conviction for child pornography in 1992. John Henniker (see above) disclaimed any knowledge of his presence. His daughter-in-law agreed Righton was a tenant, but said he had assured her that he had been wrongly convicted. This rubbish is on a par with the officials who ‘didn’t know’ and ‘can’t remember’. At the same time, this was also the estate which hosted the Islington-Suffolk Project to provide holidays for children in care in Islington, which also involved paedophiles. The Chief Constable of Suffolk – another of the decent police chiefs – warned against Righton being allowed to live there, but was ignored. How much arrogance, corruption and collusion among the élite do the government think the public will tolerate?

In 1994 Don Mackintosh, the mentoring police officer who threatened the young Rochdale PC with the Official Secrets Act in 1988 and covered up for Smith, was himself arrested for a string of sex assaults on at least a dozen boys in the Boys Brigade in Fallowfield, and sentenced to nine years in jail for paedophilia. These offences could all have been discovered and the children helped five years earlier, when two of them were reported, if they had been properly dealt with.

This same junior police officer who was pressured in 1988 to be silent over Cyril Smith also claimed that Don Mackintosh was tipped off about his impending arrest. Mackintosh was thus able to resign and keep his £52,000 golden handshake plus £11,000 a year police pension: “A week later I got a visit from the Y department (professional standards branch) who wanted to question me about Mackintosh’s habits and an allegation he had interfered with a couple of police cadets. I said he had never molested me and the officer said ‘that’s the answer we want you to say’. I know two bobbies that were abused by him. They told me that when they were cadets he assaulted them, yet he was never charged.”

In 1994 Barry Bennell, scout and coach for Manchester City and later Crewe Alexandra as well as many junior teams in the area, was jailed in Florida for four years for child sexual abuse.

In 1994 Education Otherwise had cause to ban Cyril Smith’s friend and fellow PIE member David Higgins (the ex-Knowl View teacher) from our membership. We had set up a child protection group, before this became the norm, because of being targeted by PIE since about 1978. Michele Elliott of Kidscape was unfailingly supportive and generous as we battled with a malignancy from PIE that we found hard to believe.

Higgins came to our notice because he was claiming to be an outdoor pursuits social worker, and was trying to get single mothers to let him help them by taking their small boys on exciting outward bound-type excursions – unaccompanied. We were suspicious because he would not have other parents go out with him, although he claimed to welcome their help. He wanted to take little boys out on the hills on his own, which was obviously unsafe practice. Members found that he already had convictions and we expelled him. We also expelled David Crane and Roger Joy (see above). Other members of PIE had already been expelled in connection with Azimuth sail training holidays. [For Azimuth see Cornwall Council Publish 1994 Azimuth Trust Report [7] and Michael Johnson Azimuth Trust Update [6]]

In early 1995, there was a major fire at Knowl View, allegedly caused by pupils. Between the fire and the scandalous reports it was closed down. John Pierce, the same chief executive of the Council who had denied any knowledge of the problems at Knowl View despite discussing what to do about them, asserted that (while claiming to know nothing of the problems) the authority was already taking action before Shepherd made his report in 1991. He also insisted there had been no cover-up and that the police said the same. But Breitbart reports allegations from Labour workers that a Lib-Lab deal was done to say nothing about Cyril Smith’s abuse in exchange for not publicising a senior Labour man abusing two little girls with special needs. [Lib Lab deal see Shocking Liberal Labour Conspiracy to conceal Paedophiles [8]]

In 1996 Liz Lynne, who was elected as Rochdale MP to replace Cyril Smith in 1992, ignored allegations of abuse by Smith at Knowl View and a cover-up by the council. Her assistant Deborah Doyle took pages of notes from a phone call with Martin Digan, which Lynne told her to destroy and refused to follow up. Digan managed to catch Lynne on the phone later on, and arranged a meeting, which someone else cancelled at the last minute.

Martin Digan was scapegoated for his whistle blowing, probably primarily at Smith’s instigation. He was made redundant by the council, lost his family’s accommodation, and he was harassed and intimidated by people angry about the closure of the special school.

Whether or not it is true, in narrow legal terms, that a cover-up cannot be proved in court, it is abundantly clear that Rochdale council, along with senior staff in the police and the rest of local services, were guilty of gross institutional child neglect causing death by suicide among several ex-residents of Cambridge House and Knowl View, in a way that parallels the institutional racism resulting in the death of Stephen Lawrence. It is also clear that this was enabled by government.

