Rochdale and Beyond – The Legacy of Child Abuse by Anne Wade Part 1

Introduction

Rochdale is one of the towns that has a problem with the euphemistically named “grooming gangs”. In 2017 Anne Wade wrote an article which I posted onto my wordpress blog, [1]. It is topical just now and Anne has updated it slightly, though not for the recent focus on grooming gangs, and also added some new photos. It is split into 4 parts now, as it was long. It joined many dots of factors common to the abuse through the years in Rochdale and Beyond.

Several links are now dead, the bain of a writer, but for most I have been able to substitute archive or alternative links. I am continuing to try to find alternatives, but in general always check on https://web.archive.org/ and https://archive.md/. I have left the original links even if dead, which looks messy, but the original links are often the key to people finding more sources, as well as keeping the articles original integrity.

Rochdale and Beyond – The Legacy of Child Abuse by Anne Wade Part 1

The legacy of child abuse in an English town. Why the roots of historic child sexual abuse must be dug out.

‘Amber’, ‘Holly’ and ‘Ruby’ in the docudrama Three Girls (BBC May 2017)
Played by Ria Zmitrowicz, Molly Windsor and Liv Hill; Photographer: Ewen Spencer

Should old and dead paedophiles be left in peace? By bringing out detailed stories of historic childhood abuse we may give relief and justice to survivors, but do we benefit the rest of the community? Or does this engage resources that are better applied to current abuse? Is there any harm in simply saying the past is past, and putting all our energy into how we treat children in the future?

It can be argued that it was just such a failure to challenge past abuse by a paedophile network in an ordinary town that enabled further, apparently unrelated, child abuse scandals to occur there. And the corruption and cover-up of the past that is still being maintained is allowing child sexual abuse to continue, locally and nationally.

The town of Rochdale, in Greater Manchester, has a proud history as the birthplace of John Bright, the co-operative movement, and Gracie Fields. But at the moment it is better known as the place where

• Cyril Smith and a score of his associates abused boys sadistically for decades

• 20 boys and girls from loving, harmless families were abused by being taken into care for up to 10 years for non-existent ‘satanic ritual abuse’

• hundreds of underage girls were, and are being, groomed for sexual exploitation, enslaved and trafficked into the paedophile sex trade.

At first these three episodes seem unconnected. But if we trace how they developed, we can see how the cover-up of earlier abuse, and the corruption that enabled this, made it easier for later abuse to occur. Sweeping wrong-doing under the carpet not only strengthens the perpetrators but it also weakens institutions, making it harder for decent members of the community to identify and challenge further offences. As corrupt council members, police, teachers and social workers age, they initiate younger members of staff into the corruption so that the cover-up continues and widens. This protects them from earlier victims who as adult survivors may try to disclose their abuse.

A pleasant English market town…

Town Hall

The Seven Sisters

Mediaeval bridge over River Roch…

and the Rochdale Canal
Why should all this have happened in Rochdale? What was especially awful about the place? Nothing. This is only typical of what has been happening in many areas of the country. What makes Rochdale unique is that we are safe to go public on all the episodes that took place there. Child protection workers, in cooperation with investigative reporters, and now increasingly the public, have details of similar events in dozens of other places. But in most of them the abuses have not yet become fully public. Whistleblowers are liable to litigation; or they are subjected to lies and defamatory publicity; or they are harassed, bullied, ostracised and sent to coventry at work or in the community; or they are muzzled by super-injunctions. The law is weak. The government, for its own protection, has no interest in enabling whistle blowing. And Rochdale’s story is simpler to describe because, although it is complicated by the web of national paedophile connections, it does not seem to have major international links.

…with countryside nearby

Rooley Moor

Flats 5mins drive from the town centre

Scout Moor reservoir

Scout Moor in winter

A town like many another… with a terrifying and complex jigsaw of abuse and cover-up, with many pieces deliberately carved into the wrong shape or buried. Worst of all, this obfuscation was – and is – by those whose job it is to protect these children and our community. Even more than the abusers, of whom we expect no better, we are angry with those who collude, who are corrupt or culpably blinkered, because they have so betrayed us.

Cyril Smith
Cyril Smith was born in 1928 and became active in local politics in his teens. He promoted himself as working tirelessly for the welfare of deprived boys. Suspicions of child abuse began in the 1950s. In 1956 he bought St Mary’s Gate newsagent and tobacconist. In the late 1950s, according to Mike Smith of the CID, this was put under police surveillance because of concerns about the number of young boys seen going in through the back door. Specific complaints began in 1961: for instance, he supported a boy to have singing lessons, groomed and sexually abused him. Why were these leads not followed up?

