How John Smyth’s spouse enabled the Church’s most prolific abuser’s horrific reign of terror, handed bandages to his bloodied victims and even introduced a boy to go to him in tub: GUY ADAMS investigates

When it all fell apart, and John Smyth was finally unmasked in a television documentary as one of the Church of England’s most prolific child abusers, his faithful wife, Anne, had a ring-side seat.

You can see her, smiling in the background, as Channel 4 reporter Cathy Newman sticks a microphone in Smyth’s face and asks: ‘We’re told you beat young men until they bled. Why did you do that?’

It was Tuesday January 3, 2017, and the starting gun on a grotesque scandal that would culminate in the resignation this week of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury.

‘Do you think what you did was Christian?’ Newman asked. ‘Do you have any regrets? Don’t the victims deserve to know why you did it? Why did these young men have to bleed for Jesus?’

Smyth replies: ‘I’m not going to talk about that.’ Anne grips his hand and maintains her serene smile.

The couple were being forced, for the first time, to confront publicly the physical and sexual abuse suffered by more than 100 boys and young men who had come into their orbit via the Church over the previous 45 years.

The true extent of their reign of terror was laid bare only this month, with the publication of an official inquiry by Keith Makin, a former social services chief.

Over 251 pages, the Makin Review describes in forensic detail how Smyth, a famous barrister who once acted for morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, used religious charities and evangelical institutions to befriend young men and then subject them to sickening physical and sexual attacks.

It tells how Smyth’s abuse was repeatedly covered up by senior figures in the Church, allowing it to continue until shortly before his death in October 2017, at the age of 77. ‘Tragically, for his victims,’ Makin concludes, ‘he was never brought to justice.’

There’s no shortage of villains in this tawdry saga, not least in the Church of England, where an array of senior figures are now considering their position.

Yet the person who surely played the most active role in facilitating John Smyth’s depravity is offering neither explanation, nor apology. She is, of course, his wife and lifelong soulmate, Anne.

Now 80, and living in Cape Town, South Africa, Anne Smyth refused to give evidence to the Makin Review. When the Mail visited the family home in the suburb of Bergvliet this week, we were politely told she still doesn’t wish to comment.

Despite the wall of silence, her name crops up endlessly in the report’s grisly pages. ‘Anne Smyth knew of the abuses and assisted with dealing with the physical consequences of them,’ is how Makin sums up her role. He tells how Anne, a Lincolnshire farmer’s daughter, first met John, a charismatic barrister who became the country’s youngest QC, at a Christian house party in Dorset in 1966, when they were in their early 20s.

They married two years later and, over the course of the next decade, would have three daughters and a son, taking up residence in Orchard House, a grand home in the village of Morestead, just outside Winchester.

It was here, under Anne’s watchful eye, that the abuse began.

During the 1970s, John – who like his wife hailed from the conservative wing of the Anglican community – became a key figure in the Iwerne Trust, a charity which ran Christian summer camps in

Dorset for boys from the country’s leading public schools.

He also volunteered to run a ‘Christian Forum’ for boarders at Winchester College. The organisations allowed him to become a sort of father figure to many teenagers. Soon a select few were being invited to attend Sunday lunches at Orchard House.

Over time, John would gradually brainwash young guests into believing they were committing mortal sins. Alongside pride and envy, he had a particular fixation with lust, informing his young protégés that having impure sexual thoughts, or worse, engaging in masturbation, would condemn them to eternal damnation.

Fortunately, Smyth told them, the problem could be solved: they could accompany him to the garden shed, where he’d strip them naked and subject them to punishment beatings that would bring them closer to God. The attacks, carried out with a cane, were brutal and highly sexualised, often continuing until blood trickled down a victim’s leg.

And, shockingly, they took place with the knowledge of Anne, who not only bought into his medieval interpretation of the scriptures, but played a role in covering it up.

After many of the assaults, ‘bandages and other medical supplies to dress wounds were provided by Anne Smyth’, reads the report.

‘Sometimes they were handed to victims as they returned to the house following abuse, and prior to being served tea or Sunday lunch.’

One victim recalled Anne’s brazen complicity in her husband’s violence, as he was handed bandages. ‘I think Anne explained, ‘We’re conscious that this can result in some blood. We don’t want you to have to remain like that, we don’t want to be found out, we don’t want you to have blood on your underpants or your clothes or whatever, so, if you put one of these on each buttock for the next few days, that will prevent blood getting on to your clothes’.’

Another, chronicled in Bleeding For Jesus, a 2021 book about the scandal, recalls the savage beating of a victim named ‘Paul’.

‘Afterwards, Paul lay face down on the bench in shock and agonising pain,’ it reads. ‘Smyth kissed him softly on the neck. Then he massaged Savlon on to his buttocks and carefully wrapped them in a nappy to catch the blood. Together they walked back to the house. Every step was agony.

‘When they got to the kitchen, Anne Smyth was smiling. She handed him a cushion.’

Anne didn’t just help cover up her husband’s vile assaults, she also appears to have been involved in the grooming of his victims.

On one occasion, she told a 16-year-old boy that John wished to see him while he was lying naked in the bath. ‘They have described how they had to go and sit in the bathroom to discuss something with him, and how this felt uncomfortable,’ the report reads.

‘They have described that Anne Smyth was also in the bathroom while this was taking place and that made the event feel legitimate.’

