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See No Evil Season 1 Episode 1 (2025)
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00:00I've got some good memories of times with Dad.
00:08He was active and athletic,
00:13was often playing tennis and water skiing,
00:18a well-respected Christian minister.
00:21I would describe him as a brilliant man,
00:23not just in the way he spoke, but he was charming.
00:26He had a big smile and he was compelling.
00:31John Smythe and family were a rather lovely country house,
00:36a Volvo, a yacht,
00:40holidays in Sardinia in the summer,
00:45and skiing in the winter,
00:49and entertaining lord and lady so-and-so.
00:53That's the world that I remember.
00:57I did love my dad as a small child,
01:00but I remember feeling he is an unsafe grown-up.
01:06It's very hard to verbalize, but watching him,
01:09I had this feeling there was something not right about Dad,
01:12something off, off with how he was.
01:17The effect of John Smythe's abuse has been devastating for so many people.
01:30Death, suicide attempts, mental health sections,
01:36and innumerable people needing psychiatric help.
01:40That's nearly 40 years after the abuse took place.
01:47Is there anything that you don't want to talk about?
01:50I won't talk.
01:53I can't talk about the Shed.
01:55We're talking about my dad here.
02:02We are, for the first time,
02:04properly confronting everything my father did.
02:08How on earth did he get away with everything for so long?
02:14Why didn't they take action?
02:20This is a story about hypocrisy, power and control.
02:25There's a Christianity that's life-affirming and courageous,
02:29and there's a Christianity that is pultish, soul-destroying,
02:35fearful and destructive.
02:38And this story contains both of them.
03:05When I was 12, I moved to Winchester College,
03:08one, if not the oldest, public school in England.
03:12Mecteen nova vertute qua sic etor ad astra.
03:18Go to it with fresh courage, young man.
03:21This is the way to the stars.
03:24My father was chairman of the governing body of Winchester,
03:28and he'd been to the college himself, as his father had,
03:31so there was a strong lineage of Morses at Winchester.
03:36But I was a bit different.
03:40I liked, in fact, loved Andy Morse right from the first meeting.
03:47Mark was very funny.
03:50He was obsessed with dogs.
03:52I was very rebellious into alcohol big time.
03:55I think I was probably hard work for the teachers as well.
03:58Like, what do you want, Stibby?
04:00It was like finding a brother to find someone like Mark.
04:03We liked all the same things.
04:05We liked sport, we liked films.
04:07We were particularly excited about Star Wars coming out.
04:10I can't shake it!
04:11Watching Grey, Luke Skywalker,
04:13kicking a football around,
04:15pretending to be Norwich City players.
04:18We were taking our bathtubs out and sailing them down the river,
04:24drive a car around a straw field.
04:27I remember a friend of mine,
04:29who was actually the son of a lord,
04:31saying that he thought that there might be drugs in hamster food.
04:35We smoked it and made ourselves extremely sick.
04:38All totally dangerous stuff.
04:40It was a sort of golden time.
04:43It was a lot of fun.
04:50But the early years,
04:53and in fact all the years,
04:54were tough trying to come to terms with my homesickness.
04:58These are two pictures of me aged,
05:01I think four or five,
05:03a very privileged upbringing,
05:06still living at home,
05:08not being sent away yet.
05:13I was seven years old when I was sent away to boarding school.
05:17I remember chasing my mother as she was trying to leave
05:21and clinging on to her,
05:23desperately asking her not to leave me.
05:34There was a Latin song that you had to sing,
05:37called Domum, Dulci Domum,
05:39which meant home sweet home,
05:41which I always thought was ironic,
05:43to just make life a little bit more homesick.
05:49I never lost that sense of homesickness.
05:52And I was definitely looking for something.
05:55I was beginning to have questions
05:57about what I was going to do in the future.
06:00In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
06:04In the 70s, Christianity became quite popular.
06:11Because it is so vibrant,
06:13and you can feel something there.
06:16The Festival of Light drew something like 25,000
06:20from all over Britain to Tobago Square.
06:22There were a number of talks held at the school,
06:27given by evangelical Christian leaders.
06:30Evangelical Christianity is to do
06:32with the charismatic wing of the church.
06:35I found this very black and white message
06:41that was being preached particularly appealing.
06:44but also the talks.