Smith gradually developed connections with paedophiles both locally and elsewhere in the country. Without these connections, and without sympathisers protecting him on a large scale, he would not have been able to offend as he did. One notable connection was with his later friend Jimmy Savile, born in 1926. Savile similarly presented himself as a dedicated fund raiser for charity. He volunteered at Broadmoor from his early 20s, and as a porter in other hospitals. The first complaint of abuse against him came in 1955, at a Manchester dance hall he managed. Some abuse is recorded from 1960, for example with autograph hunters being taken into hotels and abused. Just as Smith’s abusing can be traced over the next decades, so too there are records of complaints about Savile at the BBC, at Leeds general infirmary, and at Stoke Mandeville hospital.

Smith and Savile continued to live parallel lives as predatory paedophiles for half a century, both becoming well-known members of the establishment and escaping public disclosure and judicial convictions during their lives. However, once their behaviour began coming out in 2012, after their deaths, the offending of Savile, the media figure, led to the establishment of five separate inquiries, most notably Operation Yewtree. Other media figures began to be effectively followed up. But in the case of Smith, the high-level politician, all investigations have been so far resisted, just as they have been for other politicians who have been implicated. The braver press, the Rochdale Alternative Press, followed by Private Eye, Northern Voices and the New Statesman, had published disclosures in 1979. Any others were suppressed by Jeremy Thorpe. In 2013, Channel 4 Dispatches broadcast a documentary, Cyril Smith The Paedophile MP How He Got Away With It. [dead link/googlewall try 8 min news summary or info]. Then came the 2014 book by Simon Danczuk and Matt Baker, Smile for the camera, and Danczuk named Smith in the House.

Thanks to the public reaction to all this, one strand of IICSA, the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, is assigned to Rochdale. We are not powerless. They govern by consent, and when ordinary protest is wide enough, they back down, at least until they think we have forgotten.

Peter Righton, another paedophile born in 1926, also became a close friend of Smith, and like him and Savile rose high in the establishment. Righton recorded in his diary abuse he committed during 1956-7 at Gaveston Hall School near Horsham and Cuddesdon College near Oxford, both of which he left after a few months. His next school, Red Hill in Maidstone, was run by Otto Shaw, a man with a reputation as a brilliant therapist with bright but maladjusted boys. Mark Thewliss was a pupil there, and has described in a 1994 documentary, The Secret Life of a paedophile, [dead link removed by BBC on copyright grounds, try this link, download and spread] how he and other boys were groomed and seduced by Righton from 1957. This was confirmed by Righton’s diaries. Two other teachers separately reported concerns to the head about Righton, which he denied.

In 1963 Shaw and Righton came to a gentleman’s agreement that Righton should leave the school with a clean record. This would inevitably expose more children to his abuse. For a man of Shaw’s insight and awareness, it was unforgivable. Righton’s diaries show that he abused 28 boys at Red Hill, and that he continued in the same way afterwards. Shaw could and should have investigated properly. There is no shame in organisations having abusers, only in failing to deal appropriately with them. This includes not allowing them to continue their abusing career elsewhere. That was already recognised in the 1960s. It is not true that ‘these things were seen differently then’. However, not all institutions or people in authority were prepared to face the problem of challenging and investigating an offender. It is still not easy. Mandatory reporting would make this easier.

Like Smith and Savile, once he surmounted initial setbacks, Righton thrived as a predatory paedophile within the establishment.

Like Righton and Savile, Smith organised access to institutions with children whom he could abuse with relative impunity, first at Cambridge House and Moorland Home, and later at Knowl View School. He maintained a power base on the local council, managing to stay quietly in charge of the establishment committee so he had the gift of many good jobs in the area, eg all the head teachers, making people beholden to him. He kept his reputation by bribery, bullying, manipulation and do-gooding, and moved into national politics as the local MP from 1972 to 1992. I explore below how each time police put together a case, it was blocked at a high level. Smith escaped prosecution through corrupt pressure from friends on the council and senior police officers, and later from the British political establishment, who used the security services to steal files and cover up any charges by claiming ‘national security’. This is part of what we hope IICSA will investigate.

Despite hostile reporting in the alternative press, an increasing tide of critical reports from local professionals, renewed police investigations, and referrals to the DPP, the director of public prosecutions, Smith was knighted [archive] in 1988, recommended by David Steel. Questions about this recommendation were covered up for some time, but the fact was forced out under an FOI request in January 2014, the ICO ruling that there was a ‘legitimate public interest’ in it being disclosed. More questions should be asked of the Political Honours Scrutiny Committee about its lack of scrutiny over this award. The same applies to Savile, knighted in 1990, recommended by Margaret Thatcher. Righton, narrowly, never came up for a knighthood because he was fighting for his reputation by then, as the Azimuth trial, referred to in the documentary The secret life of a paedophile, was going on in which he and several other prestigious men such as Morris Fraser and Charles Napier narrowly escaped exposure.

In 1992 Righton had a minor conviction for pornography, which was enough to disgrace him and take him out of public life but was nothing to what he should have been prosecuted for before he died in 2007. Plenty has come out about him since then but there has been little public outcry compared with that against Savile and Smith, despite Righton having been the leading social work and child care trainer in the country, dominating government policy and corrupting and disabling the whole profession.