In January 1996, Dispatches on Channel 4 showed Soccer’s foul play. This related to three abusive coaches in the Greater Manchester area including Barry Bennell. Football clubs were asked to ensure that no adults were ever alone with a child, but they refused to co-operate. Why was this failure not publicised, so that parents could have criticised the clubs and demanded that it be made a rule? The Football Association refused to engage even though most voluntary organisations by then were implementing child protection policies.

Roger Jones, a BBC governor from 1996 to 2002, was chair of Children in Need from 1999 to 2002. He banned Savile from the programme because he was uncomfortable with his creepy, strange behaviour, and felt he should not be allowed near children. He admitted he had not openly challenged it while he was a governor because there was no hard evidence. But what he, and the rest of BBC management, should have instituted, like football, was a tight child protection policy. This had become established in ordinary voluntary organisations well before the turn of the century. Why were the big institutions lagging so far behind?

In 1997 MP Iain Mills, who had helped MP Geoffrey Dickens research paedophilia among MPs, was found dead in his Dolphin Square flat. At first there was confusion over the cause of death, but Westminster coroner Paul Knapman recorded a verdict of acute alcohol poisoning – despite Mills having been tee-total for as long as anyone had known him, as his friends and constituents insisted. He was surrounded by empty gin bottles, and had an extremely high blood alcohol level. Dickens had said earlier that they had had death threats, and was dismissed as hysterical: ‘The noose around my neck grew tighter after I named a former high-flying British diplomat (Hayman) on the floor of the House … as important names came into my possession so the threats began. First, I received threatening telephone calls followed by two burglaries at my London home. Then, more seriously, my name appeared on a multi-killer’s hit list.’

In 1998, when Barry Bennell was deported from Florida on release, he was jailed here for nine years.

In 1998 the Greater Manchester Police investigation Operation Cleopatra started, concluding in 2002. It ended up including 66 children’s homes over the whole area. The police referred Smith to the DPP, Barbara Mills, in 1998 and again to DPP David Calvert-Smith in 1999. These DPPs still refused to prosecute him, on the grounds that although there were sufficient allegations to prosecute him, he had already been told he would not be prosecuted for these offences and there was nothing new.

However, some were new: according to the Independent on Sunday (27 January 2013), two boys under the age of 16 in care in Lambeth identified Smith as a user of rent boys at the Elm Guest House, in Barnes, London. Police also referred another file with statements from two new witnesses and victims from Cambridge House. Despite the fact that this clearly was new evidence, the CPS once more refused to act. Serious questions must be asked about this decision. Was it negligence, incompetence, or continued evidence of a cover-up?

The CPS at that time was branded the Criminal Protection Society by police nationally.

Complaints against Harry Wild grew, and in the 1990s he was investigated by another Greater Manchester Police child abuse operation. In 2000, the Manchester Evening News reported the allegations after GMP’s chief constable intervened to prevent Wild’s appointment as high sheriff of Greater Manchester. Wild told the paper that his community work made him vulnerable to ‘mischievous claims’: ‘Of course, one has to consider the type of boy at Knowl View – low-grade really.’ Just like Smith, he was never convicted. Wild died, aged 80, in 2001.

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Second episode of child abuse 1990-2000 – false allegations of ‘satanic ritual abuse’

One of the strategies used by PIE (which claimed to close down in 1984 but was still effectively active) was to start an alarm about non-existent abuse, and initiate an investigation which would find nothing. Then when allegations were made against the real paedophiles, the authorities would be reluctant to embarrass themselves again with another possibly fruitless and expensive investigation. Back in 1990 Cyril Smith was coming under increasing pressure, like all paedophiles, as his victims grew older, more confident and more likely to disclose his abuse. Several of his plans had come unstuck. Knowl View School was increasingly chaotic and out of control, and Martin Digan was a braver, more persistent, whistleblower than he had had to deal with before. Smith was finding it more difficult to hold his empire together. It would be convenient if attention could be diverted on to a different abuse case. The solution came through Paul Flowers, the utterly corrupt fundamentalist Christian pastor.

‘Satanic indicators’

And so in 1990 the Devil was brought to Rochdale, or at least his Witch-finder General, Liz McLean of the RSSPCC (now Children 1^st, the Scottish equivalent of the NSPCC). In March a police officer and two social workers were sent to attend a London seminar on ‘satanic ritual abuse’, and received a ridiculous list of ‘satanic indicators’, which they circulated round Rochdale schools. Two weeks later a little boy told his teacher he had dreamed of ghosts, and that was enough for the teacher to ring social services and start a panic – because dreaming of ghosts was on the list of ‘satanic indicators’ they had just received. It later came out that the evening before his dream he had watched a ghost film which he had not understood.

