by TIM HICKS [Book Review]

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Introduction

In October 2015, Nigel Ward ran the following article in the NYE:

• The Paedo-Friendly DPP

In this article, Nigel argued that the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) from 1964 to 1977, Sir Norman Skelhorn KBE QC, protected powerful establishment paedophiles. He based this on the revelations in recently released official files – kept secret for forty years – that in 1977, leading Conservative MP Victor Montagu was charged with two counts of indecently assaulting a boy under 16.

Montagu had admitted “simply romping about with children either with clothes on or not”, but never faced trial, because Skelhorn took the view that:

“The assaults, which are admitted, are not of themselves very serious, and if Mr Montagu is prepared to take the excellent advice given to him by Det Ch Insp Newman and avoid any contact with the boy in the future I do not think that proceedings are called for.”

In 2014, Montagu’s son Robert published a book revealing how he was repeatedly raped by his father, along with details of the ordeals suffered by around twenty other boys at his father’s hands.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) found that “significant leeway was given to Montagu” as a well-known aristocratic landowner, and that “a patronising attitude was shown by the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions’ office towards a working-class victim”.

• Sir Norman Skelhorn ordered that the Bishop of Stepney Trevor Huddleston should not be prosecuted –“for the public good”– when four boys from the East End reported he had sexually assaulted them in 1974. The Daily Mirror reported the Bishop as stating:

“I sat them on my lap, touched their bottoms and pinched them but there is nothing indecent.”

• He also alleged that Sir Norman Skelhorn protected Sir Cyril Smith MP from prosecution over the most horrific cases of abuse over many nears in children’s homes in Rochdale.
• Nigel went on in the article to point out that in 1972, during the period when Sir Norman Skelhorn was DPP, Scarborough Councillor, Mayor and Alderman Peter Jaconelli escaped trial following a recommendation from the DPP that “no action” should be taken in respect of indecent assault charges against him. This left him and his close friend Jimmy Savile free to rape children in Scarborough, with impunity, from then until their respective deaths in 1999 and 2009.

This may explain – but not excuse – why North Yorkshire Police protected Savile and Jaconellli, although many complaints were made against both of them to Scarborough CID.

Had Jaconelli been prosecuted in 1972, it would certainly have unmasked his criminal associate Jimmy Savile.

Savile was a close friend of Sir Cyril Smith MP for forty years and invited him onto his TV programme “Clunk Click”. This may also explain why he was not prosecuted.

“Smile for the Camera: The double life of Cyril Smith”, by Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker

Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker published a biography of Sir Cyril Smith called “Smile for the Camera: The double life of Cyril Smith”, which was widely acclaimed:

“Danczuk revealed how the authorities systematically covered up sickening sexual exploitation of boys by Sir Cyril over decades.” 

[Daily Express]

For his investigative work on child abuse, Danczuk was named ‘Campaigner of the Year’ by the Political Studies Association.

His work was instrumental in the decision of the government to set up the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which accused former leader of the Liberal Democrats Sir David Steel “of an “abdication of responsibility” over the allegations against Smith. Steel subsequently resigned from the Liberal Democrats and as a member of the House of Lords, after admitting that when he was leader, of the Liberal Party – one of the Lib Dems predecessor parties – he had known of the allegations about Smith, but failed to take any action.

Left, Jeremy Thorpe (was protected and got away with attempted murder),

Centre, Cyril Smith (was protected and got away with horrific acts of child abuse)

Right, Sir David Steel (knew what was going on, but did nothing)

I have just finished reading “Smile for the Camera: The double life of Cyril Smith”. It is a good book, well written, but it covers a horrible subject in great detail. The victim’s accounts are graphic.

Interestingly, Danczuk and Baker have been equally caustic about the role of the CPS and of Sir Norman Skelhorn.

They reveal that, on 11^th March 1970, a report was sent to the DPP that was explicit that Smith was a serial child abuser. The DPP recommended no further action, although both Greater Manchester Police and Lancashire Constabulary believed he should be prosecuted.

