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A reader of this blog has sent me the Report of the Home Office Research Unit, June 1974 – when Roy Jenkins was Home Secretary – summarising current and past projects funded by the Home Office Research Unit as far back as the mid 1950s. This Report is certainly an interesting document but there is not the capacity on this blog to write as much as I'd like to about the research summarised. What is very clear from the Report is that for many years, the Home Office Research Unit had been conducting research into children's social services, the psychiatric system, detox units, prisons and remand centres, borstals, approved schools, the Probation Service, the parole system and the practices of the police. Even if those researchers were of mediocre quality – and I imagine that some of them were – they could not have missed the large scale abuse of vulnerable people within the systems that they were researching. Research projects included investigating: who were the clients of prostitutes; why children and young people were attempting suicide or running away from approved schools and borstals; the histories of teenaged girls in Borstals and women in prison; narcotics users in detox units and prisons; and the workings of legislation relating to children, young people and prisoners deemed to be mentally ill. The Home Office Research Unit will have stumbled upon Dafydd and the gang repeatedly. Which might be why some of those being commissioned by the Home Office Research Unit to conduct the research were associates of Dafydd et al.
The Home Office Research Unit was established in 1957 under Macmillan's Home Secretary Rab Butler. After the Children and Young Persons Act 1963, the Unit's responsibilities were extended to matters relating to child care and adoption and extended again in the wake of the Race Relations Act 1968 and the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Universities and academics were invited to apply for grant funding from the Unit.
The Home Office Research Unit acted as a liaison between the Home Office and Social Work Group and the Scottish Home and Health Dept. Throughout many of the years that this Unit was in operation, there were at least two civil servants at the very top of the Home Office who were corrupt and colluding with serious crime – Barbara Kahan and Bing Spear. Kahan was a social worker based in Oxfordshire for much of her life who colluded with the most serious abuse of children throughout her career and was appointed as the Home Office's Deputy Chief Inspector of the Children's Dept in 1970, under Heath's Home Secretary Reginald Maudling. When the remit for childcare moved to the DHSS in 1971, Barbara moved with it and became adviser to the then Secretary of State of the DHSS, Keith Joseph (see post 'Always On The Side Of The Children'). Bing Spear spent years as the mandarin responsible for the supervision of the prescription of Class A drugs in the Home Office's Drugs Branch. Spear seems to have been an addict himself and was undoubtedly facilitating the sale of Class A drugs by Top Doctors like Ann Dally and Dafydd (see post 'Little Things Hitting Each Other'). Bing Spear and Sir Peter Morrison were most conveniently found dead just four days apart in July 1995, as decisions were supposedly being taken by John Major's Gov't as to whether to hold a Public Inquiry into the North Wales Child Abuse Scandal. The decision to hold the Inquiry and to appoint Ronnie Waterhouse as Chair had obviously been taken by then because Ronnie had altered his retirement plans and was on manoeuvres, as was the well-camouflaged paedophiles' friend Professor Eric Sunderland, former VC of UCNW (Bangor University). And of course Dafydd had finally 'retired', but he hadn't, business had simply been re-routed through his charidee CAIS and the North Wales Hospital Denbigh had closed down, except that it hadn't, parts of it were still up and running but no-one was told. Then there had been the recent musical chairs at the very top of the Welsh Office, with Secretaries of State coming and going and paedophiles' friend Lord David Hunt just taking over for a few days whilst all the crime was concealed as best as it could be.
Some of the work commissioned by the Unit was conducted by people who were already big names, such as the now discredited Prof H.J. Eysenck and his wife Sybil of the Institute of Psychiatry, who conducted research on the 'personality of offenders', 1971-74. Dafydd, Tony Francis, Professor Bob Woods and many more passed through the Institute of Psychiatry during their 'training'. Eysenck was there for years, Dafydd et al will have known him even if they didn't work with his team. Many people named in the Home Office Research Unit's June 1974 Report have disappeared without trace, some became well-known but are now names from a previous era, whereas a few are still highly influential today or have only relatively recently died.
This Report exemplifies why there are such problems with the care and treatment of vulnerable people, including those who end up in the criminal justice system. If one takes the time to read some of the other research published by some of those named in this Report, it comprises some of the most notorious 'research' conducted during the latter half of the 20th century, for example the experiments on 'neurotics' with sodium amytal. Such experiments at Aston Hall Hospital were a smokescreen for the most serious abuse of children by the Top Doctor who ran that institution. It was an Aston Hall survivor who sent me the Report – they have also told me that the report of the police investigation into Aston Hall is due to be published later this month. The people who abused children, patients and prisoners in the name of this lame, poor quality research trained the generation of researchers and practitioners who are just retiring now ie. those who were responsible for educating and training today's researchers and practitioners.
The more critically minded students were able to see through the terrible practices of their mentors, but a frighteningly high proportion of those students were not critically minded and were taught laughable theory and inducted into very bad practice.
This was a problem in the School of Psychology at UCNW. Professor Fergus Lowe, who led the regime there for decades, was known to lie, cheat and plagiarise. Some psychologists walked away from Fungus and Bangor because of this, but a great many didn't, they learned – or didn't learn – at the knee of Fungus. Thus this 'world leading department' contained more than a few researchers who did not adhere to basic protocol. The School of Psychology used to recruit a lot of people to participate in the PhD students' experiments and I and two friends of mine volunteered for this in about 2005. The students didn't know that two of us held postgraduate qualifications in science subjects ourselves and they responded to us as they did to other participants. They were rude, arrogant and patronising while we watched them make elementary mistakes. Midway through one trial which involved me hitting a computer key in response to images flashing on the screen in front of me, the keyboard provided for the participants was changed. The substitute keyboard was of a completely different design and it was a design that I had not seen before. As I grappled with the new keyboard, the PhD student looked at me contemptuously and commented that I probably wasn't intelligent enough to participate in this trial. I explained to him that I had been given a different keyboard. He stated that didn't matter. Yes it did you idiot, it is called 'alerting the variables during the course of the trial' and it is something that one never does. I demanded the return of the original keyboard and after much aggro it arrived. I completed the experiment while Mr Fuckwit looked on in amazement.
My two friends who participated in trials with Fungus's minions had similar experiences, but with added extras, having taken part in many more trials than I did. They noted serious breaches of ethics as well as flaws in methodology. I knew these friends from my days in Bethesda, when the Top Docs and paedophiles' friends had me arrested constantly and tried to set fire to my house. They had lived in the same village as me and witnessed what was going on. One of them died some years ago. He had a long-standing heart condition with which he had lived for many years, which was known to the GPs at Bethesda surgery. He had a non-fatal heart attack at home one evening and his wife rang the GP on call, Dr Nicky Heinersdorff. Heinersdorff refused to attend her patient's home, although Nicky Heinersdorff lived just up on the hill behind Rachub, about half a mile away from the house of the man who had the heart attack. His wife had to ring an ambulance for help. By the time that the ambulance arrived, my friend was unconscious. He died in hospital a couple of weeks later without ever regaining consciousness. Heinersdorff's negligence was the talk of Bethesda but there was no investigation.
This man's death was yet another death of someone who knew about the paedophile gang and what it was doing to victims, who also knew some of what was going on in the School of Psychology under Fungus and who many years ago had been a student of Prof Greig-Smith, the botanist at UCNW who worked with the spouses of some of the paedophile gang and who knew Prof Edred Henry Corner, the botanist who was the uncle of Douglas Hurd. Hurd was Home Secretary, 1985-89 and colluded with the crimes of Dafydd et al (see post 'Additional Security Measures').
It really is quite striking as to who pegs out when a Top Doctor refuses to do their job.
I have mentioned in previous posts that when I was an undergrad, a lot of my friends were postgrad students at UCNW in zoology or plant biology. I was friends with a number of students on the MSc Ecology degree at Bangor, which was at the time considered the leading course of its kind. Prof Greig-Smith led the course and even the keenest and most able students complained bitterly about Greig-Smith's deep unpleasantness and the lack of student support. One such student was an Oxford zoology graduate called Adrian Barnett. Adrian had been a member of the Exploration Society at Oxford and had done the David Livingstone bit and had hacked through jungles. During the course of his adventures, Adrian had contracted malaria which is of course recurring. Adrian would be spotted shaking and sweating around the University and in lectures and would be cheerfully ignored by the staff, while the students said to each other 'oh it's Adrian's malaria again'.
Adrian knew my friend Anne who was killed by the paedophiles' friends in spring 1986 and I think that Adrian knew what was happening to me at the hands of the Top Doctors as well.
Adrian didn't end up with an MSc from Greig-Smith, he was given a Post-Grad Diploma instead. I can't remember whether Adrian was just given the booby prize or whether he opted for it by leaving the course early. There was such dissatisfaction with Greig-Smith that students did talk of leaving without hanging around for their MSc. Adrian later went to Surrey University in Roehampton to do a PhD in Primatology, but he didn't get that either.
Not that any of this has held Adrian back. He has spent many years exploring Central and South America, including the Andes and the Amazon, as well as West Africa. Adrian now styles himself as a rainforest ecologist and works at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonia.
Adrian's career highlights include:
Research Associate, Department of Anthropology, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, California, USA: Public Lecturer: Los Angeles, London and Philadelphia zoos; Royal Geographical Society; British Museum of Natural History; Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities, Universities of California Berkeley and Pennsylvania and others; Senior Research Officer, Friends of the Earth England, Tropical Rainforest Campaign, 1991-93; Environmental Journalist, 1986-present: BBC Radio 4, 5 and BBC World Service Radio (Over 600 appearances and presentations.) Children's educational radio: presenter of 'Animal Talk' and 2 years as resident scientist on the 'Mark Curry Morning Show'. 'BBC Wildlife' magazine, 'Earth' magazine, 'The Guardian', 'The Times', 'New Scientist' magazine. Royal Geographical Society-Shell UK Rainforest Education Pack, Maraca Rainforest Project. Partner, Akodon Ecological Consulting, 1996-present. Staff, Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, Education Department, 1998-99. Staff, The Franklin Institute Science Museum, 1998-99. Resident Faculty, International Honors Program in Global Ecology, 1992-96. Expedition team leader, 1999, for the Wildlife Conservation Society mammal survey.
Scientific societies: Fellow, Royal Geographical Society. Scientific Fellow, Zoological Society of London. Member, American Society of Mammalogists; American Society of Physical Anthropologists; Neotropical Bird Club; Primate Society of Great Britain.
Adrian's success is certainly impressive when one considers how many degrees that he failed to complete and how sought after opportunities in ecology in exotic places are. Zoologists and botanists of Adrian's generation with career-orientated parents were very used to receiving grief from their mums and dads about their terrible prospects if they insisted on wasting their talents studying flora and fauna.
Jobs with the BBC as naturalists are damn near impossible to bag. David Attenborough landed one, but then his dad was Principal of University College Leicester, an institution which concealed a VIP paedophile ring (see post 'Gwlad y Menig Gwynion') and of course Terry Nutkins and Chris Packham landed such jobs, although I don't know how, particularly as Chris Packham keeps telling everyone that he was seriously dysfunctional and autistic. Bill Oddie of course succeeded, the Bill Oddie who was part of the Footlights tribe, along with Graham Chapman, a Top Doctor who molested young boys and was a friend of one of those who gave thousands of quid to people in Somerset who knew what was happening to me in north Wales (see post 'Upper Class Twit Of The Year – Shooting Themselves') and of course Jonathan Miller, a Top Doctor who was the son of a Top Doctor, who knew damn well what Dafydd et al were up to (see post 'The International Language Of Screaming'). Jonathan's son William worked at the BBC with my friend, when a gangster went after my friend, before the BBC forced my friend out of his job (see post 'The Turn Of The Screw').
So when Adrian's CV arrived on the desk of Jimmy Savile's employer and of course the employer of Esther, who did not reply when I wrote to her and told her of Dafydd's abuses in the late 1980s, what outstanding features did Adrian's CV have out of the hundreds that the BBC would have received? Er – UCNW, Ecology, 1986 perhaps?? AAAARGGGH – we've either got to kill him or give him a job…
Mark Curry used to present 'Blue Peter' and later in his career he starred in the TV series 'Doctors'. I do hope that Val, John and Pete weren't linked to Dafydd as well. I wasn't one of these people who believed that my childhood had been stolen when Savile was unmasked as a sex offender, because I didn't waste time with 'Jim'll Fix It', I hated the weird old creep and years later, after falling into the clutches of Dafydd and the paedophiles, I knew that there was no innocent explanation when Savile was appointed manager of Broadmoor particularly as I had heard that Savile was a child abuser even if no-one at the BBC had. However I did like Val, John and Pete and of course Shep and the other pets and it would be a great disappointment if it were to become known they they too hobnobbed with a gang of paedophiles. If anyone has info that they did, please let me know and Brown and I will reconstruct the tale in the style of that popular 'Blue Peter' feature 'John Nettleton Tells The Story'. It'll make a change from The Life Of Mozart which was what John Nettleton was usually narrating.
To return to the June 1974 Home Office Research Unit Report. Many people working for the Home Office Research Unit, either directly as staff of the Unit or as researchers in universities who had received funding from the Unit, will have known about Jimmy Savile as well as Dafydd and the gang. These researchers were working with the group who were targeted by sex offenders – young people deemed to be troublesome. They could not have failed to have noticed what had happened and what was happening to some of their research participants.
The Director of the Home Office Research Unit, 1972-83, was John Croft. Croft was in post throughout the incumbencies of Home Secretaries Robert Carr (July 1972-March 1974); Roy Jenkins, (March 1974-Sept 1976); Merlyn Rees (Sept 1976-May 1979); Willie Whitelaw (May 1979-June 1983). Croft's tenure may also have covered the last few months of Reginald Maudling's time as Home Secretary and the first few months of Leon Brittan's incumbency.
