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The children of the Church of England’s most prolific serial abuser have revealed how their father tore their family apart.
John Smyth groomed and abused more than 100 boys and young men from the 1970s until his death in 2018, a church report found.
Smyth’s son PJ, his youngest victim, recalled his father caning him in the garden shed of their Hampshire home from the age of eight in a two-part Channel 4 documentary, to be aired next week.
Smyth, a barrister who represented Mary Whitehouse, the conservative activist, was the chairman of the Iwerne Trust, which ran evangelical holiday camps for children.
He was accused of attacking boys he had met at the camp in Dorset at his Winchester home during the 1970s and 1980s. His victims reported receiving as many as 800 lashes of the cane, sometimes causing them to bleed.
In the documentary, PJ and his siblings recall the life of torment caused by their father and confront their mother to ask her why she remained loyal to her husband for so long.
Although Smyth was exposed by Channel 4 News in 2017, it wasn’t until four years later that PJ experienced a traumatic flashback and realised he had also been a victim.
The family moved from Hampshire to Africa in 1984, after the Anglican church upheld complaints from his Winchester College victims. Smyth he told his children the move was because he wanted to spread God’s word.
When, years later, Fiona attempted to ask her father why they had moved, he reacted with rage.
The independent Makin review described the former barrister’s abuse as “prolific, brutal and horrific”, and said it had “permanently marked the lives of his victims”.
It found that, from 2013, the most senior figures in the Church of England, including the Justin Welby, then the Archbishop of Canterbury, knew of the allegations of abuse and were guilty of a “distinct lack of curiosity…and a tendency towards minimisation of the matter”. Mr Welby resigned over the scandal.
Source: Our father was the Church of England’s worst serial abuser. He destroyed our family too