Liz McLean, notorious in other ‘satanic ritual abuse’ cases and as deluded as Matthew Hopkins the original 17^th century Witch-finder General himself, was the self-designated expert brought in by social services to sniff out Satan and his covens. Helped by local social workers Jill France and Susan Hammersley, she pressed the children to disclose what she ‘knew’ had happened to them: being drugged with hallucinogens, being subjected to ritualised sexual abuse, being locked in cages, and watching the ritual sacrifice of babies. They were supported all the time by Paul Flowers, the Crystal Methodist, who was by then vice-chair of social services.

Imprisonment of children: abuse by the State

In March 1990, 16 children from the Langley estate, and four more in the following months, who all denied having been abused, were taken into care and subjected to this grotesque questioning, on no other grounds than a six year old’s very ordinary dream. All three social workers and Paul Flowers were fundamentalist Christians for whom Satan was an actual person. These people had lost touch with consensual reality, in a temporary folie à trois or quatre. Jill France and Susan Hammersley came out of this group psychosis after a few months when challenged, and were said to have apologised. Despite their gross failure of judgment, they continued to work in child protection. Liz McLean disappeared. Paul Flowers may have been equally deluded, or it may have been an expedient to distract from Cyril Smith’s paedophile network. Flowers went on to greater depths of disgrace in the Co op.

Langley was a ‘sink estate’ neglected by the Council, and these parents were mostly out of work. They were working class and did not have influential friends they could involve as advocates to help them fight their corner, as families in this situation did in Orkney and Humberside – I knew those cases in detail. Those in Langley were impoverished and disadvantaged, but they were loving and the children were happy in these families. They were not abusive.

Daily Mirror headlines in March 1990 reported that the ‘NSPCC makes sensational claims and gets world-wide publicity – kids forced into satan orgies – sex slaves ordeal exposed by NSPCC’. Videos of Liz McLean’s interviews with other children show her bullying them and using unprofessional techniques, such as

very lengthy interviews
leading and suggestive questions
refusal to accept denials
bribing them to answer the ‘right’ way
and over-interpretation of trivial things children said.

By September 1990, within six months, the case had collapsed, with the Daily Mirror headlines claiming that ‘Satan kids council gives NSPCC boot: £160,000 grant axed’. But some of the children were nevertheless kept in care ‘for further investigations’, for up to ten years. No reason was ever given, no neglect or abuse was ever found and the Council claimed in 2006, when they were sued, that they had apologised – though no-one else had noticed. Liz McLean went on to create the same havoc elsewhere, until she received severe criticism from Lord Clyde in the inquiry after Orkney, which finished her career, and she vanished.

Add to all this the fact that some of the Rochdale children, taken into care on the strength of fantastical false allegations of abuse, were placed for ‘safety’ in Knowl View School – a place where real abuse was happening.

The rumours that Smith and his friends orchestrated this debacle have not been proved, but it is a standard strategy with PIE.

What is undeniable is that the institutional weakness caused by decades of dishonesty, denial and turning a blind eye to wrong-doing made the authority less able to perceive reality or act with common sense and integrity. ‘That’s just the way we do things round here’ becomes the norm, with dodgy deals over every issue. The complaints by some of the staff at Knowl View School were all too real, but like the children they had never been able to get anyone to listen. If Smith and his friends had not been allowed such licence for the previous thirty or forty years, it is unlikely that the insanity of allegations of satanic abuse would have found such fertile ground in Rochdale, and then these families would have been saved years of suffering and injustice. And it is certain that the boys at Knowl View would have been better safeguarded.

Similar accusations of satanic ritual abuse occurred in over 80 areas in the UK over a few years around 1990. People working with paedophiles were told repeatedly that members of PIE were initiating these stories to distract attention from real paedophiles. It was the same story everywhere, with greater or lesser success: PIE were able to hook into a group of Satan-fearing Christian fundamentalists who would not normally have got a hearing in this country, and hysteria took off.

In 1994, professor of anthropology Jean la Fontaine produced a report on the subject. She researched 84 cases, and found some hint of ritual in only three of them. The three were sexual abuse with a ritualised element to confuse the children. She found nothing satanic. Since then, there have been no more cases involving children in the UK.

There are still some irresponsible therapists who allude to satanic ritual abuse when they have an adult patient in a suggestible state, in effect lightly hypnotised. They encourage dissociative identity disorder, leading their clients into ridiculous numbers of multiple personalities and false memories, perhaps of human sacrifice, cannibalism, bestiality, dismemberment of foetuses, witchcraft and devil-worship. This is corrupt, reckless and damaging.