06:46They were in the evening
06:47and it meant that you got out of homework.
06:49The call was put out,
06:52will you give your life to Jesus?
06:54So I stepped forward with my friends
06:57and I put my hand up.
07:03So I was not a religious guy at all,
07:05but Andy and I went to the Christian Forum together.
07:10Lord, make an instrument of thy peace.
07:15Those meetings were very inspiring
07:18for an orphan boy like me
07:20who was looking for older male role models.
07:24In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
07:27and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.
07:30The first time I saw John Smythe
07:32was at a Christian Forum meeting.
07:34He was the guest's speaker.
07:37But what struck me was that he was younger
07:40than nearly all the other speakers were.
07:43Engaging, very funny, a brilliant mind.
07:49He was this top, top barrister
07:52involved in court cases that made the press
07:56and his knowledge of the Bible seemed to be immense.
08:00There was something seductive about John Smythe,
08:03like a tractor beam.
08:05You felt charmed and privileged
08:08to be of interest to him.
08:10He would stand very close to you,
08:15almost in your face, and look into your eyes.
08:18And he always had this sort of half-smile as well,
08:22so you weren't sure whether he was going to tell a joke.
08:26He was magnetic.
08:30He started to meet with us in very small groups,
08:33talking about the promise of our lives.
08:37John said he saw something in me.
08:42He thought that I might get a job in the law one day,
08:46and it was incredibly flattering.
08:49I felt very special.
08:51I felt loved.
08:57John Smythe became a father figure to me.
09:02I was drawn under his spell.
09:04Predators are good at discerning people who are vulnerable.
09:09It's like a pheromone.
09:10They can sense and pick it up,
09:12and I think he picked it up in me.
09:15I still feel as though I have
09:20and had a personal relationship with him
09:25that endures to this day.
09:28He's still always with me,
09:33not always as a comfort.
09:40He appears in my dreams,
09:44and it is normally the loving John.
09:50Then, of course, there is also the other side of John
09:55that is harder to deal with.
10:03My name's Andrew Greystone.
10:15I have a background in journalism.
10:20Oh, it's cold.
10:22Do you want the chocolate button?
10:25And from time to time,
10:27because I have a Christian faith,
10:29I've been called on by Christian organisations
10:31to help them with their communications.
10:34In the autumn of 2014,
10:36I was called by an organisation called the Titus Trust.
10:40It's a Christian organisation that runs summer camps.
10:44And it's led by members of the Church of England.
10:48And I was asked to go and meet a representative
10:51in a strange, empty office building
10:54above a shop in central London.
10:56They said that a man called Graham had come to them
11:01with a disclosure of historic abuse.
11:05And they were nervous that this person
11:08was perhaps a bit unstable,
11:10and if this man went public,
11:12that it would damage the work of the Kingdom of God.
11:15So they asked me if I would help them.
11:18I took this dossier of information and I read it on the train.
11:26As I turned the pages, I was more and more horrified.
11:33The file contained a report from 1982
11:36that documented not just one allegation of abuse,
11:39but almost 20.
11:41The abuse perpetrated on these young men
11:45was really stomach-churning and life-changing.
11:55I went back to a meeting of the Titus Trust
11:58and I said to them,
11:59you need to get somebody in to investigate it
12:01from top to bottom.
12:03And there was a kind of silence in the room
12:06and the message that I got from them was,
12:08well, we're certainly not going to do that.
12:10That's not what I asked you here at all.
12:14And so they sent me away.
12:17But I was left with this dossier.
12:21Sometimes you just have to think,
12:22what is my role here?
12:25This kind of knocked on the door of my life.
12:31I had to do something about it.
12:36I got a letter from a man.
12:38I didn't know Andrew Greystone.
12:41Explaining he had something
12:43he thought I might be interested in.
12:45So I agreed to meet
12:47and he handed me a file.
12:49I read a few sentences,
12:51thinking this is absolutely jaw-dropping.
12:54Allegations involving huge institutions
12:57at the heart of British society.
12:59This could be something of national importance.
13:09The report involved a man called John Smythe.
13:16I'd never heard of him before,
13:18but from the digging around that we did,
13:20I'd begun to build up a picture of how influential Smythe was.
13:24We discovered that John Smythe came to prominence in the 1970s
13:28as a moral campaigner for Christian values.