Smith managed to keep the lid on scandal until he died in 2010, with 144 complaints against him and 21 other men but without ever having been brought to court.

Savile, of course, also got away without being prosecuted. When he died in 2011, the flood of allegations began to wake the country up to what had been going on. But that was ‘just the women’, as Newsnight editor Peter Rippon reportedly wrote when claiming ‘a lack of evidence’ for Savile’s abuse.

On 13 November 2012, Simon Danczuk, who had become Rochdale MP, publicly exposed Cyril Smith by naming his abuse in the House, and was met with silence. This was followed by his 2014 book with journalist Matt Baker, Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith, which made newspaper headlines. Now the abuse was difficult to deny because it was well substantiated from every direction.

So how did these paedophiles get away with it? In particular, who covered up for Smith? Who were the ‘21 other men’?

In 2014 the BBC said that GMP, the Greater Manchester Police, were looking at claims of abuse from 24 – or was it 40? – former pupils at the school as well as allegations of a cover-up of abuse committed by the former MP Sir Cyril Smith. What had happened to the 144 complaints identified four years earlier? GMP said they had interviewed 21 men aged between 35 and 80 under caution for a variety of offences relating to sexual and physical abuse from 1969 to 1995, but there were still a number of other suspects to be traced and interviewed. (So IICSA can require these 21 names, at least, of GMP.) Operation Clifton was set up to investigate criminal allegations of a cover-up. But on 29 September 2016, having got rid of Keir Starmer and Nazir Afzal, there was an announcement out of nowhere from the CPS that there would be no more action over Cyril Smith and the inquiry into Knowl View was closed. And on 8 Feb 2017 GMP announced that their investigation had shown that there was no cover-up. And, as one keeps feeling during this whole story, pigs might fly – I keep looking for more formal ways of putting it, but it all beggars belief. Does the government, local, central and top police, believe they can still con the public like this?

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

Cyril Smith network, 1960ish-1974

So how did Smith and his cohorts get away with 50 years of abuse?

First episode of child abuse: the Cyril Smith network, 1960 ish - 2010

It is unlikely that Cyril Smith only began abusing children in his thirties, but earlier abuse is not substantiated, and it is unclear who else was involved.

In 1962, when he was chair of the social services committee, Smith and his fellow Rotarians and Freemasons (from Liberty Lodge 5573) opened Cambridge House as an independent philanthropic project. Initially it was a hostel for working boys, mostly self-confident electrical engineering apprentices from Glasgow to whom Smith gave a wide berth, as they would have fought back. If you weren’t being abused it was a decent enough subsidised hostel for young men, with plenty of food at a time when food took a large proportion of one’s wages; but it was not sheltered and caring enough for younger children. Nevertheless Smith gradually arranged for social services to pay for places for boys in care. Increasingly the home took younger boys, orphaned or otherwise in need, who tended to be more vulnerable and easily dominated. Smith had the keys and the run of the hostel in the same way that Savile did at Broadmoor and in many hospitals.

Smith also groomed poor families with problems, helping to resolve crises, finding jobs for their boys, supporting them to discipline tearaways. Some families used him as a bogey-man to threaten naughty boys. Mothers would warn, ‘I’ll send for Cyril Smith’, and if they actually did so he would arrive with drama that impressed a streetful of little boys. He would enter the house, be directed to the bedroom, and spank the child with a lot of noise.

He advised families to put their older boys into care if they were unruly or if the family could not afford to feed and clothe them. Smith could appear kind, and he would bring them into Cambridge House, assuring them truthfully they would have as much as they wanted to eat. Once they were there, he assumed an authority he did not rightfully have. He would use the force of his personality to discipline them, telling them to strip and spanking them naked on the slightest pretext, giving them ‘medical examinations’ as an excuse for voyeurism and fondling their genitals, and gradually grooming them and finding excuses to abuse them, physically and sexually. It was easier for him to do this with older boys if they were away from their families. When he tried to spank one boy who was still at home, the boy refused to submit. They ended up in a brawl, and the boy reported it to the police as a sexual assault.

As well as using his aggression as sadism – the sexual perversion of gaining gratification from inflicting pain and humiliation – Smith was a childish bully who simply could not bear to be defied, and resorted to violence to get his own way.

Councillor Ronald Alan Neal, survivor and whistleblower

Councillor Alan Neal and Mrs Janet Neal, Mayor and Mayoress Whitworth 2017
The Mayor and Mayoress have been married for 42 years and have two daughters and three grandchildren who live in the area. This year also marks Mayor Neal’s 30th year as a Whitworth Town councillor.

This physical abuse was not trivial: in 1964 an attack on 11 year old Ronald Alan Neal, later a councillor in nearby Rossendale and now Mayor of Whitworth, for refusing to eat meat, caused the loss of two front teeth and a head wound needing stitching. The adults running the hostel were aware that 29 stone Smith had committed this violent assault on a slight pre-teens boy, resulting in his needing hospital treatment. ‘The person who took me to the hospital said “You'd better not say anything about what's happened – we'll tell them that you've tripped and had a fall.”’