Throughout this time the Home Office was riddled with corruption. A whole series of high profile miscarriages of justice occurred, which took years to be remedied as a result of the Home Office's flat refusal to admit the degree of wrongdoing involved. Dafydd et al did precisely what they wanted in north Wales and teenagers from children's homes in north Wales as well as psych patients died at Risley Remand Centre without investigations taking place (see post 'Include Me Out').
For decades, Bryn Estyn was an approved school run by directly by the Home Office and I had thought that was the situation until Bryn Estyn became a community children's home in Nov 1973 and was transferred to the management of Clwyd County Council. However, I have now found information from the Home Office stating that the running of approved schools was transferred from the Home Office to the DHSS in Jan 1971. Thus Bryn Estyn was managed by the DHSS from Jan 1971 until Oct 1973. So that's how Dafydd and Lucille came to be ruling the roost there. The abuse of boys in Bryn Estyn was endemic throughout the various different regimes, but it was when the DHSS were responsible for the institution when one Head was forced out after only a short time in post and when his successor was killed in a car crash, along with his wife and young son – and the Deputy Head. That car crash provided the opportunity for Matt Arnold and Peter Howarth to take up positions at Bryn Estyn in 1973 and it was then that the place turned into basically a brothel staffed by children.
The Secretary of State for the DHSS June 1970-March 1974 was Sir Keith Joseph. In 1967 Harold Bennett who had been Head of Bryn Estyn for 26 years retired. David Ursell succeeded him. On 15 March 1971 – two months after the DHSS had assumed responsibility for Bryn Estyn – an inquiry was held into a complaint against Ursell concerning his methods of instilling discipline. In 1972 David Ursell was suspended as Head concerning complaints regarding his methods of discipline. Peter Burton was appointed Head of Bryn Estyn. In March 1973, Peter Burton and his Deputy were killed. In May 1973, Matt Arnold took over as Head and in Nov 1973, Arnold appointed his former colleague from Axwell Park Approved School in Gateshead to a position at Bryn Estyn.
Barbara Kahan was Keith Joseph's adviser throughout these events. In my previous post 'A Local Boy Made Good?', I explained how when we were undergrads, Brown and I wrote to Keith Joseph in his capacity as Secretary of State for Education regarding student finance. We wrote separately, yet Joseph sent one – rather unpleasant – reply to both of us, knew that our both of our home addresses were near Bridgwater and seemed to know that we were friends. I have mentioned in previous posts how I have been given evidence that Brown and me were under surveillance by the security services, before I encountered Dafydd and the paedophiles, from my earliest days at UCNW.
It was Keith Joseph who, with Thatch, set up the Centre for Policy Studies.
Bryn Estyn was located in Wales, so of course the Welsh Office would have been the direct layer of management, below the ultimate masters at Westminster. Peter Thomas was Secretary of State for Wales while the events at Bryn Estyn concerning Headmasters were occurring. Thomas was also Chairman of the Tory Party for some of that time. Peter Thomas's father was a solicitor from Llanrwst.
Peter Higson's family are from Llanwrst. Higson was a clinical psychologist at the North Wales Hospital Denbigh, then the manager of Denbigh, then a regional manager for the mental health services, then the Chief Executive of HIW and now Higson is the Chairman of the Betsi. Higson presides over patient harm and death wherever he is. Higson's sister Dr Ruth Hussey is the former Chief Medical Officer of Wales.
Peter Thomas became a barrister and was a member of Middle Temple, as was Ronnie Waterhouse. Thomas and Waterhouse both worked on the corrupt Chester and Wales Circuit. Thomas was Deputy Chairman of the Cheshire Quarter Sessions, 1966-70 and Denbighshire Quarter Sessions, 1968-70. Thomas was the Tory MP for Conwy, 1951-66 and for Hendon South 1970-87. He was Secretary of State for Wales throughout Ted Heath's time as PM. For more info re Peter Thomas, see post 'The Cradle Of Filth'.
The DHSS and the Welsh Office weren't the only people helping Dafydd. The police and magistrates did as much as they could to assist him and the paedophiles, rather than their victims.
John Croft is an Honorary member of the British Criminological Society and on their website he explains that from approx 1953, he was a member of the forerunner of that Society, the Scientific Group for the Discussion of Delinquency Problems. Croft became a member of the British Criminological Society in approx 1961.
In 2015 Croft wrote a piece for the website of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies regarding the problems of bridging the gap between research and policy. Croft mentions that when he was Director of the Home Office Research Unit, there was political resistance to acknowledging the bias against ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system. This is true, but at least Croft and others were permitted to voice their concerns regarding this matter. The serious widespread abuse of people in children's homes, approved schools, borstals, prisons and long stay hospitals was not even acknowledged by people like Croft. Peter Morrison and his mates dropping into Bryn Estyn to have sex with the kids? Never even got a mention. Dafydd preparing young people for the sex industry in his 'personality disorders unit' in the North Wales Hospital (see post 'Include Me Out')? I don't remember seeing any references to that, not even in the most radical of publications. I'd never have known myself if I hadn't have heard all about it from Mary Wynch and if Dafydd hadn't have been trying to manoeuvre me into that unit himself.
Even films like 'Scum' and 'Scrubbers' which were considered to be frighteningly frank regarding life in institutions for troubled young people didn't show staff abusing inmates, they only portrayed volatile, unhappy inmates abusing each other. The 1994 film 'Sin Bin' about life in a secure psychiatric hospital was very much more realistic in that it made evident the extreme brutality towards the patients and staff whistleblowers on the part of the Angels, but even 'Sin Bin' couldn't admit that the Top Doctors were facilitating such abuse. Top Docs and clinical psychologists were instead portrayed as naive idiots with no understanding of the realities of dealing with difficult dangerous patients. Sadistic Top Docs shagging the patients themselves? No sign of them.
Croft mentioned on the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies website that individual pieces of research rarely led to a direct change in policy, but they can influence the climate of opinion among policy makers as well as practice. Indeed Croft and his colleagues' main achievement in their endless dishonest research was to convince politicians that places like Bryn Estyn were the proverbial holiday camps for violent terrifying young criminals, rather than repositories for youngsters with multiple vulnerabilities who were being beaten and sexually assaulted by gangs of men who either worked in those institutions or were mates with those who did. Thus the spectacle of Willie Whitelaw wobbling away banging on about short sharp shocks for young thugs when he became Home Secretary. Had Croft et al ever told the truth about what was happening in approved schools and borstals and the sort of young people who were ending up in them, no-one would have been able to claim that hardened teenaged criminals were 'getting away with it' in the face of daft pale pink Guardian reading social workers and criminologists.
As Director of the Unit, John Croft inherited about 50 research workers and approx 10 support staff. Before he retired in 1983, Croft was proud that he had managed to get the Unit located in the main Home Office building at Queen Anne's Gate. So the bent researchers were sitting alongside the bent civil servants and their Ministers then. Croft was obviously following the model of the Welsh Office – all the crooks under the same roof.
The Home Office Research Unit under Croft had a Scottish arm, with a Senior Research Officer based in Edinburgh, P.J. Didcott and also had teams based in Manchester and Edinburgh. At that time, Dafydd's mate Dr Bob Hobson had just left the Maudsley and had established an outpost of his empire at Manchester University (see post 'The Mentor'). Dr Tony Francis was based at Manchester with Hobson, Ian Brockington et al in the 1970s, before he joined Dafydd and the gang in north Wales. Once Francis bid Manchester a fond farewell, Ian Brockington was given a Chair at Birmingham University's Dept of Psychiatry, alongside Professor Robert Bluglass (see post 'Ian Brockington's Mischief'), Bluglass being Dafydd's mate and umbrella (see post 'Enter Professor Robert Bluglass CBE').
It was John Croft's Unit which was responsible for the launch of the British Crime Survey as well as the 1977 Review of the studies of screen violence and film censorship by Stephen Brody, a Principal Research Officer at the Unit. Brody's Review was produced when paedophiles' friend Merlyn Rees was Home Secretary and John Allen in north Wales was busy with his highly profitable side line in child porn starring kids in care.
There's a few familiar names in Brody's references, including Stan Cohen, Laurie Taylor and R.D. Hare. Laurie Taylor must have come across branches of the Westminster Paedophile Ring, he is yet another person who, with his CV, could not have missed it (see post 'My Arse – It's Tatifilarious'). Laurie's mate Prof Dick Hobbs's specialism is in white collar and organised crime; Dick was a friend of Lord K.O. Morgan's late wife Jane. Lord Ken was VC of Aberystwyth University, 1989-95 and has spent his career surrounded by paedophiles' friends, whereas Jane was a criminologist who grew up in Wrexham who's specialism was the child victims of crime (see post 'A Bit More Paleontology'). Laurie's son Matthew is Blair's former adviser.
R.D. Hare is the man responsible for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which enabled Dafydd and his ilk to spend twenty minutes failing to establish any rapport with someone whom they had unlawfully imprisoned and then by ticking a few simplistic ridiculous categories hey presto, creating a Dangerous Psychiatric Patient. Get Robert Bluglass on the blower please, a 'second opinion' is needed, then it's off to Broadmoor because this particular witness has made a note of a few of the names of those involved in breaking the law on their journey here in the middle of the night. Hare went into business on a grand scale after he devised that Checklist, he started holding weekend courses for a few hundred quid – he held a few in Wales – allowing a variety of 'professionals' ie. social workers, Angels, Top Docs, clin psychs and other sundry paedophiles' friends to acquire 'training' in diagnosing psychopaths. One journalist who got wind that something worrying was going on signed up for one of Hare's courses and wrote a witty expose of how he was now qualified to give people the psychopath test.
It was good of that journo to expose the con, but he might be surprised to know that a great deal of 'training' in the field of mental health is just as farcical. The 'therapist' who one sees is very likely to be an Angel who has 'trained' in CBT or another 'talking treatment' over four weekends. The Mindfulness practitioner may have had just as little 'training' and they didn't need any qualifications to get on the course – life experience is just as important! The only qualification that is required is a few hundred quid, Prof Mark Williams has always been quite strict about that. Oh and they don't accept nutters either. Hergest patient? No, you're not coming on the training course, it's 'not suitable' for Hergest patients, as Mark's colleague Judith Soulsby will confirm (see post 'The Biggest Expert Of The Lot').
I have yet to meet someone who has failed their course in talking treatments or Mindfulness.
Other names which made an appearance in Stephen Brody's Review were those of Leicester University academics Prof Jim Halloran and Paul Hartmann, who were those responsible for pushing the boat out in an attempt to prevent Brown from completing his PhD (see post 'Life In Cold Blood'). Halloran and Hartmann worked at Leicester University during the years when numerous people in that institution concealed the Leicestershire Child Abuse Scandal, which involved Frank Beck and Greville Janner (see post 'Gwlad y Menig Gwynion').
The 1974 Home Office Research Unit Report names many people as having conducted research for the Unit, so I'll just draw attention to a few here. I've mentioned that the Eysencks received dosh to carry out work, but two others from the Institute of Psychiatry whose expertise was called upon were Professor T.C.N. Gibbens and Dr J.C. Gunn. Gibbens and Gunn were funded to conduct research on mentally ill people in prison, 1970-75. Top Doctor John Gunn became a very big name in terms of being a friend of Dafydd and the paedophiles and I blogged about him in my post 'Security, Security'.
Professor Trevor Gibbens was a forensic psychiatrist who died in 1983. Gibbens was the son of a civil servant. Two of his brothers became Top Doctors, but medicine was not Trevor's first choice as a profession. He was 'steered' in that direction by 'the persuasive powers of Edward Glover and Sir Cyril Burt' after Gibbens began a degree in history at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. I have not found out why Glover and Burt were so convinced that medicine could not do without Gibbens, but after Glover and Burt twisted Gibbens's arm, he switched to medicine and subsequently did his clinical training at St Thomas's Hospital.
Edward Glover was a Top Doctor and psychoanalyst who was close to Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones who knew many of the paedophiles' friends in north Wales and in Plaid, include Gwynne the lobotomist (see post 'Feet In Chains'). Glover was co-founder of the Psychopathic Clinic (renamed the Portman Clinic in 1937) and the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency and co-founder of the British Society of Criminology aka the British Criminological Society.
Cyril Burt was the educational psychologist and geneticist who in the 1970s was accused of research fraud regarding his studies of the hereditary nature of intelligence using twins. Burt was suspected of having made up data and even the identities of the researchers who allegedly carried out the research. Burt's name has been mud for years and he is viewed as being doubly unsavoury because of his involvement with eugenics and the use of his data to support racial theories of intelligence. However having read quite a lot about Burt's contemporaries, it is clear that Burt was not the only person making up data, if indeed that is what he did (the matter was never resolved) and a belief in the benefits of eugenics was common throughout much of the 20th century among Top Doctors, scientists and many others. I learned about Burt's alleged research fraud when I was 17 from a Guardian reading biology teacher who thought that Burt should be burnt at the stake, but a more salient question for me now is why was Burt exposed and his reputation ruined when so many others did rather worse? Very few of these people were kind, compassionate old buffers who wanted to Help The Poor; they were usually privileged, autocratic, arrogant, unpleasant people who saw themselves as very much more superior than the plebs upon whom they literally experimented. Their towering reputations are entirely based on the medals and prizes that they awarded each other and the obituaries written by their friends which stressed their genius.
At the outbreak of war in 1939 Trevor Gibbens was at the Maudsley, but as soon as it became possible, he was commissioned in the RAMC. Gibbens was posted abroad with the British Expeditionary Force, but was taken prisoner. He was directed to a prisoner of war camp where his job was to look after Russian prisoners. Gibbens and a friend attempted to escape but were caught. Gibbens was kept in solitary confinement for six weeks and was later transferred to a British POW hospital.
