‘Culture of concealment’ divides Jersey as abuse scandal grows

From The Sunday Times
March 2, 2008

Brendan Montague, Jersey and Jack Grimston

THE old men of Jersey are racking their consciences as terrible secrets resurface.
Dozens of senior figures in the island’s tight-knit establishment are facing possible police questioning over who knew what about abuse, beatings and, con-ceivably, murder from the 1940s to 1980s at the Haut de la Garenne children’s home.

The elite may fear the taint of scandal on Jersey’s sunny, wealthy image. But others are seething with anger, particularly the poorer people whose wayward children so often ended up in the home. They sense the scandal might well dislodge the ruling order.

As the police continued their excavations yesterday, the retired bigwigs of Jersey’s parliament and its children’s services still maintained they had neither seen nor heard of anything untoward.

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John Rodhouse, 78, director of education at the time much of the abuse was alleged to have occurred, said he had “searched my conscience to see if there had been warning signs during my tenure. My position is I knew nothing”.

Reg Jeune, 87, the highly respected former president of Jersey’s education committee, also knew nothing. According to a woman at his home, he “was not aware of any allegations of abuse” during his time in office.

A children’s officer who has served on the island since the 1970s called one particularly horrendous abuse claim “complete and utter bunkum”. But with each new find by the police, it is the victims’ side of the story, rather than the denials of the elite, that are gaining credence.

At the former children’s home in the parish of St Martin, northeast Jersey, where part of a child’s skull was found last weekend, Lenny Harper, the officer in charge of the inquiry, said the discovery of a trapdoor “corroborates exactly what people are telling us”.

It leads down into a complex of at least four cellars where a bath was found last week – also consistent with inmates’ claims. Builders said they found shackles there five years ago.

The number of claims of abuse at the home has now passed 160, with allegations of the rape, drugging and flogging of children in the cellars. More than 1,000 children passed through the home during the period under investigation. Some were abandoned by single mothers, others removed from delinquent parents.

While acknowledging the horror of what is said to have gone on at the home, many of the 90,000 islanders seem equally exercised about the impact of sensationalist coverage. At a service last week, Robert Key, the Dean of Jersey, went even further.

“From overinquisitiveness, false sensationalism and prurient curiosity, good Lord, deliver us,” he prayed.

Under the headline “The island need feel no shame”, the Jersey Evening Post accused the British of portraying the island as “some kind of North Korea of the English Channel”.

But the split within island society seems as wide as any differences with the mainland and has revived class rivalries dating deep into the feudal past, far beyond the Nazi occupation of the Channel islands.

On one side is an elite who staff the island’s states, as the parliament is known, under whose watch Jersey has built a tax haven economy. They are personified by Frank Walker, the chief minister.

Walker has spoken of “our absolute horror at the revelations” and promised the authorities will identify and prosecute “anyone who has perpetrated crimes against children, or who has in any way colluded with that abuse”.

But opponents accuse the elite of trying to ignore the lower orders in their obsession to preserve Jersey’s glossy international image of beaches, double cream and a flat-rate income tax of 20p in the pound.

Walker has come off worse in televised encounters with Steve Syvret, the maverick former health minister who last year sparked the police investigation.

Syvret has set himself up as champion of the “outsiders”.

Walker’s cause was not helped when he was caught on television telling Syvret: “You’re trying to shaft Jersey, internationally.” Later last week, Syvret, who trails bundles of documents, plonked himself uninvited beside Walker on the podium at a press conference. The chief minister ploughed on as minders tried unsuccessfully to remove Syvret.

Walker is a former chairman of the Evening Post’s publishers. It was under his chairmanship eight years ago that the paper declined to publish a report into abuse in homes.

Syvret said there had been “decades of the most atrocious and appalling abuse of children of all kinds and the most widespread culture of concealment of it”. He added: “The island is run by an oligarchy. It is anything for a quiet life.”

One senior community figure was prepared to admit to disturbing memories from more than 20 years ago.

Lawrence Turner, the 64-year-old Anglican vicar of St Martin Le Vieux, near the home, said after the child’s remains were found last weekend: “I sat for a long time trying to think if I should or could have done something.” He recalled being told of “untoward” goings-on at the home just after he arrived in the parish in the mid1980s.

The priest described the whispers as “little rumours from one or two people expressing distress”. But one of the abuse stories, although vague, was worse than the other. Turner pondered whether he should tell the police himself but decided against. “I only heard it secondhand and I thought the person would go to authority,” he said.

Jackie Penfold, 63, a former worker at the home who now runs a guesthouse in Fish-bourne, West Sussex, also found old memories resurfacing. “There was one occasion when two young girls had cuts and scratches. One of the houseparents said, ‘Take no notice’. The houseparent came to us later and said they were from an abusive home and had self-harmed themselves. I just believed them, but now I am questioning it.”