Occasionally we still get police believing these negligent therapists and their unfortunate patients, which undermines what may otherwise be a substantive case against a paedophile. There have recently been attempts to mislead the Wiltshire police like this over Ted Heath. Richard / Rachel Hoskins conflated the satanic ritual abuse allegations with the child sexual abuse allegations and claimed they were equally ridiculous.

***********************

Since the Rochdale article was first published, I wrote this post about ritual abuse, after a study was released by Department of Education in Britain, which Pilot Study on Alleged Organised Abuse – Hale and Sinason c.1994, [10].

This is the Report that was released which would indicate a higher level of ritual abuse than Fontaine concluded.

Sinason1993redacted Report Searchable

487KB ∙ PDF file

Download

It is also worth saying that Jean La Fontaine was named in Ritual Abuse, RAINS list as attending rituals, [11]. I have not studied the Rochdale ritual abuse allegations.

Other articles that may be relevant to this post…

Looking for a Place Called Home – Report of Shirley Oaks Survivors [5]
PIE Membership List How the Home Office and Police Failed Children [4]
Cornwall Council Publish 1994 Azimuth Trust Report [7]
Michael Johnson Azimuth Trust Update [6]
Shocking Liberal Labour Conspiracy to conceal Paedophiles and Sex Pests [8]
[La3] Summary of Child Sexual Abuse Reports, Lambeth [14]
7 More Reports on Child Abuse from Lambeth publicly released [13]

Previous Posts on Rochdale and Beyond

Rochdale and Beyond – The Legacy of Child Abuse by Anne Wade Part 1 [50]
Rochdale and Beyond – Part 2 Paedophile Information Exchange PIE [12]

Links

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/satanic-abuse-dismissed-as-myth-by-government-inquiry-report-blames-evangelical-christians-and-specialists-for-the-scare-which-led-to-investigations-rosie-waterhouse-reports-1420013.html

[2] https://tellaboutabuse.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/rochdale-over-20-years-ago/

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20121009121020/http://menmedia.co.uk/middletonguardian/news/s/508066_satanic_abuse_the_truth_at_last_

[4] 2015 Oct 29 foxblog1 PIE Membership List How the Home Office and Police Failed Children https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2015/10/29/pie-membership-list-how-the-home-office-and-police-failed-children/

[5] 2017 Feb 6 foxblog1 Looking for a Place Called Home – Report of Shirley Oaks Survivors https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2017/02/06/looking-for-a-place-called-home-report-of-shirley-oaks-survivors/

[6] 2020 Jan 2 foxblog1 Michael Johnson Azimuth Trust Update https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2020/01/02/michael-johnson-azimuth-trust-update/

[7] 2015 Feb 11 foxblog1 Cornwall Council Publish 1994 Azimuth Trust Report https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/cornwall-council-publish-1994-azimuth-trust-report/

[8] 2014 oct 9 foxblog1 Shocking Liberal Labour Conspiracy to conceal Paedophiles and Sex Pests https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2014/10/09/liberal-labour-conspiracy-to-conceal-paedophiles-and-sex-pests/

[9] you tube

[9c] Odysee Dispatches Soccer's Foul Play Repaired https://odysee.com/@FoxesAmazingChannel:8/Dispatches---Soccer's-Foul-Play-Repaired-fB7mbQwhn2k:3 #csa #childabuse #disaptches #foulplayrepaired

[10] 2017 Aug 8 foxblog1 Pilot Study on Alleged Organised Abuse – Hale and Sinason c.1994 https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/pilot-study-on-alleged-organised-abuse-hale-and-sinason-c-1994/

[11] RAINS list https://www.covidtruths.co.uk/2021/03/satanic-abusers-named-the-r-a-i-n-s-list/

[12] 2025 Jan 11 foxblog3 Rochdale and Beyond – Part 2 Paedophile Information Exchange PIE https://foxyfox.substack.com/p/rochdale-and-beyond-part-2-paedophile #PIE #PaedophileInformationExchange #childabuse #rochdale

[13] 2019 Dec 31 foxblog1 7 More Reports on Child Abuse from Lambeth publicly released https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/more-reports-on-child-sexual-abuse-from-lambeth-released/

[14] 2017 Jul 12 foxblog1 [La3] Summary of Child Sexual Abuse Reports, Lambeth https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2017/07/12/la3-summary-of-reports-about-child-sexual-abuse-in-lambeth/

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