13:33What I think is an essential distinction,
13:36if we're to understand this bill at all,
13:38and that is controls which are necessary for the protection
13:42of the more susceptible members of society,
13:45such as our children.
13:46In 1977, Smythe represented Mary Whitehouse
13:51in the prosecution of a magazine called Gay News.
13:55It was a hugely anti-LGBT agenda.
13:59We prayed loud enough
14:01that the Holy Spirit would go into that jury room
14:05and guide aright.
14:07Clearly a man with Old Testament Christian morality.
14:16And the crucial thing for us was that he was still alive.
14:23So we had brought in Tom Stone to try and find the victims.
14:28Without them, we didn't really have a story.
14:31The first step was to contact Graham,
14:34the man who had come forward,
14:37forcing the Titus Trust to hire Andrew Greyston.
14:40Our hope was that he would lead us to other survivors.
14:43Now, by and large, you don't cold-call people about their abuse,
14:48but this is pretty high stakes.
14:50He picks up first time, says his name.
14:54He's very nervous.
14:57He's very jumpy.
14:58But by the end of the phone call,
15:00it becomes pretty clear
15:01he'd been waiting for three decades
15:03for someone to call him about this.
15:11Do you prefer to call yourself a victim or a survivor?
15:15I know this is very contentious.
15:17I remain a victim.
15:18I'm not sure I have or will ever come out the other side of this.
15:23In 2016, I got a phone call from Tom Stone.
15:29I trusted Tom immediately.
15:32And he is the one I chose to...
15:41He's the one I chose to speak to about this first.
15:44Part of my OCD has been keeping stacks of documents related to John Smythe.
16:01This is probably the most chilling.
16:04Smythe picked and chose from texts like this to justify what he...
16:11Oof.
16:12For what he did to us.
16:18What many of us need today is a burning examination by the Holy Spirit,
16:22which may be bitter to the taste.
16:26He has planned for you a personal Calvary,
16:29a personal Pentecost,
16:31where his blessings must be withheld until, like David,
16:34you prostrate yourself on your face before him.
16:38The psychiatrist I've seen has told me that my body to protect myself,
16:49my PTSD has stored much of this somewhere where I can't retrieve it.
16:55I hope it never does come back.
16:57So if I talk quite coldly about this,
17:00that's... that's because...
17:03I don't... I... I... I... I... I...
17:07Sorry.
17:08I don't allow myself to get drawn into the emotion of it.
17:15I went away from that first meeting thinking this is very serious
17:19and this is not another job.
17:21Next, I need to try and find as many contemporaries of Graham
17:28who might be victims.
17:30So I drive to Winchester College
17:32where a lot of the victims were believed to have gone.
17:38Winchester College was built around excelling.
17:42We were told we were special.
17:44Grooms for academic success.
17:47It was almost failure if you didn't get into Oxbridge.
17:50Winchester College has its traditions.
17:54It has its own language called Winchester notions.
17:58Lessons were up to books.
18:00A bicycle was a bogle.
18:03There were probably a thousand separate words.
18:09It's like Harry Potter, it really is.
18:13And I find that it has its own shop.
18:15And in that shop is a book, the Wickhamist Register.
18:22It details the name of every student that's ever been to the school.
18:27The book is really a route map which enabled us to work out
18:30who were the contemporaries of Graham, who was in the same house,
18:34who was the same age.
18:35And through that, we would have a half-decent chance
18:39of identifying who else might have been a victim of John Smythe.
18:44I start calling people, travelling across the country.
18:48And then somebody puts me on to Andy Morse.
18:51And he is like nobody else in this investigation.
19:04I saw a very distinct path being laid out for me by John Smythe.
19:09There was a very strong sense of being guided.
19:15So at the Christian Forum meetings, we were encouraged to sign up
19:18for a place called Ewan Minster, which was a Christian holiday camp
19:25that was run in the Easter and the summer holidays.
19:28I got a postcard from Ewan.
19:33That is Claysmore School where the camps were held.
19:37John sold it as fun and sport and a bit of Jesus.
19:42And in fact, it was quite a lot of Jesus.
19:48We discovered that the Ewan Camps movement was started in the 1930s
19:52by a clergyman called Nash, who was universally called Bash.
19:58So they were sometimes called the Bash Camps.