On another occasion, at an Iwerne Trust camp in 1977, a victim was instructed to visit Smyth in his bedroom in the afternoon. ‘He was stark naked with his wife, on a mattress on the floor, and they were asleep,’ he recalled.

‘I was a kid of 16, 17. I walked in and I thought, ‘What the heck’.’ The stunt appears to have been in keeping with John Smyth’s habit of trying to impress adolescent boys by boasting about his and Anne’s ‘very active’ sex life.

‘He would say that this was a reward for waiting to be married before having sex and he wove this into his warnings about masturbation,’ the report states.

In 1981, alterations were even made to the couple’s home to facilitate Smyth’s campaign of abuse. An enlarged shed was built with walls soundproofed using blankets to muffle the cries of victims.

‘The shed was situated out of sight of the house, away from the road, behind a large hedge,’ Makin states. A flag post was installed, with a pennant hoisted whenever John wished not to be disturbed because he was beating children, one victim recalled. The following year a victim attempted suicide while at university, after John contacted him and asked to celebrate his 21st birthday by travelling to Morestead for a special beating.

At this point, the Iwerne Trust instructed a vicar, Mark Ruston, to investigate what had led to the incident. His report sent a shockwave through the organisation, revealing that at least 13 young men had been violently assaulted by Smyth, who ‘conned men into accepting’ the ‘horrific’ beatings.

Five of the victims told Ruston they’d received 12 beatings and about 650 strokes over a three-year period. The other eight said they had each been hit about 14,000 times over several years. One boy told him: ‘I was bleeding for three and a half weeks.’

Ruston concluded: ‘The scale and severity of the practice was horrific. I have seen bruised and scored buttocks, some two and a half months after the beating.’ He stressed that the assaults were ‘technically all criminal offences’.

At this stage, one might have expected the God-fearing Christians who ran the charity to have called the police. But an extraordinary cover-up saw John and Anne write a string of letters (many obtained by Makin) and attend a series of meetings, during which the pair successfully argued that his abuse should remain secret.

In return, they agreed to move to Zimbabwe and start a charity to carry out evangelical work.

Before leaving in 1984, the Smyths were instructed to stop working with children. But no sooner had they arrived in Harare than they began visiting schools.

A British acquaintance from church circles named Jill Kingston visited the couple’s home in 1985. Makin reveals ‘she was disturbed by John Smyth being constantly in a state of near-nakedness and his predilection for spending a great deal of time with young men’.

The Smyths had set up an organisation called Zambezi Ministries, which ran a local version of the old Iwerne Trust camps. Inevitably, they provided the setting for a string of assaults, culminating in the 1992 death of a 16-year-old boy named Guide Nyachuru, who was discovered one morning, naked at the bottom of a swimming pool.

A subsequent report by David Coltart, a human rights lawyer who became a Zimbabwean politician, raised hair-raising allegations about Smyth’s conduct.

The report detailed: ‘Regular beatings with a table tennis bat which were sufficiently painful to make the boys cry and to leave marks,’ as well as ‘lectures from John Smyth on masturbation,’ and ‘John Smyth being naked and taking naked showers with boys’.

There were also instances of ‘enforced ‘skinny dipping’ which included a naked parade from the dormitories to the pool’ and ‘boys banned from wearing underwear’.

Coltart raised concerns about ‘John Smyth sleeping in dormitories with the boys, while other staff (including Anne Smyth) slept in separate quarters’.

A Zimbabwean police investigation ensued and, in 1996, John Smyth was charged with ‘culpable homicide’ in relation to Nyachuru’s death, along with abuse offences against five other boys. However, the former QC convinced Zimbabwe’s Supreme Court to drop the case, on procedural grounds.

By 2001, he and Anne had moved again, to South Africa, living first in Durban and later in Cape Town.

There they moved into a white painted bungalow in Bergvliet, a comfortable suburb south of the city centre, and threw themselves into the evangelical community. John and Anne were soon hosting sleepovers for young men they’d met via the evangelical church.

The abuse continued. According to the Makin Review, several students later ‘complained to Church leaders that John Smyth would shower with them and then stay naked as he discussed masturbation and pornography with them’.

Still nothing was done until 2012, when a historic victim named ‘Graham’ contacted the Church of England to expose Smyth’s abuse.

While senior figures at Lambeth Palace were made aware of his claims, and copies of Mark Ruston’s damning 1982 report were circulated, the whole thing was kept under wraps until 2017, when a whistleblower, frustrated at what they saw as yet another attempted cover-up, contacted Channel 4.

Around this time, Anne and John travelled to the UK to visit their daughter Fiona, who lived in Bristol. They stayed with Jane Auld, a barrister friend who was influential in the evangelical Alpha movement. It was outside her flat that Cathy Newman finally cornered them.

Days later, they returned to Cape Town, frustrating attempts to bring him to justice. John died from a heart attack that August.

After the prolific child abuser’s funeral, his three surviving children Caroline, Fiona and Paul (the eldest, Nicola, died from breast cancer in the 2010s) sent a joint letter to John’s victims, saying that ‘as bearers of the Smyth name’ they were ‘profoundly sorry for all the trauma you have experienced in your lives because of your connection with our dad’.

It continued: ‘Over the last couple of days, we have had some encouraging conversations with our mum. Although she has only just begun to process life without dad, she wholeheartedly supports the sentiments of this letter and our sending of it.’

That was seven years ago, yet, despite the ‘encouraging’ signs of repentance, Anne has issued no public apology.

Whether she can possibly atone for the sins of her past is now, one must assume, for the Lord to decide.