The website of the Royal College of Physicians tells us that 'there can be no doubt that his experiences as a prisoner of war, and as an escapee, had a profound influence on him and were in no small measure responsible…for the deep, and lifelong sympathy he felt for the underdog. It was in fact the notes he kept of his clinical experiences in the POW hospital, where he had to cope as best he could with prison psychoses, that were to serve later as the basis of his MD thesis.'
OK, so Gibbens – who was one of those who held a senior position at the Maudsley when Dafydd 'trained' there, was also someone who concealed the crimes of Dafydd and who conducted dodgy research for the corrupt Home Office – was of course fully in sympathy with those on the streets and was such a whizz academically that notes compiled in a POW camp concerning the poor buggers who disintegrated under those conditions later became an MD thesis. I suspect that thesis was not particularly impressive.
After demobilisation, Gibbens was appointed as registrar at Hammersmith Hospital, where he joined the fraudsters who would do anything at all to make a name for themselves and who were given Chairs after making substantial donations to the hospital (see post 'Interesting Facts'). There were strong links between Hammersmith Hospital/Royal Postgraduate Medical School and Top Docs in north Wales.
In 1946 Gibbens resumed his training at the Maudsley. In 1948 he was awarded a Nuffield travelling fellowship which allowed him to visit forensic institutions and prisons in the USA. On his return, he was appointed senior lecturer in forensic psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry located at the Maudsley. In 1967 Gibbens was appointed to the Chair of Forensic Psychiatry at the Institute. He retired in 1978 and was later appointed Emeritus Professor.
Trevor Gibbens's 'major research projects' included surveys of borstal lads, of cruel parents, of the clients of prostitutes and a study of shoplifting. Gibbens's colleagues were running paedophile and prostitution rings and removing kids from 'cruel parents' in order to traffick them into sex work. Furthermore they were fitting up anyone who complained for criminal offences. When I have time I will read Gibbens's research, I imagine that it will be quite something.
Gibbens just kept on giving. He was a member of the Streatfield Committee in 1958 and a member of the Royal Commission on Penal Reform, 1964-66. In 1967 Gibbens served as President both of the British Academy of Forensic Sciences and of the International Society of Criminology. He was a member of the Parole Board, 1972-75. He acted as adviser to the World Health Organization, the Probation and After-Care Advisory Board and to the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency. Gibbens was Vice-Chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform from 1975.
In 1950, Gibbens married Pat Mullis by whom he had three children: a daughter who qualified as a Top Doctor and two sons.
Gibbens found 'comfort and relaxation' with his family in his home in Dulwich – that's the posh bit within spitting distance of the Maudsley, it's not as if Gibbens was going to live in the slummy bit nearer to the hospital where the patients tended to reside. Not that Dulwich was sufficient for Gibbens, he later purchased a cottage in the Dordogne. John Allen owned a villa in the south of France to which he took kids in care 'for holidays'. Dafydd held 'clinics' in the south of France.
Trevor Gibbens 'left his mark on British forensic psychiatry, a mark as indelible, indeed, as the mark he made on the minds and hearts of those of us who were privileged to know him and to learn from him'.
'Well, Dafydd – have the lambs stopped screaming?'
'Da dafydd – a yw'r ŵyn wedi rhoi'r gorau i sgrechian?'
Drs Russell and Rebecca Dobash of Stirling University's Dept of Sociology were listed in the Home Office's Research Unit's Report as carrying out research on 'violence within the family setting', 1974-75. Russell and Rebecca Dobash are two Americans who became leading researchers in the field of domestic violence, violence against women and men who murder women, particularly in Scotland. They will know that among the mess, false allegations are made about people by welfare professionals, that other people are sometimes pressurised into backing these false allegations up and that children involved in domestic violence are subjected to yet more abuse and violence on the part of the 'helping professions'. They will also know that in mental health settings, patients are allowed, or even positively encouraged, to form relationships with other patients who have a history of abusive behaviour without being warned about this.
The Strathclyde University Centre for Law, Crime and Justice, listed Professors Russell and Rebecca Dobash as experts specialising in sexual killers, domestic violence, homicide, violence, gender and justice. The Professors Dobash contributed to the Future Learn course 'Understanding Violence Against Women' at the University of Strathclyde.
Russell Dobash received his BA and MA from Arizona State University and his PhD from Washington State University. He started his career at the University of Stirling, Scotland and moved to Cardiff University in 1992. Since 1996 he has been Professor of Criminology at the University of Manchester. He is an internationally recognised expert in the area of domestic violence. Rebecca Dobash is Professor of Social Research in Criminology in the School of Law, Manchester University. After completing her PhD at Washington State University, she went to the University of Stirling, then the University of Cardiff and finally to the University of Manchester.
Rebecca and Russell worked at Cardiff University while Dafydd and the gang wreaked havoc in north Wales and their colleagues at Cardiff University colluded with them. Cardiff University also colluded with organised child abuse in south Wales, including the crimes of George Thomas (see post 'It Wasn't On Our Radar').
Rebecca and Russell Dobash have won the World Congress of Victimology Award for Original Research and Publications in the area of Domestic Violence; the American Society of Criminology's Distinguished Book Award for Comparative Research and the American Criminological Association's August Vollmer Award; and have been visiting scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Arizona, University of Melbourne and University of Sydney.
Russell and Rebecca have held fellowships and/or research grants from the Carnegie Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the ESRC, the Home Office, the Scottish Office and other Gov't departments and served as research and policy advisers in Britain, Canada, USA, Australia and Sweden.
In 1978, Kate joined Leicestershire County Council as an unqualified social worker and over the next eight years obtained a Master's degree, in social work, from the University of Warwick and a Certificate of Qualification in Social Work. She was also appointed guardian ad litem (in litigation) for Derbyshire, helped establish a voluntary hostel for women with housing needs and became the authority's first research social worker.
So Kate, a member of the crack team on violence and abuse, worked as a social worker for Leicestershire County Council which was colluding with one of the biggest paedophile rings in the UK at the time. Kate then moved on to work for Derbyshire County Council, which hosted the paedophile ring who not only supplied abusive staff to children's homes in north Wales, but who's Director of Social Services was John Jillings, who later led the Jillings Investigation into abuse in Clwyd children's homes. The Jillings Report was damning, but Jillings pointedly refused to state whether he found evidence of a paedophile ring in north Wales with links to VIPs and/or paedophiles in other parts of the UK (see post 'It's A Piece Of Cake…'). Perhaps to men in Leicestershire called Frank Beck and Greville Janner or to a gang of molesters in Derbyshire.
Kate knew nuzzing.
Kate and her partner moved to Edinburgh in 1986 and later joined her old mates at the University of Stirling as a part-time lecturer in social work. Kate also worked with the Dobashes once more, which led to the book 'Changing Violent Men' (2000). Kate also completed her PhD with the Dobashes at Stirling in 1998, although in 1993, she joined the University of Glasgow, where she remained for 15 years, first as a lecturer and then as a senior lecturer in social work, before returning to Stirling in 2004 as a senior lecturer in social work.
While Kate was at Glasgow, with the Dobashes, she undertook a study of the murders of children by examination of more than 800 cases of men and women convicted of murder, as well as 200 in-depth interviews with men and women serving life in prison. The resulting publications included 'Men Who Murder Children Inside and Outside the Family' (2005), in the 'British Journal of Social Work', and 'The Murder of Children By Fathers in the Context of Child Abuse' (2007), in 'Child Abuse and Neglect'. Kate's 'efforts to raise public awareness, change public policy and practice and introduce innovations for abused women and their children and for victims of rape, were tireless.' Although Kate couldn't quite bring herself to admit the complicity of welfare professionals with these crimes, because let's face it, 'Two Ovaries Good, Two Testicles Bad' sounds good, is nice and simplistic and no-one dares quibble with a Strong Woman who's Speaking Out About Male Violence. They're certainly not going to dare mention that sometimes it is the female partner who is violent or of course that domestic violence occurs in some same sex relationships.
The Home Office Research Unit funded Professor R. Illsley at the University of Aberdeen's Dept of Sociology to carry out research into 'juvenile delinquency and the social control network', 1972-75. This study investigated the role of social workers with young people in trouble with the law. Raymond Illsley arrived at Aberdeen University in 1951 and was the first Director of the MRC Medical Socioogy Unit there. There is another Prof Raymond Illsley who has recently worked at the University of Bath in the field of health inequalities but the Aberdeen Raymond Illsley was born in 1919, so they cannot be the same person. They might be father and son though…
Raymond Illsley of the Aberdeen MRC Medical Sociology Unit seems to have worked with some real butchers, even by the standards of Top Docs in the 1950s. Illsley was part of Sir Dugald Baird's Obstetrics and Gynaecology empire, which pursued what was euphemistically described as 'social reproductive health research'. Sir Dugald gathered together a team which included Top Doctors, midwives, a lady almoner (what would now be called a social worker), a psychologist, a physiologist, a statistician, a dietitian and a nutritionist. Then sociologist Illsley joined the crew. This team was involved in a number of strands of work, but what Sir Dugald was really proud of was their pioneering work in 'NHS abortions for socio-economic reasons'. This was in the 1950s. Abortion for 'socio-economic reasons' was illegal, although no-one stopped Dugald. Neither does Dugald mention the views of his patients when he performed abortions on them for socio-economic reasons. Dugald boasted that he was leading the way, as he performed abortions upon low income patients and sterilised those who already had children. For socio-economic reasons.
Baird 'saw Aberdeen as a unique opportunity in which to conduct research to establish the factors that contribute to efficient childbearing and the influence of social conditions'. The 'population was of an appropriate size and a settled nature, which would permit follow up of women and their families and there was a centralised medical service. The relative isolation
of the northeast of Scotland, with the City of Aberdeen as the major administrative centre for a large rural hinterland, facilitated the epidemiological study of a total population.'
I think it was a Dafydd situation – a madman turned loose in a large rural area among a lot of desperate people who had no money. Dugald was so busy performing abortions for socio-economic reasons that word got round that abortion was rife in Aberdeen, indeed many believed that the situation was one of abortion on demand. Of course this wasn't true, as Dugald and his supporters stressed. After all, it was only poor women who's babies were aborted and who were being sterilised because they were breeding like rabbits. Lest anyone is in danger of believing that old Dugald was concerned for an over populated planet, a quick perusal of Dugald's writings confirms that Dugald didn't have a problem with moneyed women having big families, because that was Different.
Sir Dugald was a Wimmin's Champ before his time. He was a strong supporter of abortion law reform, he was keen on cervical screening and on promoting 'family planning'. A lot of people have thought me rather odd when I have shown such cynicism towards the causes which were so close to Dugald's heart – I have been asked if I am a Roman Catholic or if I am 'religious'. No, I have just met people like Dugald. The causes pursued by Dugald can, in the right circumstances, be used to help people. But not when Dugald and those like him have their hands on the controls. The worst case scenario is girls in their early teens being prescribed the contraceptive pill to ensure that the men sexually abusing them will not have the bother of a pregnancy, slightly older girls being sterilised without informed consent for the same reason and women being invited for cervical screening appointments by groping Top Doctors who know damn well that there are not enough staff in the labs to read the samples and where so many false positives and negatives are flying around that the screening programme is meaningless. Where have I seen this? North Wales of course, I was well aware of what was going on. So I was interested to receive an e mail from someone a few weeks ago who had witnessed contraceptive pills being prescribed for girls in their early teens who were in the care of Gwynedd Social Services in the 1980s. Girls who were not showing any interest in acquiring a boyfriend as well.
I had come across Sir Dugald Baird before I researched Raymond Illsley. When I was researching Dr Ann Dally, the Top Doc who ended up in such trouble for flogging prescriptions to addicts, I read Dally's own account of her career. She detailed at some length the numerous illegal abortions that she and her colleagues at Tommy's performed and made reference to their role model in Aberdeen, Dugald Baird (see post 'Little Things Hitting Each Other').
Baird's team collaborated with the London-based Social Medicine Research Unit (SMRU) under the directorship of Professor Jerry Morris. Jerry Morris and Richard Titmuss were involved in the initial planning and the research started in 1948.
Jerry Morris was a Scottish epidemiologist who was a lifelong member of the Labour Party until he resigned in old age over the Gulf War. Jerry Morris worked with Brian Abel-Smith, the elitist gay LSE economist who was an NHS adviser to successive Labour Ministers. Abel-Smith was one of those who loved the NHS so much on the grounds of his socialist principles that he remained silent about the poorest members of society whom Abel-Smith knew were being abused, neglected and were dying at the hands of the NHS. But Abel-Smith had his boyfriends, his celebrity friends, his range of Italian gentleman's clothes which he flogged to pop stars and the reputation of the NHS and the Labour Party to think of, he could not be distracted by trifles such as organised abuse and trafficking. For more info on Abel-Smith, see post 'The Old Devils'.
Richard Titmuss was the founder of the discipline of Social Administration (now known as Social Policy) and held the founding Chair in the subject at the LSE. Titmuss's work in the 1950s helped shape the characteristics of Britain's post-war welfare state. At the LSE Titmuss trained social workers – some of his students are among those we know and love. Titmuss advised Gov't regarding matters health and social services. He robustly promoted public provision over private and was directly involved in social policy eg. he was Vice-Chairman of the Gov'ts Supplementary Benefits Commission. Titmuss was one of those who did design a welfare state, but much of what they built in to it was profoundly degrading and demeaning for those who were supposed to benefit. I found a short book written by Abel-Smith the other day which details many aspects of welfare provision that exemplifies this. Brian Abel-Smith and Richard Titmuss weren't on the receiving end of their system.