Skelhorn wrote to Lancashire Police justifying his decision on the basis that:

“The characters of some of these young men would be likely to render their evidence suspect”

 Here, I can do no better than quote Danczuk and Baker on Skelhorn:

“He may as well have said that as long as a high profile local politician decides to abuse boys of lowly social status then there is zero of him ever being prosecuted. It more or less outlined a code of conduct for abuser. Stick to vulnerable people from broken homes and the las w will give you a wide berth.

The injustice contained in these words is as strong now as it was then.

I refuse to believe that insufficient legal tools were available to make a prosecution. It was a colossal error that would compound the injustice felt by victims and allow Cyril to repeat the same pattern of behaviour time after time. Knowl View [a residential home where Smith was a governor and where he horrifically abused children], Elm Guest House and other abominable cases of abuse could and should have been avoided”

Smith and Savile

Serial child sexual abusers who were protected.

Nigel Ward’s Investigative Journalism Vindicated

Nigel did not have access to Danczuk and Baker’s work when he wrote the article in 2015.

However, their comments vindicate the line Nigel took in his 2015 article and when I read them, I was instantly reminded of Nigel’s comments.

Nigel’s work on Skelhorn goes to greater depth than Danczuk and Baker. Whilst Danczuk and Baker were not writing a book on Sir Norman Skelhorn, one cannot help but wonder what they would have written if they had known about the way he protected Montagu, Huddleston, Jaconelli and, by extension, Savile.

“Smile for the Camera. The double life of Cyril Smith” got the Sunday Times Political Book of the Year award for 2014. Good to see that the NYE’s investigative journalism is at the same standard.

Right of reply

If you are mentioned in this article and do not agree with the views expressed in it, or if you wish to correct any factual inaccuracy, please let me know using the letters@nyenquirer.uk email address and your views and a correction will be published if appropriate.

• an “In My View” article by NIGEL WARD, pondering the apparent blind spot of the North Yorkshire Police – historical Child Sexual Abuse (CSA).

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Scarborough

Regular and long-term readers of the North Yorks Enquirer will be aware of the prominent part played by myself and co-contributor Tim HICKS in the exposure of the predatory paedophile and former Scarborough Mayor, Councillor and Alderman, Peter JACONELLI [Con.] and his close association and serial co-offending with Jimmy SAVILE.

Simply by typing those names (individually or together) into the search box at the top right of this page, the whole story can be accessed in reverse chronological order. Our investigations culminated in a grudging acknowledgement by the North Yorkshire Police that our allegations were true. I suspect that we are not forgiven.

Following my FOIA request to the CPS, it finally emerged that lifelong predatory paedophile Peter JACONELLI had been charged in his Mayoral year (1972), but the Director of Public Prosecutions, distinguished Freemason Sir Norman SKELHORN K.B.E., Q.C., chose not to proceed. A review of the following article will serve to place the thrust of this present piece in a historical context:

• PETER JACONELLI And The Paedo-Friendly DPP

Ampleforth

Turning now to recent reports emanating from Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire regarding a series of allegations of sexual abuse at the prestigious school over a period of several decades, most readers will be aware that, beginning on 24th August 2016, Andrew NORFOLK, Chief Investigative Reporter at The Times newspaper (and formerly, long ago, a junior reporter at the Scarborough Evening News), published a series of articles breaking a new twist in the Ampleforth story:

• “Top school hid sex abuse claims”
• “Suicide shattered Ampleforth’s silence over sex abuse claims”
• “New claims emerge of abuse at Ampleforth”

Readers may recall that it was Andrew NORFOLK who broke the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal.

In broad strokes, Andrew NORFOLK is reporting that the sexual abuse of pupils at the College has been a long-concealed but very persistent problem, and that the North Yorkshire Police (NYP) has not covered itself in glory in the pursuit of its investigations. Ding, ding – a familiar ring.