Barry Fitton and Eddie Shorrock have also spoken out in their own names about Smith’s violence – in their case his spankings, voyeurism and genital fondling. Smith would routinely round off his evenings of council meetings with spanking, fondling and grooming, leading on to fellatio and buggery. Kevin Griffiths, [ dead/ googlewall try this link] who was one of the first to stand up to Smith and report him to the police (see below), was advised by a member of staff, ‘Don't worry Kevin, the best thing to do, don't come back into the home between nine and ten o'clock at night, because Mr Smith finishes his council meetings then.’

At this time Smith also held some position of authority at Rochdale’s Moorland Home, a children’s holiday home in which Smith had, or assumed, some powers of inspection which again gave him access to naked children, [archive]. He liked to bathe them and visit the dormitories after lights out, sliding his hands under the covers. I cannot find any further links to Moorland.

At the same time, in July 1963, Peter Righton was being investigated by police for sexual abuse. Righton wrote several suicide notes in which he admitted the harm he had caused one boy in particular. The case was dropped, quite unnecessarily, for ‘lack of evidence’ but Righton kept the notes, and they were found in 1992 with other incriminating papers.

In this period Savile was a DJ for Radio Luxembourg and was quietly building up his abuse, but we have little more than rumours until he began to present Top of the Pops in 1964, and then to volunteer at Leeds General and Stoke Mandeville in 1965.

Up to this point, no-one except Smith is known to be committing abuse in Rochdale. One of his close friends who was later implicated was a councillor and Freemason called Harry Wild, who chaired the education committee. Harry Halstead, Bill Harding, Alan Lovick and Ron Watson were among the committee members at Cambridge House (and some of them were also magistrates and councillors). Although they had a duty of care, and met at Cambridge House as the management committee every month, they have denied any knowledge of Smith’s abuse. Such men seem to think that it is enough to say ‘I didn’t know’ and ‘I can’t remember’ and that no-one can argue with them. But this is implausible: logically they were either complicit or negligent and incompetent. The abuse was common knowledge among staff and in the wider community, and committee members should have been doing inspections, and been approachable for staff and boys to confide in. It would have been possible – I experienced both good and bad practice in those days. They all failed in their duty to safeguard the boys, and were negligent.

Furthermore, it would have been possible for the committee to report Smith had they wanted to do so. They had authority and they would have known how everything worked on the council and in the local police – who was corrupt and who was friends with whom. Smith did not yet have invincible support from somewhere on high.

It would have been impossible for junior staff to report Smith in those days: they would have had no more credibility than the boys. And they had more to lose: their jobs, and any prospect of working again, as they might have been barred, and had no references. In the early 1960s, when I was training in a psychiatric hospital, someone my age in a neighbouring hospital, Garlands in Carlisle, was victimised like this. She was dismissed on the excuse of unpunctuality for publishing a book, Sans everything, about the abuse in psychiatric hospitals, and not allowed to complete her training. There was outrage and disbelief from senior general nursing professionals, ‘Hysterical nonsense – no nurse would ever behave like that’, and silence from the psychiatric profession. As junior staff, we knew it was true and whole heartedly supported this young girl, but we had no channels to speak out and no-one wanted to listen to us.

At best, staff at Cambridge House might have been believed but nothing would have been done. That happened to me in 1964: learning from the nurse in Garlands, I waited until I was leaving the county psychiatric hospital, and then made a formal complaint, which was politely received and then ignored. In 1967 Barbara Robb followed up the first book, without acknowledgement, with Sans everything: a case to answer, which was good as far as it went but missed much of what went on. Robb, a member of the landed gentry who ‘knew’ everyone, ran a strong campaign, which was denigrated by the minister of health but eventually led to Geoffrey Howe’s damning report on Ely Hospital. I kept pondering how working class people without such ‘connections’ could have any effect.

If the Cambridge House committee had reported Cyril Smith, junior staff would probably have been glad to back them up, as they didn’t like what Smith was doing to the boys.

Meanwhile Righton, with a falsely clean reference from Otto Shaw, got a job as tutor/organiser for the WEA in Wiltshire 1963-5. After this he had garnered eight years of apparently clean references. On the strength of this, his earlier training, work and references as a probation officer in Essex, and his innate chutzpah, he became a tutor in charge of a two-year course for child care officers at Keele University from 1965-68. With his plausible fluency he established himself as an expert in the care of vulnerable and troubled children in institutions, and from 1968 to 1971 he was a senior lecturer at the National Institute for Social Work, a government-funded educational and research centre. Somewhere in the 1960s he fitted in work at the North London Polytechnic, now London Metropolitan University.