Titmuss's wife Kay was a social worker, which says it all really. Their daughter is the feminist sociologist Ann Oakley, who is Professor and Founder-Director of the Social Science Research Unit at the Institute of Education, University of London. Oakley went to Haberdasher Aske's School for Girls, did her first degree at Somerville College, Oxford and her PhD at Bedford College, London.
In 1955, the Aberdeen offshoot of the SMRU (Social Medicine Research Unit) developed into an autonomous unit: '…the Medical Research Council created for Dugald Baird the Obstetric Medicine Research Unit. Together with the University and the Health Board, they built a new research floor on the top of the [Aberdeen] Maternity Hospital'. The nutritional and physiological parts of the Obstetric Medicine Research Unit was relocated to Newcastle when Sir Dugald retired in 1965.
Newcastle-upon-Tyne University housed many paedophiles' friends, some of whom arrived in north Wales to join Dafydd and the gang, such as Dr Neil Davies and Prof Bob Woods (see post 'The Newcastle-upon-Tyne Connection'). Others such as Lord John Walton provided the most enormous umbrella for Dafydd et al from their stronghold in Newcastle (see post 'Little Things Hitting Each Other').
If one tried to escape Dugald, one had his wife Lady May to contend with. May, like Dugald, read medicine at Glasgow University. Prominent in her
own right, in 1937 Lady May became a town councillor in Aberdeen for the Labour Party and in 1947 she was appointed as the first Chair of the North Eastern Regional Hospital Board, with which she served until 1960, where she 'supported' Dugald's work. She was also a National Governor of the BBC in Scotland for 4 years. Lady May Baird died in 1983 and Sir Dugald in 1986.
Feature Lady May on 'Woman's Hour', she broke a glass ceiling!
When Raymond Illsley retired in 1984, the MRC Medical Sociology Unit moved to Glasgow, with Sally Macintyre as its new Director.
Professor Dame Sally Macintyre read social theory and administration at the University of Durham, graduating in 1970. She then did an MSc in Sociology as Applied to Medicine at Bedford College, London and undertook a part-time PhD while working as a research fellow at Aberdeen University, on the topic of decision-making processes following premarital conception, the degree being awarded in 1976.
From 1975 Macintyre was employed at the MRC Medical Sociology Unit in Aberdeen. She was appointed Director of the Unit in 1983 and moved it to the University of Glasgow in 1984. In 1998 she took on the Directorship of the Chief Scientist Office funded Public Health Research Unit, which merged with the MRC Medical Sociology Unit to become the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit. Dame Sally retired from the Directorship in 2013 and was succeeded by Professor Laurence Moore. From 2011-14, Macintyre was also Director of the Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing and Prof of Social and Public Health Science at the University of Glasgow.
Sally Macintyre is an advocate for robust approaches and methods for evaluating public health policies and interventions and in doing so has contributed to guidelines for the evaluation of public health policies. So that is why so many interventions and policies have been endorsed and implemented which do not work and sometimes have had disastrous consequences for patients.
Dame Sally is a member of the Human Tissue Authority as well as the Ethics and Governance Council of UK Biobank and has recently completed an eight year term as a member of the MRC. In Feb 2017, Sally was appointed as the first Chair of the Governing Board of the Nuffield Council of Bioethics.
Sally Macintyre is married to Dr Guy Paul Muhlemann, a zoologist who later moved into computing systems management. They live in Glasgow and have an apartment in Chamonix, France. I do hope that place in Chamonix has been robustly evaluated. Now shut up and eat your five a day while Dame Sally gets on with the apres ski.
One of Raymond Illsley's team at the Medical Sociology Research Unit in Aberdeen was Janet Askham. Askham graduated from the LSE in 1960 and in 1963 began working for Mark Abrams, the market researcher and social surveyor, at Research Services Ltd. Askham's early work was on families, relationships, fertility and marriage, her later work being on ageing and patients' relationships with health professionals. In 1975, Askham published the 'ground-breaking' 'Fertility and Reproduction' a study of differential fertility among working class families in Aberdeen. Presumably the families who had the highest fertility rates were those who steered well clear of Dugald Baird and Lady May.
In 1980 Janet married the political commentator Byron Criddle.
In retirement Mark Abrams founded the Age Concern Research Unit, where Askham joined him in 1983. In 1986, Askham and Jonathan Barker subsumed the Unit into the new Institute of Gerontology at King's College, London. 1998, Askham became the Professor of Social Gerontology and Director of the Age Concern Institute of Gerontology at King's, launching and managing the Masters course. In 2004, Askham relocated to Oxford when she was appointed as the Director of the Picker Institute, where she remained until 2008. Janet led the external team on research on ageing and old age at the DoH and advised on the training and postgrad education of Top Doctors. She was Deputy Chair to the Advisory Committee on Older and Disabled People at Ofcom.
A member of Illsley's wider academic network was Prof Margot Jeffreys, who, we are told in her 1999 obituary in The Indie, was 'one of the founders of medical sociology'. Jeffreys discussed matters of social class and health with Illsley in the 1950s when she researched health and social services in Buckinghamshire. At one MRC funded meeting in 1956, one sociologist observed that medicine was looking to sociology for a 'docile wife' and that sociology would not play ball. Unfortunately people like Margot and Raymond Illsley did. We are told that Margot avoided the 'doctor bashing label' that 'some sociologists' earned. Indeed Margot was so successful at this, that many believed that Margot served as a 'doctors moll'. Not that there was a word of truth in such an accusation, just as Dugald Baird didn't carry out illegal abortions on women who were not as affluent as he and his friends. And when they say no they mean yes.
Margot joined the Communist Part of Great Britain in the 1930s, but left in 1956, with the Soviet invasion of Hungary. She graduated from the LSE in 1938 and her first academic appointment was at Bedford College at the University of London in 1949, researching 'Mobility in the Labour Market' (1954). Margot lectured in the Dept of Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 1953-65, where she taught sociology to Top Doctors. Between 1965-82, Margot worked at Bedford College once more, where she eventually became Director of Social Research.
Bertrand Russell's son Lord Conrad Russell was an historian who spent much of his career at Bedford College. Bertrand Russell spent his later years living in north Wales, knew about Dafydd and the gang and made use of their services (see post 'So Who Was Angry About What?'). Margot might have also known some of the members of the Communist Party of Great Britain who rented their second homes in Cwm Croesor in north Wales off Russell's friend Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who also all knew about Dafydd et al (see post 'The Village').
Following the Todd Report, 1968, (Royal Commission on Medical Education), Jeffreys was invited to develop medical sociology in the London medical schools and she taught the Masters in Medical Sociology from 1969. She later acted as a consultant to the WHO and helped launch an international research programme. Margot worked with GPs and Chaired the 1970 BMA Working Group on Primary Health Care. The DHSS funded her team on primary health care and in 1983 the volume 'Rethinking General Practice: dilemmas in primary medical care' was published, which she co-authored with Hessie Sachs. Sachs also published about team work in inner cities between health visitors and social workers. Hessie will have known that the children of poor and dispossessed people were being abused, trafficked into sex work and that many were being sent to children's homes in north Wales. Margot will have known as well.
After Margot retired in 1982, she continued research into ageing and was appointed visiting Professor at the King's College Centre for Medicine, Law and Ethics. In Nov 1988, the Royal College of General Practitioners gave Jeffreys an honorary fellowship, while the people trafficking GP from north Wales Dr D.G.E. Wood held senior positions with the Royal College.
Margot may have done the bidding of a bunch of Top Doctors who were doing many disgusting things including illegally aborting babies and sterilising people because they had less money than the Top Doctors did, but Margot did of course have many wonderful qualities. Her obituary explained that her 'deep belief in equality, liberty and justice guided her life' and that she was 'strong, independently minded, generous and loving'. I was greatly relieved to read that although Margot was 'not a Women's Liberation kind of feminist, she was particularly helpful to women, conscious of the disadvantages and difficulties we faced'. Thank God for that, we wouldn't want one of them Women's Libbers burning her bra when Dugald had his hands full with the unlawful abortions and Wood needed to get on with the business of people trafficking. Presumably Margot showed her feminism to her disadvantaged female colleagues by sympathising over the bother of having to wear one's girdle when the dratted things are just so uncomfortable.
The Home Office Research Unit Report informs us that Dr Roger Hood of the Penal Research Unit at Oxford University investigated 'the definition and explanation of crime', 1971-76. Roger Hood retired in 2003 and is now Emeritus Professor of Criminology and Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Hood did his first degree at the LSE, graduating in 1957, then completed his PhD at Downing College, Cambridge in 1963. He held research posts at the LSE, 1957-63 and was then appointed as lecturer in social administration at Durham University. Hood was Assistant Director of Research and Director of Post-Graduate Studies at the Institute of Criminology, Cambridge, 1967-1973 and Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, 1969-1973. He was Reader in Criminology and Director of the Centre for Criminological
Research (formerly the Penal Research Unit, now the Centre for Criminology), University of Oxford, 1973-2003. From 1996-03, Hood was Professor of Criminology and he was Professorial Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, 1973-2003; Sub-Warden, 1994-96. He has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1992.
In addition, Roger Hood has been: Member, Parole Board for England and Wales, 1972-73; Member, Judicial Studies Board for England and Wales, 1979-85; Member Social Science Research Council, Committee on Social Sciences and the Law, 1975-79; Member, Departmental Committee to Review the Parole System, 1987-88; Consultant to the UN on the death penalty, 1988- 2005; President of the British Society of Criminology, 1987-89; Member of the British Foreign Secretary's Death Penalty Panel, 1999 until disbanded in 2015 and took part in the UK/China Human Rights Dialogues and the UE/China Human Rights Seminars; Consultant to the Great Britain-China Centre Project on 'Taking Forward the Debate on the Death Penalty in China' (in collaboration with Beijing Normal University, Centre for Human Rights, NUI Galway and the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg-im-Breisgau) 2007-09;
Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia Law School, 1980-82, 1984-90 and from 2004-2011; Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Hong Kong, 2003-2004; Adjunct (Visiting) Professor, City University of Hong Kong School of Law, 2008-2011; Guest Professor, College of Criminal Law Science of Beijing Normal University 2007-2012 and Guest Professor, Wuhan University 2008-2011; Consultant to the Death Penalty Project (London) since 2004; Consultant to the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP); Consultant to the Attorney General of Malaysia's Committee to Study and Report on the Death Penalty in Malaysia 2014-16;
Member of Scientific Committee formed to advise on the programme for the
World Congress against the Death Penalty, held in Oslo, June 2016; Consultant to the National University of Singapore for a survey of public opinion on the mandatory death penalty, 2016-17.
Since retirement, Prof Hood has given lectures on the death penalty in China, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, USA, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Taiwan, Trinidad, Uganda and Vietnam.
Roger Hood became well known as a specialist on the death penalty but in the mid 1960s he carried out work into the lives of borstal boys. Hood will have known about the brutality inflicted upon them and the miscarriages of justice.
Roger soon dispensed with researching the lives of borstal boys, he had his trajectory towards All Souls to think about:
There is a piece on the internet in response to the question 'What are formal dinners like at All Souls?' and the response includes the line 'Drinks are always excellent, especially reds, from the College's own cellar and there is a fair amount of drinking (perhaps more than at a regular Formal hall) owing to the advanced age and strong liver of most Fellows'.
Roger's not really going to be concerning himself too much with the horrors that prevailed within Bryn Estyn is he. Not when there are reds to drink and such fascinating people at High Table.
The Home Office Research Unit Report lists Professor H.K. Bevan of the Dept of Law at Hull University as investigating 'the interpretation by the Courts of the Children and Young Persons Act 1969', between 1972 and 1974. H.K. Bevan graduated in law from Aberystwyth University in 1949, so he was a contemporary of all those crooked old lawyers who loyally protected Dafydd and the gang for decades. Bevan's career as an academic lawyer began in Hull in 1950. He subsequently played a critical role in the emergence and development of the Law School at Hull, where he held a Chair for over 20 years. Bevan was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1959. He was a JP in Hull for many years and was Chairman of Hull Magistrates Bench, 1967-71. After he retired from Hull, Bevan was awarded an honorary fellowship at Wolfson College, Cambridge.
Hull and the wider Yorkshire region was the location of a paedophile gang and associated police corruption, much of which involved Jimmy Savile, with links to north Wales.
Professor Howard Jones of University College Cardiff is listed in the Home Office Research Unit Report as conducting an evaluation of Long Lartin, a maximum security prison, 1973-76 and as also evaluating a Community Training Centre in Gloucester, 1973-74. Howard Jones was Head of the Department of Social Administration at University College, Cardiff, 1969-84. Jones became Professor Emeritus on his retirement.
Howard left school at 14, worked for a glass firm and in local government before joining the YMCA as Deputy Warden to supervise the training of boys in farm work. In tandem with ten years in youth work, casework and residential social work, Jones completed a London degree as an external candidate part-time and went on to take a Diploma in Public Administration and to qualify as a psychiatric social worker, training at the Tavistock, a 'leading edge place for psychoanalysis and group work'. Howard Jones also did a PhD under Hermann Mannheim at the LSE. Howard's 'sense of commitment' and of 'doing it my way' 'carried with him till the end of his days'.
Not only was the Tavi a hub of paedophiles' friends, but all psychiatric social workers at that time were complicit with the most enormous Dafydd-like abuses, including the denouncing of people who had been targeted by organised child abusers as mad.
Hermann Mannheim, Howard Jones's PhD supervisor and the father of British criminology, knew a great deal about white collar criminals and in his 1965 volume 'Comparative Criminology' he summarised them thus:
The white collar criminal is neither a political offender nor a rebel. He exploits the weaknesses of society rather than rebelling against its iniquities and his interest in the reform of the legal, political and social system is normally confined to changes which might enable him to make more and more money and to get more and more influence in order to exert increasing pressure to obtain his selfish objects.