20:01Bash's idea was to gather young men
20:05from the top 30 public schools in England.
20:10It was highly exclusive, white, English,
20:14and only the wealthiest were admitted.
20:18You know, some people were sound,
20:20which meant they believed all the right things.
20:21If you weren't sound, you might be NQWWW.
20:25Not quite what we want.
20:27It was grossly misogynistic.
20:31There were women known formally as lady helpers, informally as bunnies.
20:36They had a uniform of Laura Ashley blouses and pearls.
20:40They were not allowed to talk to boys
20:43and they were there to do the ironing and the washing up.
20:46We found ourselves investigating what was effectively a cult.
20:49John Smythe was the kingpin at these camps.
20:54He was chair of Ewan itself in the 1970s.
20:58Ewan and John Smythe promoted muscular Christianity.
21:03Women, join us!
21:06The essence of it was the church and culture has become too feminized.
21:12We need men to step up to the plate and be men.
21:16Sports, the primary route for that, along with Christianity, put them together, you've got muscular Christianity.
21:22That's what Ewan Minster sold.
21:26The real purpose of the Ewan camps was to groom these boys how to operate in the highest echelons of British society.
21:36The goal was to place them in politics, in the army, in business and the law and particularly in the Church of England.
21:46So they were deeply proud when Justin Welby, a Ewan man, became Archbishop of Canterbury.
21:56The Archbishop of Canterbury is the head of the Church of England.
22:05Justin Welby is just about the most powerful religious figure in the UK.
22:11The peace of the Lord be always with you.
22:24The more we investigated, the more we realized what an influential character John Smythe was within the Church of England.
22:32He had this pivotal role training up the leaders of the future.
22:37And a lot of the victims we talked to said that they were desperate to please John Smythe.
22:45They were desperate to be invited to Sunday lunch at his house.
22:51I think I was 14 when John Smythe first invited me to his home.
22:58There were circles within circles.
23:03The Orchard House was the inner sanctum.
23:07Every Sunday, he would choose three boys to go back with him.
23:18He used to cram kids into the back of the car, drive slightly too fast,
23:24and it was tucked in a hollow right in the middle of the countryside.
23:27So we're going to Orchard House, which was my childhood home.
23:37That's my bedroom with the window open.
23:40My name is Peter John Jackson Smythe, and I'm the only son of John Jackson Smythe.
23:52My dad would be appalled at me sitting here a few years ago.
24:05I couldn't even think, let alone say, a dishonoring thought or word about my dad without feeling wrecked with guilt.
24:23Dad made it an existential issue dishonoring him.
24:32It was like, if you dishonor me, you are dishonoring God, and you die young.
24:36Being back here is a blend of memories. I have some good memories of playing in the yard, my sisters.
24:46I've also got a bit of a sense of dread in me.
24:56The dark cloud of shame around our family name, it looms very large.
25:01My name's Fiona, and I'm John Smythe's youngest daughter.
25:09We, as his family, understand that what happened in Winchester
25:14is nowhere near the full picture of dad and his abuse and his character
25:18and how that has done so much harm to so many people.
25:23Do you remember Orchard House at all?
25:26I don't know. I mean, bits and pieces.
25:29I remember the garden quite well, actually.
25:32We'd look out of the kitchen window to the slope of the lawn.
25:37Large tree with a rope swing.
25:40Orchard, apple trees, dropping beautiful fruit.
25:44The smell of cut grass.
25:47We had a really typically English garden.
25:49Roses and honeysuckle, lots of colours.
25:55Look at our sweet Carolinas.
25:57Yeah.
25:58There was an indoor swimming pool.
26:01But when I say indoor, it just had a white canvas tent over it.
26:07It was a handy way to make friends.
26:10It was a place of laughter and warmth.
26:12And I remember entertaining these wonderful Winchester College boys.
26:21When you got there, his wife Anne had already cooked up an amazing meal.
26:27Roast chicken, all the trimmings.
26:29It was like manna from heaven, like holy food.
26:33And occasionally John would get out beers.
26:36Sundays were fun days.
26:38A packed dining room table with all these boys, many of whom I looked up to.
26:44John Swine's children were lovely.
26:47Very polite.
26:48Almost alarmingly polite.
26:50So it was a bit like having a small brother and sister.