Lyndon Price, Children’s Officer and whistleblower

In 1965 a Rochdale social worker did report Smith’s abuse to the new Chief Children's Officer Lyndon Price. Price, an intelligent, idealistic young professional, recognised the sadistic implications of naked spanking. He in turn reported it as sexual abuse to the chief constable, Patrick Ross, expecting him to prosecute Smith. The first police investigation of Smith took place at this point, and enough evidence was collected to prosecute. Sworn statements were taken from boys, but Ross refused to prosecute, telling Price ‘it had been decided’ that no action would be taken. Price suspected that Ross had been leaned on. By whom? Afterwards, instead of having to take early retirement, Ross moved to a cushy job in West Sussex constabulary as assistant chief constable, in anticipation of the amalgamation of all the town police forces into the Lancashire county constabulary. A lot of minor chief constables were forced out, and the new organisation was taken over by chief constable William Palfrey.

Price did not take it further, as he believed, probably correctly, that he would have lost his job, but Smith lost his position as chair of social services, the children’s committee refused to contribute a requested extra grant that year, and that year, 1965, Cambridge House was closed. At the time, Price and other decent people on the council must have thought they had solved the problem. But they had not dug out the roots, and worse followed.

Despite these allegations of sadistic behaviour towards the boys at Cambridge House, Smith became mayor in 1966, and was awarded an MBE (having pestered his MP Jack McCann relentlessly for it). He was succeeded as mayor in 1967 by another close friend Henry Howarth (see below).

From 1966 Jimmy Savile’s offending became prolific. In his autobiography, Smith says they met in the early 1970s. This was also when Savile began abusing girls at Duncroft girls' school near Staines, Surrey. Smith and Savile were friends for 40 years. It seems that some police officers, especially in Yorkshire, colluded with Savile. It also seems that administrators of various institutions, and the establishment, allowed him to groom them with his fundraising in the same way that he groomed children. Many nurses and porters were aware of what he was, and helped the children trapped in bed by advising them to pretend to be asleep if Savile approached them. But, like the care staff at Cambridge House and Knowl View, no-one with power wanted to listen to them. Many of the public were simply baffled by the indulgent attitude of royalty and top government.

In 1969, notwithstanding continuing allegations, Smith played musical chairs, taking over chair of the education committee from Harry Wild, who became chair of social services, from which Smith had been removed. Together they established a small LEA special boarding school for learning disabled and emotionally disturbed boys, Knowl View. They delegated the power to appoint staff to the governing body on which they would later serve.

Where were the other councillors in all this? Why did they allow it, when they had a fair idea of how Smith, and Wild, were behaving? Why could the decent ones not manage to stop it? How many others of them were part of Smith’s paedophile network, and swung the voting, or succumbed to his forceful personality or simply accepted bribes? Predictably, Smith dominated Knowl View as he had Cambridge House, and used it as his personal paedophile brothel, shared with his friends, including the 21 men the GMP interviewed – who were they? Who was visiting Knowl View, which was functioning in the same way as Bryn Estyn in Wrexham? Councillor Harry Wild, chair of governors and of social services, was one, named along with Smith as at least voyeurs by Martin Digan, soon after Digan started working at Knowl View; and also at various times by the police. Teacher David Higgins was another, as we shall see.

Complaints soon began at Knowl View, as they had at Cambridge House. Smith was arrogant and convinced everyone he was untouchable. Local joke at the time: ‘God is walking around Rochdale and thinks He’s Cyril Smith.’

Other complaints to the police increased: a former Cambridge House boy imprisoned in Risley Prison, Warrington, for soliciting minors said that he had ‘only done what Cyril Smith does’. This attracted serious attention. In 1969 police in Rochdale began a second investigation, following the first which had been started by Lyndon Price and stopped by CC Patrick Ross. This investigation started with some boys from Howarth Cross school who were being sexually abused at a nearby house during their lunch hour. One of them named Smith as his abuser. Eight more young men, mostly from Cambridge House, made formal complaints about him and other senior local politicians – the elected councillors – and council officials – the paid council staff – to the police. Police records, and officers on the case would be able to tell us the names of these paedophile members of the council. It looked this time as though the case might be brought to court, and Smith was seriously worried. He attempted to bully DI Derek Wheater into dropping the investigation, but he failed.

The behaviour of his friends towards the police was similarly outrageous – Henry Howarth, ex-mayor, councillor and a magistrate, named above as one of Smith’s close friends, actually threatened DI Jeffrey Leach: ‘I sincerely hope that this matter is not prosecuted before the court. In my opinion, as a justice of the peace, it is not court worthy. The prosecution can do no good at all and the backlash will have unfortunate repercussions for the police force and the town of Rochdale. It is no secret that Cyril and I are buddies, and not only politically.’

This comment was copied into the formal complaint to the DPP, the Allegations of sexual assault, on 11 March 1970. Henry Howarth was alleged to be one of the paedophiles and should clearly have been charged with perverting the course of justice, but the DPP ignored it.