The following report, 27th April 1996, appears to have escaped the attention of the mainstream press:

Back in 2005, when the present (until earlier this week) Abbot of Ampleforth Father Cuthbert MADDEN* (the eponymous MADDEN [* see title] – NOT the similarly-named Thomas HARDY novel) was elected to his first eight year term of office, the College endured a wave of damaging publicity. This Independent article tells the tale:

• “Abuse: ‘To have a monk strip your lower half and beat you was what you expected'”

Bringing things up to date, the Daily Mail published the following article on 1st September 2016:

• “Abbot of Ampleforth who is most senior figure at Britain’s leading Catholic public school is being investigated for ‘sex offences against boys'”

This was followed, the very next day, by this:

• “Did one of our top public schools turn a blind eye to stories of abuse for years?”

All this follows hard on the heels of the resignation, in June 2016, of the College’s first lay headmaster David LAMBON after a tenure of just less than two years. Most unusually, Mr David LAMBON (pictured below), whose reputation is that of a reformer, offered no explanation for his unexpected departure. It is not suggested that Mr LAMBON was in any way associated with CSA at the College.

The Link

On the face of it, any similarity with the SAVILE/JACONELLI saga would appear to extend no further than the questionable degree of diligence exercised by the NYP in its various CSA investigations.

Nevertheless, readers should be forgiven for wondering what other connections between the SAVILE/JACONELLI child abuse offences and those at Ampleforth College are about to emerge, beyond the fact that both SAVILE and JACONELLI were devout Roman Catholics – and Freemasons.

The Abbot

George Haliburton HUME (pictured above) attended Ampleforth College from 1936 to 1941. Thereafter, at the age of eighteen, he entered the novitiate of the Benedictine monastery at Ampleforth Abbey. He studied modern history (St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford), then theology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, before being ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1945, when he adopted the monastic name Basil.

Basil HUME returned to Ampleforth College to teach religious education, history, French and German. He served as Head of the school’s Department of Modern Languages before becoming the Abbot of Ampleforth Abbey in 1963, in which position he remained until, in 1976,  he was appointed Archbishop of Westminster by Pope Paul VI.

1963-1976 was the peak period of the SAVILE/JACONELLI partnership.

The following extract from Basil HUME’s Wikipedia entry fills in some background:

Controversies

Hume was accused of ‘hushing up’ a suspected sexual abuse scandal at Ampleforth College by not calling in the police when he received a complaint from parents in 1975 about Father Piers Grant-Ferris, the son of a Tory peer at Gilling Castle, formerly a prep school for Ampleforth. In 2005, Grant-Ferris admitted 20 incidents of child abuse. This was not an isolated incident and involved other monks and lay members. The Yorkshire Post reported in 2005; “Pupils at a leading Roman Catholic school suffered decades of abuse from at least six paedophiles following a decision by former Abbot Basil Hume not to call in police at the beginning of the scandal.”^[16]

In 1984, Cardinal Hume nominated Jimmy Savile as a member of the Athenaeum, a gentlemen’s club in London’s Pall Mall. Following the posthumous revelation of Savile’s repeated sexual abuse of minors, members of the club have criticised Hume’s nomination of him for causing embarrassment to the club.^[17]

HUME’s nomination of SAVILE to membership of the Athenaeum was seconded by another close confrère of SAVILE, Cardinal Keith O’BRIEN (featured image), who, in March 2015, was stripped of his privileges by the Pope following his exposure as a sexual offender.

Here is what award-winning SAVILE biographer Dan DAVIES (whose ‘In Plain Sight – the Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile’ dedicates a chapter [67] to the investigations carried out by me and Tim HICKS) has to say about SAVILE, HUME and the Athenaeum:

This extract from an 2014 Daily Express report on the Athenaeum is also informative:

“It has also emerged that the members of the Athenaeum were horrified when Jimmy Savile was elected, on the grounds that the tracksuit wearing DJ ‘would not be a natural habitué of a club that has counted Sir Winston Churchill, Lord Palmerston and Lord Curzon as members’. The only reason they didn’t veto him was because he was nominated by Cardinal Basil Hume, the Archbishop of Westminster, and Hume would have had to step down if his nominee was blackballed.”