Hermann Mannheim worked at the LSE from 1935 and in 1946 he was appointed a Professor. Mannheim was sent, at the age of nine, to Tilsit, in East Prussia where he attended the classical Gymnasium for nine years. He then studied law and political science at the Universities of Munich, Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Koenigsberg. Mannheim qualified as a lawyer, barrister and magistrate and served in the German artillery in Russia and in France during WWI. He held an administrative post in local gov't, 1919-23, serving as legal adviser and as Chairman of industrial courts, industrial disputes tribunals, rent tribunals etc. Mannheim was appointed Privatdozent (roughly equivalent to that of lecturer) in the Law Faculty of the University of Berlin and at the same time became a deputy magistrate in Berlin.
Mannheim was soon appointed a judge, first in the lower courts, then in the superior court – the district court of Berlin – where he presided over a large number of difficult criminal trials in what was the busiest criminal court in Germany. In 1929 Mannheim was made a Professor Extraordinarius at the University and three years later was promoted to be a judge of the Kammergericht in Berlin, the highest court in Prussia.
When Hitler came into power, Mannheim was deprived of his academic post and realising that there could be no future for him as a judge under the Nazis, he retired from the bench.
In Jan 1934 Mannheim emigrated to London. At that time in England, criminology was not a recognised subject in universities and the scientific study of crime and the criminal was in its infancy.
The ideas of the English social reformers, the work of the Probation Service and expedients in the after-care of prisoners appealed to Mannheim and he had made contact with men such as Dr J. J. Mallon, Sir Basil Henriques and Mr H. E. Norman, the then Secretary of the National Association of Probation Officers, as well as with the Institute for the Scientific Study and Treatment of Delinquency in London, which was founded shortly before his arrival.
In 1935 Mannheim was appointed an honorary part-time lecturer in criminology at the LSE. In 1944 he was appointed to a full-time lectureship, and in the same year published the study, Young Offenders, undertaken on behalf of the Home Office and in association with Sir Alexander Carr Saunders, the then Director of the School and Dr E. C. Rhodes.
In 1946 Mannheim was made a Reader in Criminology in the University of London, a position he was to retain until his retirement in 1955. His link with the LSE was preserved through two years of part-time teaching and subsequently through his honorary Directorate of the Criminology Research Unit.
Out of a selected list of some 30 postgrad students supervised by Mannheim in the years between the end of WWII and his retirement from the School and with whom he had remained in contact, nearly half of that number held university appointments, six were directly connected with law and its practice, another six hold senior positions in the administration of social or penal services, while the remainder were engaged actively in social work. In addition, Mannheim also had a long association with the training of probation officers, at the LSE, at the training centre at Rainer House and at the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency.
It is clear from the Waterhouse Report that not only was the Probation Service as a whole fully complicit with the serious abuse of children in north Wales over many years, but that probation officers were among those abusing children. I described in my post 'I Know Nuzzing…' how, contrary to the stereotypes held by many English migrants to north Wales, those staffing and managing Gwynedd County Council and the Social Services during those years when the paedophile gang operated within were not all unqualified people or people who had simply picked up a certificate from Cartrefle College in Wrexham. The more senior people had postgrad qualifications, some of them had studied at elite universities and there were a number of LSE graduates among them. If one looks at the CVs of others who colluded with the child abuse scandals of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, one finds more LSE graduates. One of the north Wales academics who wrote an entirely untruthful sanitised account of the history of psychiatry in north Wales is an LSE graduate. As of course are dear old Jane Hutt and Margaret Hodge. When one takes into account the people who probably knew about north Wales because their close friends definitely did, one finds LSE graduates and staff crawling out of every corner. Such as Ralph Miliband (see post 'What's Left? The Politics Of Social Justice').
Cherie Booth was a student at the LSE in the mid 1970s. Being a Strong Woman, Cherie has in the past discussed matters such as 'juggling' (I expect that Cherie multi-tasks as well) and Cherie is of course one half of a Power Couple. What's the betting that Cherie also enjoys Networking?
Eric Hobsbawm's daughter Julia is a Professor of Networking at the LSE. Or at least she was, she seems to have moved onto new pastures now, at the Cass Business School and the University of Suffolk. Always ahead of the game, Julia has now moved on from being an expert in networking and is currently an expert on connectedness. Julia founded Julia Hobsbawm Associates in 1992, subsequently Hobsbawm Macaulay Communications. Julia's business partner was Sarah Macaulay, who later became Sarah Brown when she married Gordon Brown.
I used to wonder how Eric Hobsbawm managed to have such a dipstick of daughter, until I came across information that suggested that Eric Hobsbawm was probably working for MI5. Is there something that Julia is not telling us as she runs around disguised as a fuckwit rubbing noses with some of the most vacuous people on the planet?
Eric Hobsbawm was one of those with a second home at Cwm Croesor who knew about Dafydd and the paedophile gang (see post 'The Village'). Julia spent much of her youth in Croesor. She didn't really blend in up there.
Harmann Mannheim was associated with the Howard League for Penal Reform for over 25 years. He sat on the Executive Committee from 1940 and became a Vice-President. Mannheim was a Director and a member of the Council and Executive Committee of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency. He was also instrumental in founding the Scientific Group for the Discussion of Delinquency Problems (now the British Society of Criminology), was Chairman from 1956-58 and subsequently a Vice-President.
In 1950, along with Dr Edward Glover and Dr Emanuel Miller, Mannheim founded the British Journal of Delinquency (since 1960 called the British Journal of Criminology) and in 1960 the Library of Criminology (now International Library of Criminology.)
Dr Emanuel Miller was one of the first child psychiatrists and was the father of Jonathan Miller, the self-styled polymath who's talents were called upon to distract attention from Dafydd and the gang when the police investigations began in north Wales.
Mannheim was visiting Professor at the Universities of Oregon and Pennsylvania in 1953 and after WWII lectured in Holland, Norway, Western Germany, USA and Canada. From 1950-55 he was a member of the Council of the International Society of Criminology and for some years was President of the Scientific Commission of that body. For several years Mannheim was a member of the Colonial Secretary's Advisory Committee on the Treatment of Offenders. He was repeatedly invited to undertake research for the Home Office.
Mannheim's most famous work included the wartime study of juvenile delinquency and in 1955, jointly with Leslie. T. Wilkins, the first large-scale prediction study carried out in the UK. In his capacity as Director of Criminological Research of the LSE, Mannheim directed and supervised two investigations on the sentencing policy of the magistrates' courts and the psychology of the short-term prisoner respectively, carried out on behalf of the Home Office and the Nuffield Foundation.
Mannheim and Leslie T. Wilkins 1955 work 'Prediction Methods in Borstal Training' is noted in the Home Office Research Unit Report, as is Leslie Wilkins' 1960 work, 'Delinquent Generation'.
Mannheim must have known about the routine neglect and abuse of vulnerable people by welfare professionals, he had fingers in every professional pie, including psychiatry and worked with and taught some of those directly involved with abuse of their patients and clients.
Mannheim's PhD student Howard Jones began academic life as a lecturer in social studies and then a senior lecturer in sociology at Leicester 1953-65, before moving to a Readership at Keele 1965-69, where he began as the only member of staff in a new department and started criminology there.
Howard Jones worked in one of the Depts of Leicester University where staff were concealing the paedophile ring which was established in the area decades ago and he then moved to Keele, which became notorious for employing people embarrassingly close to child abuse scandals. Keele hit the jackpot when it employed Peter Righton, the social work academic who's work justified sexual relationships between adults and children, which was certainly convenient for Peter Righton because he was a paedophile who was later convicted of child sex offences. Peter Righton was a Gov't adviser and worked with Barbara Kahan when she was a Gov't adviser.
After study leave at Berkeley, Howard Jones in 1969 moved to Cardiff as Professor to head the then Department of Social Administration and School of Social Work. He retired in 1984, before the merger of University College Cardiff with UWIST.
Along with many other people in what became Cardiff University, Howard Jones will have known about the abuse of children in care in south Wales, the scale of which became evident after Howard Jones retired. He'll also have known about the offences of George Thomas (see post 'It Wasn't On Our Radar') and he probably knew about Ron Davies's foibles as well (see post 'Cottaging At Castle Gate'). Howard Jones will have known about Dafydd; most of Cardiff University were protecting Dafydd and Dafydd's colleague Tony Francis trained and worked in Cardiff.
Jones's obituary noted that 'in an age when publishing did not receive the obsessional focus it does today, he was an avid communicator'. His books included Reluctant Rebels (Tavistock, 1961); Crime and the Penal System(University Tutorial Press, 1962); Alcoholic Addiction: a Psycho-Social Approach to Abnormal Drinking (Tavistock, 1963), Crime in a Changing Society (Penguin, 1965); Towards a New Social Work (Routledge, 1975); Open Prisons (Routledge, 1977); The Residential Community (Routledge, 1979); Society against Crime: Penal Practice in Modern Britain(Penguin, 1981); Crime, Race and Culture (Wiley, 1981); and Social Welfare in Third World Development (Macmillan, 1990).
The leading light in the Leicestershire Child Abuse Scandal Frank Beck was well thought off by his colleagues. He was so committed to those kids, Frank generated new theories, devised new therapies and was always keen to share his expertise. As was Peter Righton. When brave souls did raise questions about Beck and Righton they were met with a wall of 'how very dare you?' Because Beck and Righton were experts. As people kept telling me that Dafydd was. It was patently obvious that Dafydd was an insane old man who didn't know his arse from his elbow, just as it was obvious that the kids in Frank Beck's care were terrified of him and that there was nothing 'therapeutic' about making boys on the verge of adolescence wear nappies, but it's incredible what one can get away with if one is a Top Doc or a senior social worker. And it's a real laugh because if anyone does say 'bloody hell, look what he's doing to those kids', all you have to do is to tell everyone that they are a paedophile or a dangerous mental patient and they will soon find themselves unemployed and a pariah.
Howard Jones also made a significant contribution to probation and social work research and practice. He once told the story of a public talk he gave while he was at Leicester – where else? – which included a spoof on how the rabid 'hang-em-and-flog-em' brigade would deal with criminals. A reporter walked in during this sequence, having missed the contextual prefatory remarks, and he quoted this purple passage verbatim in the local press. A furious Howard – 'and he could be a match for Sir Alex Ferguson's 'hairdryer technique' when roused' – phoned the editor to complain, but the editor refused to issue a retraction or apology, since Howard had indeed uttered the quoted words. Howard 'ruefully remembered the damage this press report did to his reputation with local practitioners'.
I'm tempted to suggest that Howard Jones got off lightly if people merely mistook him for the sort of Sir Herbert Gussett who writes letters to the Torygraph from the family seat at Barking-in-the-Marshes, I think that Howard might have been rather more dangerous than that.
Howard 'had the good fortune not be cluttered by the range of literature available today' – thank goodness that Howard didn't have to bother with that, he just churned out his own literature – and 'he had a direct style and an ability to think and dictate/write in whole paragraphs or chapters'. His first book, Reluctant Rebels, arose out of his work with 'maladjusted children' (a term he used without the inverted commas) and addressed the extent to which group therapy could provide them with a sense of security and some insight into their problems. He stressed the importance of treating kids as individuals rather than labelling them as 'yobs'… The regimes in the school he studied had some positive results, which were dispassionately reviewed in his book, but the school was closed down by the Ministry of Education because its results were not unambiguous enough to fit its evaluation metrics. The date – not 2008, but 1961'.
So that school with the positive results which Howard reviewed dispassionately must have been in a very parlous state indeed, schools didn't tend to get closed in 1961. What could have been happening there?
Howard's book 'Society Against Crime' was an edited collection of articles by Cardiff criminology and social work staff, aimed at increasing the profile of Howard's department. I'm familiar with that technique, it doesn't always lead to high quality outputs.
Howard may not have been supping the reds at High Table in All Souls along with Roger Hood, but he certainly enjoyed himself. As well as sabbaticals with his family visiting adventurous spots such as Papua New Guinea, he 'played an influential role in developing probation and alternatives to prisons' in the Caribbean, especially Barbados, Guyana and, to a lesser extent, Jamaica. A five year project funded by what is now DFID brought some Guyanese to Cardiff to carry out their PhDs and sent to a member of the Howard's contingent to Guyana.
How the hell did Howard, a state bureaucrat from Cardiff, wangle a sabbatical – with his family – to Papua New Guinea?? Do they have social work teams and therapists in Papua New Guinea?
Papua New Guinea, as visited by Julia Hobsbawm:
Howard's last book before retirement, Crime, Race and Culture, explored differences in crime rates between Guyanese of Indian and African origin and tried to account for them in cultural and employment terms. Howard would have known all about that having worked among the paedophiles of Leicester and then the accessories to George Thomas and Ron Davies in Cardiff University.
Howard was kept busy with building up and then managing a 'quite fractious department of overwhelmingly junior staff' – could that have been because Howard ensured that no-one ever received promotion? – the majority being social work/probation lecturers; the next largest group being social policy (who distanced themselves from both him and criminology); plus two criminologists other than him. Most of the social work staff saw themselves primarily as 'trainers of professionals'. Professionals who would go out and join the world of abusers or find themselves ruthlessly frozen out.
Howard Jones 'was intellectually and personally sharp in debate' during the 'sometimes vitriolic staff meetings and treated some staff like the (far from) 'reluctant rebels' of his first book'. Howard also had to 'manage some cohorts of social work students who were keen to hone their skills in the culture of complaint'.