Under questioning from DI Leach, Smith tried to claim he was in loco parentis where the boys abused at Cambridge House were concerned. They were on his property, and in all matters medical and relating to general discipline, he claimed the boys had assigned to him the legal responsibility for their care. In other words, he could do whatever he wanted. The police proved to be less susceptible to the force of his personality, which usually got Smith whatever he wanted. DI Leach reported, in the first instance to the new chief constable of Lancashire William Palfrey, ‘it is without merit. It will not withstand even superficial examination.’ Smith ‘had difficulty articulating, and even the stock answers he offered could only be obtained after repeated promptings by his solicitor. Were he ever in the witness box, he would be at the mercy of any competent counsel.’

Still in 1969, the previous chief constable of Rochdale Patrick Ross, now in Sussex, ‘could not remember’ the 1965 complaints. Another pathetically implausible statement. The current chief constable William Palfrey also told his staff to stop investigating. A second cover-up by a chief constable. Why? Collusion or spinelessness? Where was this pressure coming from? It later appeared it was the DPP, Norman Skelhorn. These men all had authority, and could have stopped Smith’s predatory career. Instead, they covered it up. They should be held to account by IICSA, including publicising those who are dead.

Like his boss Attorney General Michael Havers, DPP Norman Skelhorn seems to have had arrogantly poor judgment, unmodified by any sense of a need for accountability to the public or the rule of law. He told the Harvard Law Society that for a law officer, when dealing with Irish terrorists, any methods were justified. He was duped by the apartheid security forces of South Africa into prosecuting anti-apartheid campaigner Peter Hain, when they framed him for holding up a branch of Barclays bank. He gave immunity from prosecution to Britain's first super-grass, Bertie Small, inappropriately and damagingly.

Corruption and cowardice were not the norm among the police despite being rife among some of their senior officers and on the council. Because they were being blocked, they quietly passed the case to Lancashire CID, under the highly respected assistant chief constable Joe Mounsey who was trustworthy and incorruptible. The job went initially to detective constable Jack Tasker. Tasker began a third investigation of the complaints, but very discreetly because of the way witnesses were ‘got at’ and top brass were blocking them. When he was ready, he interviewed Smith formally with his solicitor. ‘We concluded that he had a case to answer and I think those boys would have stood up in court. My opinion of Cyril Smith was that he was a big bumptious bully and any decent barrister or solicitor would have made mincemeat of him.’ Tasker said recently that he believes many other men were involved in the abuse, and the Smith investigations were only scratching the surface.

Once he learned about the case, Smith did ‘get at’ witnesses, and used all the dirty tricks he could. He tried to persuade young men to withdraw their disclosures, attempting to win their sympathy by saying they would ruin his career. Another line was, ‘This will kill my mother.’ One of the complainants was Kevin Griffiths (see above). Smith gate-crashed his wedding, making it miserable for him. Smith spoke, uninvited, at the reception and insinuated himself into the photos. When asked in a police interview about Griffiths’ disclosure of abuse, Smith denied it, claiming he was a good friend and had ‘even been invited to his wedding’.

Kevin and Audrey Griffiths at their wedding in 1969 (with Cyril Smith intruding) Kevin was a survivor and whistleblower

2012 Kevin went on to have a good life with Audrey, working as an engineer.

Back in 1969, the investigation was taken over by the more senior detective sergeant Jack Watson. Tasker feared it was being covered up because of Smith’s complaints, and perhaps Watson made it look like that to keep Smith quiet while he concluded the case. But Watson confirmed Tasker’s findings: ‘Smith appears guilty of numerous offences of indecent assault. He used his unique position to indulge in a sordid series of indecent episodes with young boys toward whom he had a special responsibility.’ So an 80 page dossier was compiled, a strong case was put together, and it was expected to be successful. It included the statement: “Councillor Harry Wild has been viewed with suspicion regarding his association with young men and boys at Rochdale.” In the decades that followed, that suspicion grew. Harry Wild was one of the 21 suspects.

An ex-councillor, Eileen Kershaw, was a friend and neighbour of Smith. He told her he had been accused of interfering with boys, but in Channel 4’s Dispatches, [dead link/wall] 12 September 2013, she says she did not ask him what that involved.

She told Simon Danczuk a different version, of how Smith would come round each night for hours complaining he was being set up with sexual allegations, and that she believed him when he said it was not true.

However, in a third version she did admit to misgivings: in an interview with the Daily Mail in April 2014, she described meeting a man who had been at Cambridge House. She asked him if anything strange had happened there, if Smith had ever done anything to the boys… ‘he was silent, just staring ahead, and then drove off’. But she confessed she set it aside and continued to support Smith.

As the stress of the enquiry told on Smith, Eileen and her husband Jack Kershaw, a local headmaster who owed his job to Smith’s influence, asked Jack McCann, the local MP and deputy chief whip, to use his power and influence to help. These three conspired corruptly to cover up the boys’ complaints of Smith’s abuse. When asked on TV what she thought of McCann’s intervention, Kershaw’s only response was, ‘Well, it worked.’