To suggest that Basil HUME went ‘out on a limb’ for Jimmy SAVILE would be a monumental understatement.

Clearly, they must have been very, very close indeed – (What??? A Benedictine monk and a trashy DJ? A modern languages scholar and an all-in wrestler/marthon runner? A monastic headmaster (with a grave duty of care) and a prime-time cornball TV-presenter?

But we do know that they had at least one ‘interest’ in common – and they had it in common with SAVILE’s closest co-offender, Peter JACONELLI.

Like SAVILE and JACONELLI, HUME was a Freemason, of high degree, and with infinite loyalty to fellow brothers.

Basil HUME died on 17th June 1999, two weeks after receiving the Order of Merit. For a fuller picture of Basil HUME, see the Independent obituary, here.

In the light of the on-going Ampleforth revelations, Basil HUME’s relationship with Jimmy SAVILE merits the closest scrutiny.

And what about any relationship between Basil HUME and Peter JACONELLI?

Are we to believe that that Abbott Basil HUME, Athenaeum patron of one of the two most prolific predatory paedophiles of our times – both of them Catholic, both of them Freemasons, both of them perverts who offended together as well as separately – knew nothing of SAVILE’s co-offender and alleged sexual partner, Peter JACONELLI, the Roman Catholic Freemason? Tell that one to the Marines.

So I would be greatly obliged to anyone who can corroborate a (presently) solitary report that, as Abbot of Ampleforth, it was Basil HUME who received the Sacrament of Penance (confession) from Peter JACONELLI, a frequent caller at the Abbey in the triangle between Scarborough, County Hall (Northallerton) and the ‘meat racks’ of Leeds. The public has a right to know precisely how wide the web of North Yorkshire paedophilia really was, operating freely under the noses of the North Yorkshire Police.

Please contact me, in strictest confidence, by email at: mailto:news@nyenquirer.uk entering the words ‘FAO NIGEL – RE: AMPLEFORTH’, all upper case, in the Subject Line. Thank you.

More about the Sacrament of Penance (Confession)

Readers are left to place the protagonists in the context of articles.

Enjoy!

• an “In My View” article by NIGEL WARD, following up on his recent coverage of the SAVILE/JACONELLI investigation.

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Methodology of a Cover-up

I am grateful to my social-media connections for propelling my recent article “MAYOR FOX: “Sorry . . . NOT Sorry!” (27th October 2015) to the top of my personal ‘most widely shared’ chart. Thanks very much, everyone – and please keep spreading the word.

In fact, comments posted by social-media users have proved, on many occasions in the past, to be extraordinarily helpful in the laborious process of ‘joining the dots’ between the known elements of our investigations. The power of social-media to stimulate my own memory has often been a very positive factor.

Which brings me to an almost-forgotten article in the Telegraph, dated 15th May 2015, reporting on recently released official files which revealed details of leading Conservative MP Victor MONTAGU’s close run-in with the law, in 1972, having been charged with two counts of indecently assaulting a boy under 16.

In 2014, MONTAGU’s son Robert published a book – “Humour of Love” – revealing how he was repeatedly raped by his father, along with details of the ordeal suffered by around twenty other boys. Yet Victor MONTAGU never faced trial.

The files confirmed that Victor MONTAGU admitted “simply romping about with children either with clothes on or not”.

Astonishingly, these files – kept secret for forty years – included a letter from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) which featured the following extraordinary sentence:

“The assaults, which are admitted, are not of themselves very serious, and if Mr Montagu is prepared to take the excellent advice given to him by Det Ch Insp [Jack] Newman and avoid any contact with the boy in the future I do not think that proceedings are called for.”

The DPP in question was Sir Norman SKELHORN KBE QC (1909 – 1988).

What caught my eye was the fact this was in 1972 – the very same year that Scarborough Councillor, Mayor and Alderman Peter JACONELLI escaped trial following a recommendation from the DPP that “no action” should be taken in respect of the indecent assault charges against him.