Howard's dept sounds a nightmare. Everyone at war, the students horrified at what they were seeing and probably trying to blow the whistle on abuse of clients as well, only to be dismissed by Howard as vexatious complainants. No wonder Howard Jones did so well for himself in the world of the person-centred professions who care.
Howard 'was fearless and could be quite outspoken in private and public settings (including with the Home Office), and – though bull-like in his determination to achieve those objectives he thought right – had no temperament for the sustained delicate interdepartmental and governmental alliance-building that might have enabled him to bring to fruition the Welsh Institute for Social Policy or police-funded lectureship he sought to get in the first half of the 1980s.'
So Howard Jones was obnoxious, so obnoxious that even tame people refused to give him resources to expand his dept.
In the early 80s, Howard 'imaginatively hosted four lectures by leading Chief Constables' and when he took his regular study leave in the Caribbean, one of his colleagues, Professor Michael Levi, took over from him on 'an interesting project on police-public relationships in Devon & Cornwall and Greater Manchester'.
Michael Levi will have learned a great deal. In the early 1980s, Greater Manchester Police was riddled with corruption (see post 'Top Of The Cops') and were led by the notorious Chief Constable James Anderton, 1976-91. Who had an obsession with prostitutes and poofs but was very much more relaxed about violent, corrupt police officers, as was demonstrated by the conduct of the police towards the students who dared protest when Leon Brittan visited Manchester University on 1 March 1985. The students had the living daylights beaten out of them, in public, on camera and two who made complaint were subjected to such extreme threats that one of them went into hiding on mainland Europe. The other was a female medical student who found herself being confronted by plain clothes officers when she was working in a hospital on placement who threatened her with violence and told her that they'd have a go at any Top Docs who tried to defend her. The corrupt plods needn't have worried, no Top Docs came to her assistance.
Down in Devon and Cornwall, the Chief Constable, 1973-82, was at the other end of the spectrum, John Alderson, who pioneered community policing. Alderson was appointed a Fellow Commoner of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1982 and he was a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, 1982-83. Alderson was Visiting Professor of Police Studies at the University of Strathclyde, 1983-89 and a research fellow at the Institute of Police and Criminological Studies at the University of Portsmouth, 1994-2000. He returned to Australia in 1987 as Australian Commonwealth Fellow with the Australian Government.
John Alderson was fully aware of the scale of serious crime and police corruption in some regions of the UK, because earlier in his career he had served in Yorkshire and had been a senior officer in the Met. Alderson was frequently told that community policing might work in the west country where there was no serious crime, but it wouldn't work in Greater Manchester. Neither did police corruption, but no-one mentioned that. Not that John Alderson didn't have serious crime on his patch. In the way that Croesor was plagued by Dafydd, the west country had Jeremy Thorpe and his associates and the person who tried to murder Norman Scott. James Alderson didn't just know about Jeremy as a result of his role as Chief Constable, Alderson will have known Jeremy personally, because Alderson was active in the Liberal Party and in 1983 unsuccessfully contested the Devon seat of Teignbridge. John Alderson served as a consultant on human rights to the Council of Europe from 1981 and was a member of the BBC General Advisory Council from 1971-78. He also served on the Committee of the Royal Humane Society, 1973-81 and was President of the Royal Life-Saving Society, 1974-78.
One of Alderson's volumes was entitled 'Principled Policing'. I doubt that's what Norman Scott felt was prevailing as his desperate pleas for help in the face of Thorpe's escalating unpleasantness were ignored.
Departmental duties at Cardiff left Howard Jones 'with insufficient time to engage in personal fieldwork in the UK' so 'some of his writings lacked the ethnographic base of immersion in the field that would have given them more lasting power'. He always found time for a quick jaunt to Papua or the Caribbean though.
The Home Office Research Unit Report certainly looked kindly upon people from the Cambridge Institute of Criminology when they asked the Unit for money. The Report stated that the Unit was funding the Cambridge Study in Delinquency Development, led by Dr D.J. West, which was running between 1961-76, as well as an investigation into sentencing policy by the Court of Appeal, led by D.A. Thomas, 1963-76, as well as another investigation led by D.A. Thomas into maximum penalties, that study having been carried out during 1973-74.
The Unit also funded someone else from the Cambridge Institute of Criminology who later became very well-known, to investigate perceptions of crime and attitudes to criminal justice, 1971-74 – Dr R.F. Sparks.
Richard Sparks is Professor of Criminology at the University of Edinburgh. From 2014-17 Sparks was Head of the School of Law at Edinburgh and from 2006-16 he was a founding Co-Director of the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. He was Professor of Criminology at Keele University and in his early career also worked at the Open University as well as at the University of Cambridge Institute of Criminology.
Richard Sparks has carried out a lot of work with Ian Loader, Professor of Criminology at Oxford University and Fellow of All Souls College. I briefly met Ian Loader about 11 years ago. The Oxford University Amnesty International branch had invited a French social theorist, one of Pierre Bourdieu's former students, to give a lecture at Oxford, so I went over to Oxford to attend the lecture. Ian Loader had organised the event. A few days later I told a friend who used to work as a criminologist at Oxford that I had met Ian Loader and they rolled their eyes, told me that he was a very ruthless man and that him organising a lecture by a old French radical was the pinnacle of irony, but then Ian would do anything to advance himself. I'd never heard this person be even mildly rude about anyone before, so I was a bit surprised. At that time, a close friend of mine was working at Oxford, but they weren't a criminologist. So image my surprise when they too had heard of Ian Loader and told me that the 'new Professor of Criminology' was doing some pretty terrible things to people.
I know no more about Ian Loader, except that one casualty works in Wales. This is what Oxford University tells people about Ian Loader:
Ian arrived in Oxford in July 2005 having previously taught at Keele University and the University of Edinburgh, from where he also obtained his PhD in 1993. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. Professor Loader was a member of the Commission on English Prisons Today from 2007-2009, and now Chairs the Research Advisory Group of the Howard League for Penal Reform. He has, since 2006, been co-convener, with the Police Foundation, of the Oxford Policing Policy Forum. From 2011-2013 he was a member of the Independent Commission on the Future of Policing and part of the editorial team which produced the Commission's Report. Ian is an Associate Fellow of the IPPR (The IPPR is the think tank set up by the Windbag which serves as a job creation scheme for the children of New Labour big wigs who believe that it is their destiny to become PM. I mean 'who are ready to serve').
Long ago and far away, Richard Sparks learned at the knee of Sir Anthony Edward Bottoms. Yes, that is his name, a splendidly appropriate name for one of the big beasts in criminology who absolutely must know about the sordid practices in swathes of the welfare state and criminal justice system but who won't be mentioning any of it. Anthony Bottoms is Emeritus Wolfson Professor of Criminology, University of Cambridge and a life fellow at Fitzwilliam College, having previously been a Wolfson Professor of Criminology at Cambridge, 1984-06. Bottoms was the Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, 1984-98. Until Dec 2007, Bottoms was a Professor of Criminology jointly at the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield.
Bottoms was educated at Eltham College and then read law at Corpus Christie College, Oxford. Bottoms subsequently became a student on the first ever full-time postgraduate course in criminology in the UK, at Cambridge in 1961-2. After a short period as a probation officer, Bottoms returned to Cambridge as a research assistant to F.H. McClintock in a study focused on institutional training for young adult males.
So Bottoms is someone who spent years dining at High Table, but who many moons ago worked as a probation officer when scores of people working in that role were abusing and molesting their clients or keeping quiet when other people did.
Readers who are sufficiently nerdy to remember my previous posts will notice that much of the action in terms of people being favoured by a Home Office Research Unit during the years when the Home Office was actively concealing serious crime and the abuse of youngsters took place in Cambridge. Of course Cambridge by its nature will have hosted some influential people during the 1970s, but there was one person in particular who played a leading light in Cambridge life at that time – Baroness Jean Trumpington aka Trumpers. Thatch gave Trumpers a peerage for doing bugger all and then someone was foolish enough to give Trumpers a job as a junior Health Minister. Trumpers repaid the kindness by appointing Jimmy Savile to the task force responsible for managing Broadmoor, although after Jimmy pegged out and the media began reporting what he had done in reality rather than simply maintaining that he worked as a hospital porter pushing beds along corridors, Trumpers let Edwina Currie take the blame. Edwina wasn't exactly innocent, she knew that Trumpers had done the dirty deed and did not raise any objections, but Trumpers was the Brains behind it (see post 'Socio-Political Context Of The North Wales Mental Health Services In The 1980s').
Trumpers's crowning achievement before Thatch gave her a peerage was becoming Mayor of Cambridge. Trumpers had a great many fingers in a great many pies in Cambridge. She was 'involved with' single mothers, teenaged delinquents (so how did you get to know Savile then Trumpers?), the insane who didn't know what was good for them, the NHS and Addenbrookes Hospital, the Social Services Committee and the Leys School, where her husband was Headmaster. Trumpers had been a magistrate but was obliged to resign for reasons which do not add up. I suspect that Trumpers hasn't been entirely honest regarding the reasons for her departure from the bench.
Trumpers was also mates with Lord Rab Butler, who was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1956-77. Butler had previously held numerous Gov't positions over a period of many years, including that of Home Secretary, 1957-62, under Harold Macmillan. When Butler was Home Secretary, he established the Home Office Research Unit, which subsequently funded so much research at Cambridge University.
Bring up another red from the cellar, one of our mates is Home Secretary.
Butler was Chairman of the Conservative Party, 1959-61. Butler was Home Secretary and Party Chairman when it was all going off down at Cliveden, with Lord Astor, Jack Profumo, the teenaged call girls, the Russian spies and the unidentified members of the Royal Family (see post 'In Memoriam – Bronwen, Lady Astor'). Trumpers used to stay at Cliveden at the time and her mate Sally Norton was Bill Astor's first wife.
Anything to declare Trumpers?
Rab Butler was particularly concerned with education and legislation concerning the insane.
As if Trumpers's presence in Cambridge wasn't enough to blight the place, Tuppence and the fragrant Lady Mary Archer were cluttering up the city as well and they certainly weren't ones for keeping themselves to themselves (see post 'Tuppence And His Fragrant Wife').
Anyone for Krug and Shepherd's Pie? Tuppence is in the slammer for perjury, but rules are there for him to break, so the Home Office has kindly agreed to let him out to hold his parties. Don't mention Monica, the prostitute whom Tuppence paid to leave the country, who unfortunately died as a result of a car crash shortly before she was due to give evidence at Tuppence's trial.
The Home Office Research Unit Report states that Sir Anthony Bottoms's former boss, F.H. McClintock, who at the time was based at Edinburgh University's Dept of Criminology, led research investigating the Scottish Parole System, 1973-75; the institutional treatment of young offenders, 1971-75; children's hearings and the work of social workers in relation to children in trouble with the law, 1971-74.
Frederick Hemming McClintock was, from 1960, Assistant Director of Research at the University of Cambridge, Institute of Criminology and was Dean of the Faculty of Law, 1982-85. McClintock was a council member of the Scottish Association for Victim Support Schemes (SAVSS), and was a member of the Perks Committee on Criminal Statistics.
McClintock died in 1994 and his obituary for the Indie was written by one Anthony Bottoms.
Bottoms stated that McClintock, who was Professor of Criminology, Edinburgh University 1974-94, began life as an orphan but was fortunate to be fostered by a loving Unitarian couple in South London. He was educated at Colfe's Grammar School and the LSE. Immediately after graduation, McClintock was recommended by Morris Ginsberg, the sociologist and philosopher, to Leon Radzinowicz, who was then seeking a research officer for the fledgling Department of Criminal Science at Cambridge. McClintock remained at Cambridge for 25 years, first in the Dept of Criminal Science and from 1960 as one of the founding staff members of the new Institute of Criminology, the first major interdisciplinary department of criminology to be established in a British university.
McClintock was twice Acting Director of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology (1962-63 and 1972-73). He was elected a founding Fellow of Churchill College in 1962.
In 1974 McClintock moved to the newly created Chair of Criminology at Edinburgh University. He persuaded the University in 1983 to create the Centre for Criminology and the Social and Philosophical Study of Law, of which he was twice the Director, 1983-86, 1989-92. McClintock was also elected Dean of the Faculty of Law, 1982-85.
One can imagine Bottoms's eyes misting over as he wrote that obituary, explaining that 'Other personal memories that his death have brought to mind include watching him interview Borstal boys with a very real empathy, based on his own disadvantaged background; and joining him and his wife, Franca, on summer outings with their large and boisterous family. Derick McClintock was, emphatically, not one of those social scientists who have forgotten how to be human.'
McClintock was born an orphan, but he was adopted into a good family. If he did emphasise with the borstal boys, he never got round to detailing the horrors that the staff of the borstals as well as other people were inflicting upon them, even if McClintock was not one of the bastards of social science.
At Cambridge, Bottoms worked at the new Institute of Criminology under the guidance of Sir Leon Radzinowicz, who was the founding Director of the Institute. Radzinowicz was born in Lodz, Poland and studied law at the Universities of Paris and Geneva. He then studied for a doctorate at the University of Cracow. During this time, he spent a year studying under Enrico Ferri at the Institute of Criminology in Rome. Radzinowicz moved to England in 1938, having been granted funding by the Polish Ministry of Justice to study the English legal system, 'took refuge' in the Law Dept at Cambridge University when he realised what Hitler was doing in Europe and remained at Cambridge for the rest of his life.
Radzinowicz was Director of the Department of Criminal Science, University of Cambridge, 1949-59. In 1959, he founded the Cambridge Institute of Criminology and in the same year Radzinowicz became the first Wolfson Professor of Criminology. Radzinowicz became a fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, fellow of the British Academy and was a member of the Athenaeum. The Athenaeum is the club of choice for academics and Top Doctors. Jimmy Savile joined after being introduced by Cardinal Basil Hume. Radzinowicz also liked hanging out at Brown's Hotel over tea and toasted teacakes.