26:55I would have super powers and I would be able to wrestle these guys three, four times my size to the floor.
27:01We played games in the garden with his children.
27:04It was a break from the drudgery of school.
27:08They were kind to play along.
27:10I remember Andy.
27:12So that's me.
27:15Who's that?
27:16That's Andy Morse.
27:17Oh, that's Andy Morse, yeah.
27:20These guys were clearly my father's favourites.
27:24And they were such nice guys.
27:27It felt very good to be drawn into another family.
27:31It was a kind of home from home.
27:33They were some of the happiest days of my young life.
27:39I trusted him completely.
27:43I didn't just look up to my dad.
27:48I adored him.
27:51He was a force of nature.
27:54But I had, strangely I didn't, I was apprehensive about being alone with him.
28:00I felt unsafe in a way that I couldn't put my finger on back then.
28:04My biggest memory of Orchard House was actually a feeling, which was fear.
28:15I hid a lot.
28:17I just thought I liked making dens, but looking back I was hiding.
28:22I didn't want to be found.
28:24There was a big table on the landing, and Fiona and I used to hide there.
28:30I tried not to be seen or heard by Dad, so that I was never doing anything that might poke the bear.
28:36Not long after my 60th birthday, John Smythe invited myself and a couple of friends into his study at his home.
28:53He said to us, you're sinning, you're continuing to sin.
29:00And he opened his Bible and he turned to the Old Testament, to the second book of Samuel.
29:05And he read this verse, I will be his father and he shall be my son.
29:14When he commits iniquity, I will chasten him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men.
29:25And he looked at the three of us and he said, are you willing to be beaten for your sins?
29:31And I can remember my stomach falling away and turning cold and feeling trapped.
29:41But because he gathered together, us together as a small group, it felt impossible to speak out against what he was suggesting.
29:52And so I went along with what he was saying.
29:55Sometimes boys would visit out to our house and I would say to mum, where's, where's dad?
30:07And she would say, oh, he's praying with a boy up in the shed.
30:12And I would accept that at face value.
30:14I arrived at the house. We pray for about 10 to 20 minutes.
30:30And then we proceed through the house out into the garden.
30:35He put out a white flag in the ground, which is to let his family know not to come beyond the white flag.
30:42And we'd move into his shed.
30:47It smelled of wood and human sweat.
30:52It was a hellhole.
30:54And in the corner were a stack of canes.
30:58He asked me to undress.
31:03And he himself took his top off and just be wearing shorts and flip flops.
31:11And then there was a bench to lean over.
31:16And that was almost the very worst moment, the anticipation of the first stroke.
31:27The physical pain was intense.
31:45I cried out every time I was hit.
31:52I remember gripping the bench as hard as I could as a way of masking the pain of what was going on.
32:09I would call out and I would cry.
32:16He just exhorted me to keep going and to keep taking more.
32:21It became hellishly hot.
32:31And I could feel blood trickling down my legs.
32:35It was like I was in a horror film.
32:38The beating had been much more savage than I had anticipated.
32:49Afterwards, John put his arms around me and told me that he was proud of what I had done.
32:58And here was the complexity that a man who I had grown to love as a father figure had now turned into someone whose intentions I couldn't calculate.
33:14Like you, I could see no sense in that at all.
33:28So I suggested that the words in the home should be added.
33:32Because it seemed to me that you had to provide the authority charged with this task of sifting out the real nasty with some sort of yardstick.
33:40My dad, by all accounts, was a brilliant barrister.
33:49He was in the limelight.
33:51He was well respected.
33:53The youngest Queen's counsel in history.
33:55A huge crowd and a huge cheer.
34:05A wave that we've now become really quite well accustomed to throughout this campaign.
34:10People were drawn to dad and liked listening to him.
34:14There were photos around the house of him with Margaret Thatcher.
34:20He was incredibly articulate, very persuasive, a compelling speaker.
34:28And he had a strong sense of doing God's work.
34:34He would refer to it as the work.
34:36I started to go regularly to John Smyre's house for beatings.
34:45I actually used to write out a list of my sins.
34:50Impure thoughts, three strokes.
34:53If it was masturbation, five to ten strokes.
34:56He was particularly interested in whether I was masturbating.
35:01Are you keeping yourself holy?
35:04This seemed to be an obsession of his.