Others have lived with their suspicions for years. Roley McMichael, a Jersey resident, said: “I was a schoolboy during the times the alleged abuse and murder took place and the threat from my father if I received a bad school report was that he would send me to Haut de la Garenne. . . Everybody knew it was a nasty place and rumours were rife. . .”

Yet Tony and Morag Jordan of Kirriemuir, Angus, who were on the staff of Haut de la Garenne from 1971-84, said they had found their time there “a rewarding experience in helping disadvantaged children” and “noticed nothing untoward”.

As well as excavating the cellars of the elegant, two-storey Victorian home, police are now searching an area the size of a football pitch behind Haut de la Garenne, which became a youth hostel after its closure in 1986. They are also looking at half a dozen potential burial sites identified as suspicious by locals and former residents. Eddie, a forensic spaniel from South Yorkshire used in the search for Madeleine McCann, has been flown in.

Police are likely to be digging at the home for several more weeks, and forensic tests to date the skull and determine its sex will take another three weeks.
One man, Gordon Wateridge, a 76-year-old former warder at the home, has recently been charged with indecent assault on three young girls between 1969-79. Over the years a number of child abusers have been broken through the surfaceof Jersey life.
In 1935, there was a police search for a man known as the Night Prowler, who was never caught.

In 1971, the island’s most notorious paedophile, Edward Pais-nel, a serial rapist nicknamed Uncle Ted or the Beast, was convicted. He used a disguise of a rubber mask and an old coat with a lapel studded with nails.

Then the community turned on the eccentric Alphonse Le Gasteloise, who was driven into 14-year exile on a reef in the Channel. He was innocent.

The alleged victims of Haut de la Garenne who have come forward include Pamela, a 49-year-old mother of two from St Helier, Jersey’s capital, who says she was abused from the age of 13. She said yesterday she had told asocial worker, whom she named, eight years after the abuse took place – about 1980. No action was taken.

Pamela said: “I used to go up to [the supervisor’s] apartment four times a day because she was giving me Valium. I did tell her about the abuse but she said I was making it all up . . . I was taken to the punishment room and locked up, they pulled clumps of hair out of my head and stripped me naked.”

Pamela recalled the punishment cell for misbehaving children as a small alcove in a wall, which staff were able to shut with a sliding cover.

She characterised what happened as “the most cruel, sadis-tic and evil acts you could think of”. There were reports from others of children being taken from the beds in the night and never being seen again.

Steve, a computer worker from Telford, Shropshire, claimed the cellar was used as a punishment room for children who misbehaved and that it was known as “Baintree”. He has described canes and a device like a pillory kept in the cellar.

Harper said yesterday that police were investigating claims that Steve had been intimidated by a former care worker over the past two days since making his first allegations. He said: “We will not tolerate this and will investigate it and we will treat it as a criminal offence.”

It emerged yesterday that allegations of abuse at Haut de la Garenne were made in a blackmail case at the Royal Court of Jersey in 2004. The abuse was said to have happened when the blackmailer, who was found guilty, was at the home in the 1960s.

The abuse claim, said the judge, was “being investigated and is clearly not incredible”. Police investigations slowly spread into other cases until, last year, they decided there was a pattern of allegations that needed to be looked at more widely.

Secret rooms have been a recurring theme of child abuse scandals on Jersey. The practice of locking children away in solitary did not end with the closure of Haut de la Garenne. As recently as December 2006, a secure room nicknamed “the pits” at an institution named Greenfields is alleged to havebeen used as an isolation cell for new arrivals.

Staff were instructed to keep children in there for 24 hours, but this could be extended: “Should any unwanted behaviour be shown, the 24 hours may be started from the start of compliant behaviour.”

Last year,a solicitor at the Howard League for Penal Reform, based in London, drew up a legal opinion that found the Greenfields regime “appears predicated on a complex system of using isolation and deprivation as a means of control” and suggested it could breach international human rights law.

The Jersey government, which said it was not in a position to comment on the specifics of the Greenfields allegations, hasinvited the league’s inspectors to visit at the end of this month.

Other homes have also been investigated in the current inquiries, including one called La Preference, once run by Paisnel’s par-ents-in-law. Victoria College, whose head of maths was jailed in 1999 for sexual offences, is also thought to have been looked at.

The impression of a reasonably well-run care home system – comparable with that in Britain – that is presented by those responsible for running it, is proving increasingly hard to maintain.

Harper has been no comfort to the establishment as he pursues the police investigation. He has said there is “no evidence of a government cover-up”, butadded that the 40 people he wants to talk to are from “all areas of island life”.
Today Turner will conduct a special mother’s day church service. He now hopes that an exorcism – of human souls as much as a building – can begin to bring the memories out into the open.

He said: “We could get victims there, people who suffered indirectly, and do an elaborate ritual which, whether you believe it or not, looks effective. Bell, book and candle, the lot, could settlea lot of minds. This little lot is so soiled it’s got to be washed in public for everybody’s sake, people not involved, like myself, who just feel guilty about it.”

Additional reporting: Christine Finn, Jersey

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