Radzinowicz's obituary provides a considerable amount of information regarding the state of criminology in the UK when these intellectual giants were building their reputations and their empires. We are told that: 'Criminology in England had, until the arrival of these emigrés [Hermann Mannheim and Radzinowicz], been a minority interest of the medical profession. It was seen as having little relevance to penal policy and less to forensic aspects of criminal justice.
Mannheim, at the LSE became the "father" of modern English criminology. Without his teaching in the 40s and 50s, the present generation of academic criminologists would not exist. But he was a proud man who never entirely abandoned the formalities of his youth, when he had been a Prussian officer and judge; he lacked the social skills to give the subject the public legitimacy crucial to its survival; he upset so many people that he was never to have the professorial accolade.
In 1957, the Conservative home secretary, RA Butler, approached London University about establishing an institute of criminology; Mannheim was not even consulted. At a private lunch given by the Vice-Chancellor, the Principal, Douglas Logan, dismissed Mannheim's claims in a single sentence, but praised Radzinowicz, whom he knew well as a fellow Fellow of Trinity. The lunch was attended by the under secretary of state at the Home Office and the Secretary of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, on which Radzinowicz had served.
Many in London believed that the whole thing had been a stitch-up and the man with the needle was Logan. It will never be possible to know why the Vice-Chancellor did not acknowledge, let alone reply, to Butler's letter until prompted by the Home Secretary's private office. Did Radzy know what was going on behind the academic arras? It seems inconceivable that he did not, but the Old Fox, another of his nicknames, would have been far too wily to have left the least incriminating scent.
Mannheim wasted a disproportionate amount of energy in his retirement expressing his hatred of the "upstart Pole"; this degenerated into such an obsession that any former pupil who visited Cambridge was re-categorised as an "unperson". By 1959 the Institute was established in Cambridge. Radzinowicz became the first Professor of Criminology in Britain and some of Her Majesty's judges began to accept invitations to contribute to the institute's seminars.
Radzinowicz had carved a niche in the Law Faculty and, by 1948, he had his fellowship at Trinity. By 1949, he was appointed a member of the Gowers Commission on capital punishment'.
With regard to Radzy's prolific output, the obituarist tells us that 'Not that they were the result of only one man's labour down the years. Radzy's enemies have ascribed to his various co-workers the greater part of particular volumes. For all that his mind ranged the horizons of the subject quick as a falcon's eye, his individual writings were probably not outstanding.
His membership of the Gowers Commission stood him in good stead, for he made friends in the Home Office and in the shadows of the political establishment. Trinity and the Athenaeum came in handy for such things and lesser, and younger, mortals got the toasted teacakes. He was never short of money.
In 1966, there was a major scandal following the escape of the Soviet spy George Blake, who had just been sentenced to 42 years' imprisonment. The Labour Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, appointed Earl Mountbatten to report. Radzy's seat on the Advisory Council on the penal system led to his becoming Chairman of the sub-committee that considered Mountbatten's proposals for maximum security prisons in 1967-8. He came out in favour not of Mountbatten's idea of a concentration of high risk prisoners in one place but of the preferred Home Office option of dispersal.
Mountbatten was furious, which must have troubled Radzy, since he was totally sycophantic about royalty; the history of the dispersal policy has been the unmitigated failure its critics predicted. Perhaps, knowing the tide, he judged it better not to go against it. Yet, from his introduction to a book by Richard Sparks in 1971, he clearly saw what was happening in the English prison system and made few bones about it.
In 1986, he spoke at a reception in Lincoln's Inn to mark the publication of the final volume of his History (the Conservative Home Secretary [Douglas Hurd] was the principal guest) and his asides made little secret of contempt in which he held Thatcherite social policies and the mess of British society, never mind its prisons. By this time, he lived in Philadelphia.
His knighthood came in 1970. At last he could feel on equal terms with those senior civil servants whom he had assiduously cultivated down the years, although his heart had been set on a peerage. He was not to be presented in their Lordships' house, but his retirement dinner was unforgettable.
For many years, Cambridge held regular conferences on criminology and these had become feudal gatherings at which fealty was paid to a liege lord; except that a number of young squires had begun to have their own show, what was to be the York deviancy symposium.
In the paranoid climate of British universities, Radzy was genuinely fearful of the activities of these leftist critics of orthodox criminology and the establishment. Unfortunately, quite a few of them were at his retirement dinner during a conference. Congratulatory messages were read out like wedding telegrams while Radzy, surrounded by the senior home civil service…As he rose to speak, some young squires made an ostentatious exit, but it was not his style to notice such things.
He was not always good at human relations but there was, in his retirement, a mellowness about him. Some thought it stemmed from guilt, long overdue, for the appalling way in which he had treated junior colleagues.
Carel Weight's portrait of him as a young man conveyed through the eyes a fierce, almost vulpine, impression of a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. He would have been at home in the courts of Renaissance Italy. It was not in his nature to be a tyrant, for he had too much humanity; he was just uncommonly ill-tempered, especially when he thought that he had been thwarted, when his behaviour degenerated to the level of any departmental bully. He despised weakness in others and respected those with the courage to stand up to his tantrums.
In old age, Radzy was forgiving, even to Mannheim, in a generous tribute in the Dictionary of National Biography; Mannheim would never have done the same for him. Those of us whom he described in his account of the events of 1957 as "still young, but gifted and enthusiastic… eager to leave a mark on the future development of the discipline" had a lot to put up with in the years of his ascendancy.
So if one was being beaten and raped in Bryn Estyn or had been banged up in prison as the result of a corrupt deal between a gang of paedophiles and their mates in high places, it was this group of selfish, warring, complete bastards who spent their time conducting personal vendettas against each other, or getting pissed at High Table and in the Athenaeum while beating a path to a knighthood, upon whom you had to depend to report upon the conditions of the institution in which you were incarcerated or whether the criminal justice system and law were working as they should.
My how things haven't changed.
Bottoms was a member of the Home Office's Research and Advisory Group on the Long-term Prison System, 1984-90 and on three occasions acted as a Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons N Ireland Affairs Committee for its inquiries on prison-related matters, 1998; 2003-4; 2007. He was appointed by the Scottish Gov't to write a report on the structure and content of criminological research in Scotland and this report led directly to the establishment in 2005 of the inter-university Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research.
Bottoms has collaborated with, supervised, or taught, a number of other notable criminologists, including David Garland, Alison Liebling, Richard Sparks, John Pratt and Mike Nellis.
In 2001 Bottoms picked up his knighthood. There was a glut of honours dispensed in 2001, the year after the publication of the cover-up which was the Waterhouse Report, as the immediate fury regarding such an obvious rigged scam had dissipated a little bit. I have no idea whether Bottoms's K was given in that spirit, it wouldn't surprise me if it was, Bottoms must have a mountain of shit on a great many people.
In April 2018 Bottoms and his colleague Dr Jo Parsons conducted a Review on behalf of the Sentencing Council regarding how the Council can best exercise its statutory functions.
Someone who had spent years at Bangor University sought refuge at the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 2003 – Professor Roy King. I didn't know Roy King, he had departed from Bangor by the time that I began working as a social scientist there, but he hadn't long gone and the memories of Roy King were still raw. I heard a great deal about Roy King. Not from members of staff, I suspect that he was such a nasty piece of work that no-one dared speak of him, but swathes of students past and present and a few retired staff were frank in their opinion that he was the most unpleasant, vindictive, bullying, unscrupulous man that Bangor had ever entertained. Which is quite some accolade. I wondered for a long time why such evil should exist within a criminology team at Bangor until the penny dropped. It's the paedophiles' friends again. I met students past and present who's projects and theses had involved them interviewing sex offenders, visiting bail hostels, liaising with the Probation Service, the mental health services and the social services. The heart of those who had facilitated the trafficking ring. Some of those students seemed to have been put in danger in terms of being left alone with potentially dangerous offenders and I marvelled at how some of the work had ever found its way past an ethics committee.
It did clarify a mystery that I came across in 2002 though. During the weeks when I was in the Hergest Unit in that year – just before the paedophiles' friends had yet another go at imprisoning me on the basis of their perjury – I noticed that not only had the wards at the Hergest Unit become even more dangerous and not only were the staff even more abusive and neglectful, but that there were hardly any qualified permanent staff there. None of the staff would tell the patients their full names, neither would they wear their identity badges and they simply referred to each other as 'nurses'. They weren't, there were hardly any qualified nurses there, virtually all staff were nursing assistants, who were casual labour hired from the nursing bank. I watched carefully and I noticed that on a number of occasions, there was not one qualified nurse on duty. Which is of course unlawful. Assaults on patients by staff were occurring, threats and aggression towards the patients from staff were routine and I sustained injuries as a result of an assault by four Angels. I was prevented from reporting the matter to the police, I was repeatedly lied to and one member of staff external to the ward who was most concerned at what was happening on that ward, Taliesin Ward, was banned by the NW Wales NHS Trust authorities from contacting me and threatened with dismissal if he did so. See my post 'Who Is In Need Of Restraining? for some of the details. Another patient told me that he witnessed a female patient sexually assaulted by male staff in the guise of 'restraint'.
I am no stranger to abusive Top Docs and Angels, but one thing really surprised me, which was that one of the bank 'nurses' witnessing the thuggery and assisting in preventing me as well as other patients from reporting assaults on us by staff was it transpired a postgraduate student from Bangor University. In my experience, students from Bangor were usually among those being threatened and harassed by the mental health services. I then discovered that this young woman was doing an MSc in Criminology no less. With a Professor Roy King.
Perhaps Kate Madden would now like to tell the world why she regularly worked shifts on a locked ward in the Hergest Unit and stood by saying nothing as she witnessed patients threatened, assaulted, injured, refused visitors and indeed all contact with the outside world until they had agreed to drop their complaints against staff. Oh and Kate – why did you disconnect the ward phone when I tried to telephone a friend to tell them that I had just been violently assaulted by four staff and I was now injured and was being prevented from reporting the matter to the police? Then there was the statement that you subsequently gave to the police after Alun Davies et al conspired to have me jailed. It wasn't true and the case against me collapsed. Ah – the other patient who had been assaulted by the staff on your watch Kate. The young Muslim man who sat on the floor crying 'please don't hurt me again?'
MSc in Criminology??? Where exactly were your ethics during the time that you worked at the Hergest Unit? By the way Kate, look at some of the inspection reports for the Hergest while you were employed there as a hired thug. Patients were dying. I understand that there had even been deaths on the ward. Then there was the elderly lady who set fire to herself ON THE WARD. How exactly did these things happen Kate? Would you now like to belatedly make a statement about what you witnessed Bethan Roberts, Sian Ruth Lloyd, Dave Wood and Michelle Shaw doing to patients? Why did so many female patients wake up to find 'nurse' Dave Wood in their bedrooms with them, alone, with no good reason, in the middle of the night? Er – four of us at least had that experience and complained didn't we? Only to be told that we had assaulted staff and would now be charged. The witnesses to the assaults being Wood and his colleagues.
Another one of Roy King's postgrads was the vile Dr Denise Baker-McClearns. Who spent years doing everything she could to intimidate me when she was one of my neighbours, then moved on to intimidating other people. Denise made allegations that a local man had molested her daughter. There was no evidence, the offence was said to have taken place years previously, but at least it split the man's marriage up and made his alcohol problem a lot worse. The mental health services then housed him next to a pub in Bethesda. What happened? He was found dead of course, what else was the outcome going to be. I obviously escaped lightly, Denise only told everyone that I was a danger to their children. God forbid what she'd have said if I'd been in possession of a penis, I'd have been in prison years ago.
Denise was married to a children's social worker on Anglesey. That's the Anglesey which had a major problem with the social workers facilitating the abuse of the kids.
Denise had a career in the people business as well. She worked in mental health! Denise – after a great struggle because she isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer – finished a degree in psychology at Bangor University, did whatever it was that she did with Roy King and then decided that she would help the mad. She was sacked from at least two jobs after she was deemed to be a danger to vulnerable people (imagine how I laughed when I heard about that, if only the poor sod who died after being on the receiving end of Denise had survived to know that as well) and then bagged a job with the Gov't adviser, leading Top Doc, Manchester University's Louis Appleby, as a member of his team carrying out the National Confidential Inquiry Into Suicide and Homicide By People With Mental Illness. Denise departed from Appleby's team under a huge cloud as well and then rocked up at Warwick University's Dept of Primary Care, where she was sacked within months. Denise then embarked on a new career as a food blogger and a manager of a cafe for the homeless/needy.
Louis didn't raise the alarm and get Denise removed from circulation then.
Louis might be interested to know that I was told recently that the dreadful Denise was yet another gift to me and Brown from the security services. I can understand why the security services might have wanted a mole near Roy King and Louis Appleby, but not only did Denise cause me far more grief than she caused them, but she obviously wasn't in the least bit effective, because Roy King bagged a Chair at Cambridge and Appleby has been appointed to more and more Gov't roles and positions of responsibility.
Note to MI5: If I ensure that I always sport red lipstick as warning plumage, talk with a cockney accent and say fuck even more than I do at present, cheat, lie, steal and harass people so badly that they move house to get away from me, would you pay me whatever you were paying the toxic cow Denise? If you employ me, I'll actually get rid of the trash for you, unlike Denise who simply joined them.
Another member of Roy King's merry band was Preet Nijar, 'lecturer in criminology'. Preet sported red lipstick as warning plumage as well. Preet Nijar was so excruciatingly embarrassing that Bangor University were spending good money on lawyers in an attempt to try and work out how they could get rid of her without the University disappearing in a mushroom cloud. My info re Preet came from students, because the legal nightmare which was Preet was far too hot for the staff to touch. Not all the criminology students were like Kate Madden or Denise Baker-McClearns, lots of them were great and I knew a number of them very well. It was they who filled me in on the extraordinary excesses of Preet Nijar.