35:07I was aware that my other close friends were going through regular beatings.
35:13But we didn't talk about it because we were ashamed of them.
35:17Two victims to this day deny involvement and that's shame.
35:27He stressed the importance of secrecy.
35:30That this was between us and God.
35:34But anyway, who was I going to tell?
35:38I couldn't burden my parents with everything.
35:41And I think I felt that John Smyre was more powerful than the police.
35:47Or the school.
35:51Some people say that this was nothing more than corporal punishment.
35:58But the beatings by John Smyre were diabolical.
36:03Extreme to a degree that no one could compare.
36:07We were supposed to be excelling in every area of our life.
36:09So we were supposed to be excelling in the beatings.
36:13All part of the masculine Christianity ethos.
36:22I could not believe the brutality of each stroke.
36:34And he was grunting with each and every blow.
36:37And I honestly thought, I'm going to die.
36:43This is so utterly appalling and excruciatingly painful.
36:50And I realised the only way I could get out of this was by pretending to faint.
36:56So that's what I did.
36:57Like an animal would play dead in order to avoid being killed.
37:02He suddenly realised, OK, enough's enough.
37:06After a typical beating,
37:09John would apply some soothing lotion and grown adult nappies to try and stop the bleeding.
37:19The more I learnt, the more I felt how bizarre and cruel and completely dysfunctional this thing was.
37:35The very worst beating that we know about lasted 12 hours.
37:39And it amounted to something like 800 lashes.
37:45It's unthinkable that one human being should treat another human being in that way.
37:51At the end of a beating,
37:54John would lay down the cane and he would come and he would sort of drape himself over my back.
38:05And he would nuzzle his head deep into my neck and he would sort of kiss me very gently.
38:19Lots of small sort of butterfly type kisses.
38:22And his face was wet with sweat.
38:29And his hands were clammy.
38:35And in my nightmares now,
38:39it's that draping that I sometimes feel and wake up to.
38:52I continue tracking down victims.
38:59I'm invited into some very impressive front rooms.
39:03But these men all share a very dark experience at the hands of John Smythe.
39:09The number of survivors we identified was growing and growing.
39:12As we investigated, we found Smythe was chairman of the Ewan Trust during the late 1970s.
39:25And Justin Welby, who went on to be the Archbishop of Canterbury,
39:31actually attended the camps as a young man in his twenties.
39:35At the same time as John Smythe.
39:36And it starts to beg the question, what exactly did the Archbishop of Canterbury know about John Smythe?
39:50The more people we spoke to, the more we wondered who knew what was happening inside the shed
39:56and who could have stopped him.
39:57Anne Smythe would emerge in little snippets of conversations with the young men.
40:07There were curious details.
40:09She would, for example, put down extra cushions on survivors' chairs that suggested she knew what was going on.
40:16Anne was the first adult that you saw.
40:20She always had the same expression on her face.
40:23One of, sort of, concern and, are you alright?
40:30As strange as it sounds, we would sit down for a family meal.
40:34Anne was there, ready to make me breakfast.
40:37She was behaving very strangely.
40:39She was being very friendly.
40:40Oh, how are you, you know?
40:42Would you like some scrambled eggs?
40:44The conversation would be about normal, everyday things.
40:47But on more than one occasion, I stood up and there was blood on the chair.
40:53And I'd have to point it out to Anne.
40:56Nobody acknowledged that blood on the chair was anything unusual.
41:02One of the questions we were asking ourselves all along was,
41:07what role did John Smythe's wife, Anne, have in this?
41:10Was she complicit?
41:16Or was she another victim?
41:21It's funny to consider mum from an adult perspective.
41:27It would have been interesting to hear from her what was going on in some of these moments.
41:31After a couple of years of being beaten, I moved from Winchester College to Norwich University.
41:44Most of the others were at Cambridge.
41:49And so that was a small escape.
41:51But I soon learned that despite the miles and miles of difference between Norwich and Winchester,
42:01things were going to continue very much as before.
42:06The beatings increased in intensity and in volume.
42:10Smythe built himself a second shed.
42:13A super shed, purpose-made for beatings, which he soundproofed.
42:20And Smythe got to a point where he had complete psychological control over the young people that he had chosen.
42:27John asked me whether I'd be a godparent to his youngest daughter, Fiona.