Worked for whom? Not for the boys involved, who had spoken out bravely, only to be told they were worthless liars and nothing would be done. Few of them did as well as Alan Neal and Kevin Griffiths. Their future was much more likely to be unhappy, with a high level of suicide and prison and more than the expected proportion of severe physical illness. In 2012, Cyril’s brother Norman said the resurfacing of the allegations “has been very painful". It was a lot more painful for the boys Cyril Smith abused.

MP Jack McCann pressured the DPP, Norman Skelhorn, to consider the case quickly and either take it forward at once or close it. Despite being advised by a prominent external barrister that there were grounds for prosecution, the DPP took only days to decide the boys were unreliable witnesses, and he closed the case in March 1970. Chief constable William Palfrey failed to appeal against the DPP’s decision, as he should have done. Jack McCann felt uneasy about his intervention, and discussed it again with the chief constable.

In July 1978 Albert Laugharne took over as chief constable of Lancashire. He and Joe Mounsey, assistant chief constable and head of Lancashire CID, both incorruptible, worked well together. Neither William Palfrey nor the DPP ‘could remember’ anything of the Cyril Smith scandal in 1979 when asked by a local paper. But given what Albert Laugharne revealed in 2015 of the pressure the CPS were bringing to bear on chief constables to cover up child sexual abuse by politicians, (see below), perhaps McCann’s corrupt interference made little difference: evidently the DPP would have done this anyway.

Simon Danczuk, MP and whistleblower

As Simon Danczuk has written, the DPP ‘may as well have said that as long as a high-profile politician decides to abuse boys of lowly social status, then there is zero chance of him being prosecuted. It more or less outlined a code of conduct for abusers: Stick to vulnerable people from broken homes and the law will give you a wide berth. The injustice contained in these words is as strong now as it was then. It was a loophole so huge that even someone as gargantuan as Cyril could skip through.’

The decision of the DPP effectively gave Smith immunity. Cabinet minutes from 1983 reveal that the DPP’s supervisor, the attorney-general Michael Havers, brother of Elizabeth Butler-Sloss who was asked to be the first chair of IICSA, was similarly corruptly protecting prominent public figures.

Havers also tried to stop MP Geoffrey Dickens naming top diplomat Peter Hayman and various MPs in Parliament.

Eileen Kershaw was not intimidated by Smith: she was quick enough to tell him off when she wanted to, as when he ran a nasty personal election campaign against McCann – she told him he should remember what he owed McCann. She could have chosen to find out more and challenge Smith about abuse.

Kershaw also reported to the Daily Mail in April 2014 an episode which she did recognise to be corrupt: she saw with her own eyes “some of the electoral tricks he got up to. In local elections, for example, he would collect up the bundles of postal votes and go through them to see if they were votes for him or not.” She “watched in horror once as he threw postal vote after postal vote onto the fire. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘These buggers are against me,’ Smith responded, carrying on as though what he was doing was perfectly reasonable.” (How did Smith get his hands on postal votes?) Kershaw acknowledged the seriousness of that behaviour, but instead of reporting it, she just let it go.

In 1970 Michael Seed became a 12-year old resident of Knowl View, where he stayed for five years. He later became a senior Roman Catholic cleric and confidant to Tony Blair. In his autobiography Nobody’s Child, published in 2008, he made several very explicit references to the sexual abuse of boys at Knowl View, and the fact that some of them were ensnared in a rent boy racket. Only one conviction ever happened, of former teacher David Higgins (see below).

In 1970 Peter Righton, in his role as a senior lecturer at the National Institute of Social Work, helped to write an influential government report on the reform of residential child care. Researching this gave him an excuse to tour children’s homes all over the country and put out feelers for other paedophiles, probably in anticipation of the setting up of PIE, the paedophile information exchange. At Bryn Estyn it was easy, as he knew house master Peter Howarth from Red Hill… it is difficult to focus narrowly on individual case histories of paedophiles, in this case Smith, with Savile and Righton as two of his most influential associates, because the networks extend endlessly in every direction, and one has to make arbitrary decisions.

In 1971 Righton moved to the National Children’s Bureau to run the first Children’s Centre. He began to write more papers and lecture widely. His career and reputation were now well established.

In 1971 allegations of sexual abuse were made against a teacher at Knowl View, David Higgins. He was accused by two very small boys of rape. The Head, John Turner, a good friend of Smith, gave the boys a beating and told them not to say such things about teachers. Was he ever held to account? He transferred to Underley Hall in 1976 to open the new school in Cumbria. Was he one of the ‘21 men’? He retired in 1985 and died in 1996 aged 64.

It was thought expedient for Higgins to move to a primary school in Leeds, just 33 miles over the Pennines on the new M62. It is hard to believe from his pathetic recent court appearances as an old man in 2012-4, but as the judge said, at this time 40 years earlier David Higgins [dead link, alternative source] was a charismatic, predatory perpetrator. Like Harry Wild, Higgins was one of the ‘21 other men’.