Incidentally, the Scarborough News coverage of Assistant Chief Constable Paul KENNEDY’s press statement (upon which this SN article was based) has attracted some very interesting comments from members of the public. One of them directed me to the Wikipedia entry for the Director of Public Prosecutions from 1964 to 1977 –  Sir Norman SKELHORN. According to Wikipedia, this man defended the use of torture in North Ireland during ‘the troubles’. In my book, you cannot stand much further to the right than that without moving to a bunker in Pyongyang – or a cell in Abu Ghraib.

But it seems Sir Norman SKELHORN (above) was habitually and reliably soft on paedophiles.

It was Sir Norman SKELHORN who did not prosecute – “for the public good” – when four young lads from the East End reported sexual assaults by the Bishop of Stepney, Trevor HUDDLESTON, in 1974.

The Mirror reported the Bishop as stating:

“I sat them on my lap, touched their ­bottoms and pinched them but there is nothing indecent.”

In addition to Alderman Peter JACONELLI, Victor MONTAGU MP and Bishop of Stepney Trevor HUDDLESTON, I soon encountered a reference to Sir Norman SKELHORN in a BBC report dated 27th November 2012, containing the following confirmation of Sir Norman’s tolerance for paedophiles, especially establishment pillars – this time Sir Cyril SMITH MP:

“Mr Skelhorn wrote to the Chief Constable of Lancashire on 19 March 1970 about Sir Cyril, who died in September 2010.

In it, he stated: ‘I do not consider that if proceedings for indecent assault were to be taken against Smith, there would be a reasonable prospect of conviction.'”

The Telegraph added:

“But despite all the allegations bearing striking similarities, no charges were ever brought after the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) at the time, Sir Norman Skelhorn, decided the victims could not be trusted as they were, he said, of suspect character.”

“Suspect character”? Attaboy, Sir Norman! Kick a man when he’s down. How utterly sickening.

Of course, bullying, intimidating (by “threat or retaliation”) and slurring the character of victims/survivors of paedophilia (and those who expose cover-ups) is a well-practised art by now – witness the treatment handed out to one of only thirty-five victims/survivors of Peter JACONELLI whom the North Yorkshire Police have condescended to deem genuine, Guy WHITING, who has been arrested and beaten whilst in custody, then charged with bogus offences which ultimately had to be abandoned.

All in all, one could soon arrive at the view that, when the CPS released the JACONELLI “no action” statement last week (see my previous article):

“The Crown Prosecution Service was formed in 1986 under the direction of the Director of Public Prosecutions [Sir Norman SKELHORN], consisting of a merger of his old department with the existing police prosecution departments.

Prior to this, police forces were responsible for the bulk of prosecutions, with only the most difficult cases passed to the DPP.”

the word “difficult” could easily be taken to be synonymous with “politically sensitive” – itself a euphemism for “cover-up urgently required” (as applied, for example, to the high-profile suspects in a well-evidenced fraud case that the North Yorkshire Police failed to bring to prosecution not so long ago).

It is interesting, too, that his successor as DPP, Sir ‘Tony’ HEATHERINGTON, within weeks of assuming office, reversed SKELHORN’s decision not to prosecute Liberal MP Jeremy THORPE for the alleged attempted murder of his lover, Norman SCOTT.

I cannot recall Sir Norman SKELHORN bringing any prosecutions against “twelve or fourteen MPs”. Were they really “security risks”? Or is that merely a convenient catch-all phrase within which to conceal a “get-out-of-jail-free card” for establishment paedophiles?

Be that as it may, Sir Norman seems to have had a happy knack for steering high-profile sexual offenders safely away from the Courts.

So Scarborough Police certainly had every reason to believe that, by deeming Mayor Peter JACONELLI a “difficult case”, he could conveniently be referred to the DPP, Sir Norman SKELHORN. At the very least, the prospects were good of saving Peter JACONELLI from richly-deserved disgrace (if not prison), whilst at the same time covering their own positions by passing the buck to a higher rung on the ladder of authority.

As is invariably the case, the victims/survivors were left to deal with their horrific experiences as best they could.

