Dozens of senior figures in the island’s tight-knit establishment are facing possible police questioning

, 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.


John Rodhouse, 78, director of education

Reg Jeune, 87, the highly respected former president of Jersey’s education committee

home in the parish of St Martin, northeast Jersey

Frank Walker, the chief minister.

Lawrence Turner, the 64-year-old Anglican vicar of St Martin Le VieuxHe recalled being told of “untoward” goings-on at the home just after he arrived in the parish in the mid1980s.

Tony and Morag Jordan of Kirriemuir, Angus, who were on the staff of Haut de la Garenne from 1971-84

Haut de la Garenne, which became a youth hostel after its closure in 1986.

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

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.

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.

A children’s officer who has served on the island since the 1970s called one particularly horrendous abuse claim “complete and utter bunkum”.

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.


Hampshire police announced that they were investigating claims that the Jersey case was linked to abuse at the Children’s Cottage Home in Portsmouth. Twenty-one men and women have told detectives that they suffered physical and sexual abuse at the Children’s Cottage Homes in Cosham, mostly in the 1950s. A ten-month police investigation was closed in 1996 without any charges because 17 of the alleged abusers had died and lawyers decided that there was not enough evidence to prosecute the remaining three.


Andrew Jervis-Dykes, a maths teacher, was jailed for four years in April 1999 after pleading guilty to indecent assault in connection with the offences at Victoria College

Mr Syvret said that two senior members of Jersey’s judiciary were closely involved with the school at the time.

Haut de la Garenne was built in 1867 as the Industrial School for 'young people of the lower classes of society and neglected children'.
It was meant to reduce juvenile delinquency by taking neglected children from their homes and placing them in a boarding school.
According to historians, poor behaviour led to severe punishments, with flogging or solitary confinement reserved for the worst offenders.


After the war, it became a school, an orphanage and then a children's home housing up to 60 boys and girls with special needs, before closing around 20 years ago.

In September last year, just before the police investigation was made public and when attention was focusing on a different children's home scandal on the island, a social worker named William Emslie wrote to a website.

He had been a graduate social worker during the Eighties at a home on Jersey looking after youngsters who had lived at Haut de La Garenne before it closed.

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