42:34The christening ceremony was a little bit strange because I was younger than pretty much everyone.
42:44This is my christening.
42:46Because that's one of my godfathers, Andy Morse.
42:50This is an instance of Dad leveraging you for his own ends to draw someone in.
42:57Yeah, exactly. Or keep them close.
42:58And he bestowed on these young godparents that honour.
43:06John Smythe was a manipulator.
43:10So much of what happened to us was about proving you were still part of the team.
43:15You were not disloyal.
43:17What was the reason that you kept going back?
43:21The reason that I kept going back was because I was still sinning
43:26and that I still wanted to be his disciple.
43:34But in January 1982, my mental health was really struggling.
43:39The anxiety was terrible.
43:42It was like a ticking clock, ticking down to the next beating.
43:47And I only really achieved mental calm when I was being beaten, which sounds strange.
43:57But when I was being beaten, I was furthest away from the next time I was going to be beaten.
44:04And I was in an oasis.
44:05But my spirit dried up.
44:20Eventually, I had to tell John that I was struggling.
44:25I assumed his response might be to cancel the beating.
44:32But in fact, it turned out to be the worst beating that he gave me.
44:39And I could feel the anger in his strokes.
44:41I knew I couldn't keep going.
44:46And I say that because for my 21st birthday, John Smythe had told me that I needed a special beating.
44:59And I knew what that entailed.
45:06I was at my most tortured point in my whole life.
45:14I was losing my mind.
45:18And I could see no escape.
45:20I bought a box cutter and multiple bottles of aspirin.
45:35And I took them back to my university room.
45:40And I went to the toilet in my student digs.
45:44And I cut my hair off.
45:51I don't know why, but I did.
45:54And I made a very serious attempt on my life.
46:04And I fell down on the ground and waited to die.
46:12And it was a relief.
46:16It was a relief.
46:20It felt like a release from the world of John Smythe and the beatings.
46:31A call came in to me at Trinity College, and it was Andy's father.
46:45And he told me that Andy was in hospital in Norwich and that he had tried to take his life.
46:51I remember waking up in hospital.
46:57My father and Mark came the next day and sat by my bed.
47:01And I just sat there and sat by my bed.
47:07And I just sat there.
47:09So I think one of the hardest things for me is remembering Andy as he was before he met John Smythe.
47:28Really lovely, kind, vivacious, witty, full of life.
47:38And it was just horrific.
47:43Worse than anything you could imagine.
47:46This is my friend, you know.
47:49And just held his hand.
47:51We couldn't say anything.
47:54We knew what had happened.
47:56We knew why it had happened.
48:02It's like an awful, what the hell moment.
48:08How dare somebody behave like that towards another human being, and especially someone I love.
48:14I felt calm.
48:17What I had done would bring an end to both my beatings, but also the beatings for everyone.
48:28It was the end of it all.
48:31There was no way it could continue after that, because this was like a bridge.
48:37This was like a bridge too far.
48:40There was no way Smythe could survive that.
48:42The powers that be in the UN culture are going to have to do something.
49:01Speaking to some of the victims, we discovered that suicide attempt raised the alarm.
49:07One of the boys went to a Cambridge vicar called Mark Ruston.
49:10He then investigated, he spoke to several of the victims.
49:14Mark Ruston was a UN attender, and he took control.
49:21He told me that what had happened was wrong, and it was over.
49:25Mark Ruston starts putting together accounts of what the boys say that's been happening with John Smythe.
49:30That will become the basis for what's known as the Ruston Report.
49:37And in that report, Ruston referenced 22 victims.
49:41He sent this report to eight of the key leaders of the UN movement.
49:50And that's the very same report that was in the bundle that I was given by the Titus Trust.
49:58Because we discovered that in 1997, Ewan handed over its work to a new trust, the Titus Trust.
50:09Same methodology, same ethos, same camps and same people.
50:13Which feels like rebranding and cutting off links from the past.
50:22Here's a copy of the report.
50:23I was bleeding for three and a half weeks, said one man.
50:28A hundred strokes for masturbation.
50:31Eight young people receiving 14,000 strokes.
50:38It says the severity of the practice was horrific.
50:40It's horrific.
50:41They knew.
50:42These, these UN leaders knew.
50:49In 1982, at Orchard House, there was a mood shift.