In 1972 Smith became the MP for Rochdale. Without the intervention of the DPP Norman Skelhorn, empowered by the long term AG Michael Havers, to protect Smith, this could not have happened. The prosecution would have gone ahead, he would almost certainly have gone to jail, and he would have had a criminal record. His power in the community would have been curbed, and decades of abuse might have been prevented. Instead, for the next twenty years Smith operated with impunity under establishment protection, despite constantly skating on thin ice. Like Righton, his career was now established for the next twenty years.

As an MP, Smith gained further power nationally and in the local community. He pulled strings to solve problems for constituents, which gave him a reputation as a ‘good constituency MP’ and solidified his local vote, and he was charismatic, winning some people to worship him though others found him unpleasant. He could raise large sums of money reliably for any good cause, always a vote-winner. At Knowl View the boys were harshly treated unless they were favourites, beaten into submission, and groomed to be rent boys, in forced prostitution to paedophiles within and outside the school. This paedo pimping – the ability to provide on demand little boys more-or-less trained to be sexually compliant – was the source of a lot of Smith’s power. Complaints continued but were simply dismissed. Smith could make allegations ‘go away’, through a mixture of collusion with other paedophiles and sympathisers, bullying, influence and inducements, manipulation and grooming – as well as protection from the highest in the land, not just the DPP and top lawyers, but the government and MI5.

However, this final protection came not out of kindness towards Smith, but to get control of him. Just think how unmanageable parliament would be if MPs all followed their consciences. The government might even find they were forced to listen to the people, instead of running the country as if it were part of the old empire, a resource for them and their cronies to exploit.

When Ted Heath was chief whip, from 1955-59, he had set up the little black ‘dirt’ book system. A later chief whip, Tim Fortescue, was still maintaining this when Heath was PM, 1970-74. That was part of the government cover-up of paedophilia. It was taken as a fact of life, not exactly acceptable, but allowed for and contained within the system. It must have been similar for boys complaining about having been abused at boarding school, only to feel betrayed by finding that their fathers took it for granted.

Fortescue explained later, in a 1995 BBC documentary, [dead link, see below] Westminster’s Secret Service, that whips liked to have something ‘on’ an MP that they could make ‘go away’ with the help of MI5 and the Special Branch, like a problem with small boys, because it meant they could control him to vote the ‘right’ way.

Tim Fortescue, The Whips and scandal involving small boys... [1] [Ed. I have added this video to Anne’s article]

MI5 and the Special Branch come under the Home Office, which formed the other part of the cover-up of paedophilia. After the public outrage at the 1995 disclosure, the whips were told to continue to make notes and report to the chief whip, but then to shred their notes and not keep anything.

‘Kiddie-fiddling’, as I can remember, was seen as an embarrassing peccadillo in poor taste rather a crime, as long as you had the sense to confine your antics, as Danczuk said, to the kids who didn’t matter, the powerless lower classes, preferably those in care, and there was no publicity. No-one considered the children – they were only gutter-snipes anyway, the dregs of society who could be sacrificed without anyone being held to account. Who keeps real statistics, even now, on kids in care who go missing?

Smith’s abusive behaviour was known and condoned, patronisingly, at the highest levels of government and its institutions. It never occurred to Smith that this had any effect on his reputation – indeed, he blamed his failure to become party leader entirely on his lack of a university degree. But Smith continually sailed very near the wind. He had poor judgment, and however corrupt the government was, no-one was going to risk a repetition of any aspect of the Thorpe scandal, so he was not going to become leader.

In 1974, when a national coalition between Conservatives and Liberals was being discussed, the copy of Smith’s file that had been placed for security in the safe of the Lancashire Special Branch disappeared. This included the 80 page dossier of incriminating documents with signed affidavits from boys who had been abused by Smith. The police claimed that it was ‘lost’. In November 2012, Tony Robinson, a former Special Branch officer with Lancashire Police in the 1970s, said that it was actually seized by MI5. In the 1980s, copies of this file were spread to police forces throughout the country (see subsequent posts), because ordinary decent coppers were incensed at the way their work was being corruptly misused. IICSA should be able to get hold of a copy.

End of Part One - Anne Wade 2017

The full article was published in 2017, [1] but has now been updated by Anne and will be published in 4 parts.

Several links are dead links. I am continuing to try to find alternatives, but in general always check on https://web.archive.org/ and https://archive.md/. If you do not know how to use them you need to learn.

Links

[1] 2017 Aug 4 foxblog1 Rochdale and Beyond – the Legacy of Child Abuse by Anne Wade https://cathyfox.wordpress.com/2017/08/04/rochdale-and-beyond-the-legacy-of-child-abuse-by-anne-wade/ #annewade #csa #childabuse #rochdale

[1] Tim Fortescue, The Whips and scandal involving small boys... https://odysee.com/@FoxesAmazingChannel:8/Tim-Fortescue,-The-Whips---_scandal-involving-small-boys..._-zYdUQmj6Nr8:4

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