That Sir Norman SKELHORN bears the responsibility for ensuring Victor MONTAGU, Cyril SMITH and Bishop of Stepney Trevor HUDDLESTON escaped trial has been noted before. I believe I am the first to add the name of Peter JACONELLI to that list.

SKELHORN, who ultimately relinquished his post after six MPs called for his resignation in the House of Commons, has one other claim to fame. It was he, also in 1972, who granted gangland “supergrass” Bertie SMALLS lifetime immunity from prosecution – an arrangement that the Law Lords described as “an unholy deal”.

I will be returning to the matter of Police informants’ immunity from prosecution in future articles. For the moment, I constrain myself to referring readers once more to the IPCC report (24/12/14) that featured in my recent piece – this time, Item 59.

One of our sources has spoken of having been directed to Peter JACONELLI as a likely contact whilst asking around in the Scarborough arcades for a suitable ‘fence’ to buy stolen jewellery – the spoils of a burglary he freely admits to having committed. He states that JACONELLI told him to come back in a few days; he (JACONELLI) would make some enquiries. But our source was arrested before he could return to JACONELLI – arrested and duly convicted, sentenced and imprisoned. He is now convinced that it was Peter JACONELLI who ‘snitched’ him to the Scarborough Police. Did Peter JACONELLI enjoy a symbiotic relationship with the Police?

This is all deeply disturbing because it adds yet another twist to the knotty problem of how to convince today’s authorities  that they MUST diligently investigate the decades-long cover-up of SAVILE and JACONELLI and the rest of the Scarborough paedophile-ring, without fear or favour (as we do), and use their powers of prosecution (as we cannot) to bring the cover-up artists to justice – whether it is “difficult” (read “politically sensitive”) or not. We know who to question. And we now know some of the stations where the buck stops en route to its destination.

In my view, certain members of the North Yorkshire Police and Scarborough Borough Council also know where the buck stops – and cannot for much longer avoid doing the right thing. And, again in my opinion, we will soon be hearing a long line of cover-up merchants pleading the Nuremberg Defence – “I was just following orders” – which is simply not acceptable; somebody issued those orders – perhaps Sir Norman SKELHORN – and all those who acted upon them are also culpable.

Nuremberg Principal IV states:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

No-one would deny that a moral choice was possible for all Scarborough officials – Police or Council – who were aware of allegations against Peter JACONELLI during his lifetime. For whatever reasons, they did not do the right thing. Therefore, they stand culpable and MUST be held to account.

In passing, I close with reliable ear-witness testimony of another disgraceful paedophile apologist at Scarborough Borough Council. I am informed by multiple sources that, at last Thursday 23rd October’s specially convened meeting to “bestow” Alderman status ( in some cases, a badge of shame), one of the new Tory Councillors was overheard, in the members’ room, to defend Peter JACONELLI with words very closely to this effect:

“He wasn’t like Savile. He was not a predatory paedophile. He was only handing out money to poor kids for giving him a wank.”

Apparently, it is the view of at least one serving Scarborough Borough Councillor that suborning young boys into homosexual prostitution is perfectly acceptable conduct for a Tory Councillor, Mayor and Alderman.

That incredibly crass remark surely breaches several of the articles of the SBC Councillors’ Code of Conduct; certainly it accords no respect to the victims and it irrefutably risks bringing the Councillor himself, his Council and his party into further disrepute. But one thing is certain; if a Standards Complaint is to be raised against this disgraceful, bottom-of-the-pile paedophile apologist, it will almost certainly not come from a Conservative Councillor. (They are all in it together, remember).

Inexcusable insensitivity on this scale goes way beyond the trivial sanctions available to the Standards Committee (fifteen minutes ‘re-training’ by the SBC Monitoring Officer, Lisa DIXON) and I would hope that the Councillor in question will evince the good grace and courage to issue a credible public apology during the course of his soon-to-be-forthcoming resignation statement. I will willingly submit it to the North Yorks Enquirer for publication.

Why are we waiting?