50:54My father came to visit me at prep school.
50:57And he lay down on the bed and sobbed and said,
51:01I am sorry for being such a terrible father to you, Pete.
51:05I didn't know what he was talking about.
51:06I remember stroking his head and saying, Dad, you haven't.
51:11You're a wonderful father.
51:13And then there was mum and dad having dramatic conversations behind closed doors.
51:19I remember hearing dad wailing.
51:24So after Mark Ruston has completed his report, there's then a meeting.
51:30Held at a private members club in central London, the Carlton Club.
51:34At that meeting are key figures from the UN network.
51:39Some of whom are also leaders in the Church of England.
51:43They discussed the grotesque, barbaric beatings.
51:48The men have to work out what to do about John Smythe.
51:51I was contacted by one of the leading officers at UN.
51:57He said he'd like to take me out to local Indian restaurant.
52:01We had an entertaining chat.
52:04And towards the end of the meal, he suddenly became quite serious.
52:08And he leant forward and he said to me, Andy, I want you to know that John Smythe will be held to account for what he has done.
52:21We were in the playroom at Orchard House.
52:27And myself, my mum, my dad, my sister.
52:31And dad said I've got something to tell you.
52:34But he said the reputation of UN is sacrosanct.
52:42So let's keep this between ourselves.
52:47And dad said God has called us, God has called us as missionaries.
52:51God has called me as a missionary to Zimbabwe.
52:58I found that understandable, even noble.
53:02As a 12-year-old boy, I was thinking, that sounds fun.
53:06So instead of going to the police, Smythe was encouraged to leave the country.
53:11Leaders within the UN camps and senior members of the church, being in a church that is founded on the whole business of compassion and love,
53:20they thought the right approach was to sweep it all under the carpet.
53:25They covered it up.
53:28And they said we need to protect the work that God is doing through the UN movement.
53:33We need to protect our reputation.
53:36It shows an extraordinary commitment to protecting the institution of the Church of England.
53:43There must have been a concern that to deal with it, to put it all out in the open,
53:48would end up damaging this historic institution that's persisted for hundreds of years.
53:57The church itself is more important, more powerful than any of these victims.
54:06And that's how it's always been.
54:07I assumed that I would at some point be asked by the police to give a testimony of my own experience as a victim.
54:20But that never happened.
54:21I continued going to the UN minister camps as if nothing had happened.
54:26I carried on seeing other victims.
54:30It became our dirty secret that no one talked about.
54:33One of the victims told me that John Smide gathered together all beating paraphernalia and made a giant bonfire.
54:47I think it was destroying the evidence.
54:51It's extraordinary to think back now that this was such a missed opportunity to stop Smythe.
55:01It was quite clear what John Smide was capable of.
55:06Leopards don't change their spots.
55:12You know, he could have been reported to the police, it could have been dealt with.
55:16His victims at that point could have got justice.
55:19But instead, he was allowed to continue for 35 years with fatal consequences.
55:40In Zimbabwe, Smythe started his own camping movement.
55:44And was out of control.
55:49You know, this is one of the darkest memories that I have of my life.
55:54I mean, the victims are calling for your resignation.
55:58I know.
56:00This is my Cathy Newman from Channel 4 News.
56:03Coming face to face with this man, I didn't see any self-doubt.
56:07Why did these young men have to bleed for Jesus?
56:09My mum never stood a chance.
56:13But I've got some questions I'd love to ask her.
56:22Why have you decided to speak for the first time?
56:25I suppose there's a sort of protection.
56:28One's brain or memory blocks things out.
56:35Rather like being anaesthetised.
56:38But, of course, all anaesthetic has to wear off and does wear off.
56:41And does wear off.
56:42And does wear off.
56:43And does wear off.
56:44And one's brain問題 things out of there.
56:47But, I think it appears souvenir.
56:49Let be vast.
56:51But you have to go in here.
56:55I guess you just will never walk through it's more of.
56:57But there are some of the things I do not feel comfortable.
56:59You ask myьer.
57:01I can just tell you.
57:04I think Sky운 try the 1st.
57:08The captain behind you.
57:09Support information for the issues raised
57:32can be found online at channel4.com
57:35And the final part of the investigation into John Smythe is streaming now or watch here
57:42tomorrow night at 9 as See No Evil concludes.
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