Preet Nijar had managed to have a same sex relationship with one of her postgrads. Except that Preet was at the same time in a heterosexual relationship with another criminologist, but not one who worked at Bangor. For added excitement, at some point the relationship involved all three of them. As far as that goes, it's their own business. Except that for some reason Preet and the man involved fell out with the postgrad and things got nasty. The postgrad began legal action against the University, alleging lack of duty of care. Nijar denied any improper behaviour and denounced the postgrad as mad and a liar. The postgrad then produced photos of all three of them in bed together. The University was left to pick up the crap. Nijar refused to resign and called on the assistance of the union to keep her in her job. Nijar's male partner then arrived on University premises and told the postgrad to shut her mouth or he'd shut it for her. The Professor of Sociology was left to deal with this thug in order to protect students. Then Nijar and her partner managed to manipulate a few people into believing that they'd been mistreated by Bangor University, so those people began circulating rumours blaming innocent parties for the now unholy mess.
It went on for years and the last that I heard, Preet Nijar still held some sort of post at Bangor but they'd stopped paying her a salary.
So to all those who marvelled at the saga involving Preet Nijar and blamed the senior sociologists for the mess – no, it wasn't their fault. Nijar and her partner were nuts and nasty, Roy King positively attracted such poisonous people and then departed for Cambridge, leaving Bangor to pick up the pieces in the face of a corrupt union rep who knew damn well that Nijar should have been dismissed on multiple grounds.
I think we do need to ask exactly what criteria the Cambridge Institute of Criminology are using to appoint senior academics…
There was another academic who had formerly worked at Bangor who, like Roy King, had never been forgotten on account of his alleged backstabbing, cheating and one upmanship, Ralph Fevre. Ralph Fevre left for dear old Cardiff, the former home of Howard Jones and Mark Drakeford. Ralph is now Professor of Social Sciences at Cardiff University. Ralph recently wrote a blog about bullying in the workplace and the need to value individuals! Some of Ralph's former colleagues would I imagine be entertained by that blog, but then Cardiff University might have something to say to Ralph if he wrote a blog about how to behave like a total scumbag and bag a Chair at Cardiff. By the way Ralph, do you remember when I wrote that book proposal years ago and one of your mates recommended that I should send it to you in your capacity as the commissioning editor of the series? And you never replied? So weeks later I wrote to you again and it was a case of ooh dear, I forgot about your proposal and now the deadline's gone! Ah well never mind Ralph, I was told that you were a cheating bastard who had done it deliberately because Cardiff didn't want anything high quality coming out of early career researchers at Bangor. Fortunately University of Wales Press were sufficiently impressed that they offered me a contract anyway and they subsequently published my book outside of the series which you ensured only included volumes written by your mates or people working at Cardiff.
The Home Office Research Unit Report lists work with offenders in areas of the UK where it is now acknowledged that there were paedophile gangs in operation at the time of the research. T.F. Marshall investigated criminal subcultures in an unidentified town in central Lancashire, 1973-74. Dr M.S. Folkhard studied the treatment of offenders in terms of probation aftercare, borstal and homeless aftercare in London, Sheffield, Dorset, Liverpool and Staffordshire, 1971-77. Rob Evans, who was the senior manager in Gwynedd Social Services who presided over the abuse of both children and mental health patients in the 1980s and 90s had previously been a team leader in Dorset (see post 'I Know Nuzzing…').
Folkhard also investigated Community Service Orders, 1972-74, in Durham, Kent, south west Lancashire, inner London and Nottingham. Furthermore Folkhard researched Day Training Centres in Glamorgan, Liverpool, inner London and Sheffield, 1972-75.
While Folkhard was doing that, George Thomas and others were busy in Glamorgan.
Folkhard and colleagues in 1966 had produced 'Probation Research – A Report' for the Home Office Research Unit
The Home Office Research Unit funded work on the influence of narcotics on crime for the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, to be presented at a conference of the Council of Europe, Strasbourg in Nov 1974. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was packed to the rafters with paedophiles' friends. In 1972, Sir Philip Myers, who was the Chief Constable of North Wales, 1974-82, sat on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Myers's Drug Squad officers were endemically corrupt, they were facilitating the large scale dealing of Class A drugs whilst planting such drugs on hippies and students who were blowing dope or indeed on anyone else whom they wanted to fit up. Myers also knew all about the paedophile ring and ignored it, except for to prosecute the victims and witnesses if they complained. After Myers retired he became an HM inspector of Constabulary. Read more about Myers's eccentric ways in my post 'Top Of The Cops'.
Professor R.A. Parker of Bristol University's Dept of Social Work and Administration was funded by the Home Office Research Unit to research the operation of Part I of the Children and Young Persons Act 1974 between 1971 and 1974. Bristol University hosted a collection of people who assisted Dafydd and the gang and both D.G.E. Wood and Lord David Hunt were alumni of Bristol. Wood was part of the trafficking ring and Hunt spent years at the Welsh Office concealing their crimes.
Other people and studies listed in the Home Office Research Unit Report as having been funded by them included:
Dr W.H. Hammond – Studies of Criminal Histories, 1962-74.
Dr C. Banks and Stephen Brody – Survey of the Male Prison Population, 1971-74.
C.P. Nuttall – carried out a number of parole studies between 1968 and 1974.
Joy Mott – studies on the Boys in Approved Schools and the use of opiates in prisons and psychiatric hospitals.
Elizabeth Field, W.H. Hammond and Prof J. Tizard, 'Thirteen Year Old Boys in Approved Schools in 1962', published in 1971.
A New Zealander, Jack Tizard spent most of his professional life in England where, as a psychologist, he worked 'at the boundaries of psychology, medicine, education and the social sciences'. His work on alternatives to institutional care in the 1950s and 60s 'underpinned the subsequent development of 'ordinary life' models for children and adults with intellectual disabilities'. Tizard's approach was 'characterised by a commitment to using high research standards to address important social problems, ensuring through his extensive advisory activities that the results of research were available to practitioners and policy-makers'.
The University of Kent has The Tizard Centre, named in honour of the great man, concerned with learning disabilities and community care.
Helen Sylvia Anthony published 'Depression, Psychopathic Personality and Attempted Suicide in a Borstal Sample' in 1973. I think the very title of that work tells us all we need to know, it will have been manna from heaven to the paedophiles and their friends.
Nancy Goodman – Sentencing of Women, 1972-74; long term follow up of borstal girls, 1973-74.
The Home Office's Research Unit Report also listed Nancy Goodman and Jean Price's 1967 Study of Female Offenders.
Funds were made available to the Runnymede Trust, 1973-74, to conduct 'An Analysis of the Coloured Population of Great Britain'. A great many paedophiles' friends found themselves magnetically attracted to the Runnymede Trust (see previous posts).
So that is the story of how a Home Secretary in 1957 is still influencing policy today.
'Da Dafydd – a yw'r ŵyn wedi rhoi'r gorau i sgrechian?'
I have received an e mail from someone who has sent me information concerning Top Doctor Anthony Baker who some time ago found himself in hot water regarding his misconduct but was of course allowed to carry on practising by the GMC. I did know about Anthony Baker, furthermore he was one of the advisers who were involved with the seminars held after the Waterhouse Inquiry, at which Waterhouse's recommendations and their implementation were discussed. My reader commented that she found it worrying that there were so many perverts around. I'm not sure that there are. The generation of dreadful old politicians who were damaged beyond belief in brutal boys boarding schools and spent their adult lives molesting children has just about died out. The problem now is the hordes of people who knew about them or crimes relating to them who remained silent and continue to remain silent. The consequences of the Westminster Paedophile Ring and Dafydd et al are running down through generations, as so many people are acutely aware that they only bagged their current job/peerage by keeping quiet and toadying.
So here's another person, a Top Doctor, who was never obnoxious or abusive himself, but who remained silent in the face of those who were. Dr Webb, a GP latterly of Cricieth Health Centre. In 2005, after my lawyer demonstrated that I had been threatened, assaulted and injured by mental health staff and that they had perjured themselves, the NW Wales NHS Trust were unable to continue their denials in the face of documentary evidence and witness testimonies. Their answer was to flatly refuse me all NHS treatment, to threaten me with arrest if I entered Trust properties and to refuse to make any alternative arrangements for me.
I had recently registered with Dr Webb, who seemed very pleasant, admitted that the mental health services left much to be desired but didn't believe that I had been refused all NHS treatment. So he kindly, in front of me, rang up the NW Wales NHS Trust to reassure me that I had 'misunderstood'. Medwyn Williams, the newly appointed manager of the Hergest Unit, confirmed to Dr Webb that I had indeed been refused all NHS treatment on the orders of the Trust CEO and Chair. Medwyn finished the phone call by telling Dr Webb that 'mistakes were made but we'll never treat her again'. After the phone call, Dr Webb looked a bit nonplussed and said 'its not very good really is it'. No, it was disgusting and completely illegal. Medwyn then sent Dr Webb a letter in which he confirmed the contents of the phone call. I saw the letter but didn't keep a copy. I have been told that the legal ramifications were such that Dr Webb threw the letter away.
I don't think that Dr Webb works at Cricieth anymore. Wherever he now is, could he please come forward and admit that the legacy of a paedophile gang resulted in me being unlawfully denied all NHS secondary care and that this was endorsed at the highest level – by Dr Brian Gibbons, the Welsh Gov'ts Health Minister, who also refused to investigate my complaints.
When Medwyn Williams held that phone call with Dr Webb, the NW Wales NHS Trust had the highest suicide rate for women of any area in England and Wales except for Camden. Patients were suing and writing to the Secretary of State for Wales such was the chaos. The Hergest Unit had virtually imploded and Medwyn Williams had been recently appointed after Alun Davies got up and left in a hurry when he realised that there were too many deaths to explain away. Medwyn Williams did not stay long as manager of the Hergest Unit. He had a nervous breakdown.
These are the consequences of serious organised crime. It needs dealing with.
I've been so busy on the blog that I haven't kept up with the news in detail, but I do know that the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Abuse have been guilty of a massive data breach and made public the names and other personal details of hundreds of victims. They have been clobbered with a huge fine and have apologised for breaching people's privacy. They've done rather worse than that. They've put the lives of all those people in danger. No-one seems to get this. We are not talking about sad men with arrested psycho-sexual development lurking on street corners. The phenomenon that IICSA is charged with investigating involved organised gangs of criminals with corrupt Top Docs, social workers, police officers, lawyers and judges on their payroll and they murdered witnesses. Please, just stop the IISCA now. Most of those who offered to give evidence have walked away in despair at the fuckwittery, the Chair is a former social worker who presided over the abuse of children herself and now they've put the lives of hundreds of witnesses in even greater danger. Just stop. You are idiots, you were the ones who caused the problem in the first place, you really do not have the answers. You might as well install Dafydd as the Chair.
I did see a little bit about Cliff, who I think has won a big damages settlement against the BBC. There has been much sobbing from Cliff and his celeb friends at the trauma of it all, in contrast to the media who are seething at the thought that they cannot name people accused of sex offences before they have been tried.
Cliff, the BBC shouldn't have done it, people are innocent until proven guilty and the whole stunt was obviously designed to embarrass you. However you were in your other house in Portugal at the time and I'm not sure that the tomfoolery of the BBC on that morning was really so traumatic for you and your friends that it was worth a few hundred grand in compensation. No-one seems to really believe the allegations against you, you obviously have lots of good mates around you which is what matters at such times. It's not as though you're going to be subjected to vigilante attacks or you are going to lose your job.
As for the media, do you think that you might have brought this on yourselves? Your behaviour has been so bad, just so bad – the worst examples that I can think of at the moment are the treatment of Charlotte Church's mum, Milly Dowler's mum and dad and Max Mosley – that people are no longer sympathetic to the reptiles as 'Private Eye' always called them demanding their right to hurl poison at whoever they want. Did any of you ever name Savile? No. You had the evidence, but you absolutely did not name him. Instead you continued to run ingratiating stories about his charidee work. You turned your fire on Charlotte Church's mum and two people who's daughter had been murdered. Neither did any of you publish anything about what was happening to me and others in north Wales. We weren't fantasists, there were witnesses and I've got 10,000 documents. I know at least one other person in north Wales who's lawyer extracted a similar number of documents from his records over a period of nearly 30 yrs and as with mine, there is written evidence of wrongdoing on nearly every page. Some of the same signatures and even the same phrases appear on the records of both of us.
For what it's worth, the consequences for most people – particularly men accused of sex offences – of being named in relation to crimes are usually so negative that I think that people probably should be granted anonymity until they are found guilty. The MO of the paedophile gang in north Wales was to drag anyone who complained through the courts on serious charges in the knowledge that the damage to their reputations would be such that even if they were found not guilty, they were stuffed anyway. Naming innocent people was a Godsend to Dafydd. Was Dafydd ever named? Not until I began this blog, no he wasn't. Never. Not once. But scores of people who had complained about him or his associates were, some of whom died in prison before their cases were ever heard.
My solicitor in Bangor told me years ago that the magistrates considered that the offenders appearing in the local press was an even more effective punishment than the sentences that the Court imposed. It was certainly enough to stop most people daring to complain about Dafydd et al. Again and again, I was told 'he knows things about me and he'll tell people'. I was warned myself that he'd do that to me. Indeed Dafydd and his associates did, repeatedly. Confidentiality was broken again and again and even better than that, Dafydd et al just made things up as they went along. Indeed Judge Huw Daniel made things up about me in Court and they were subsequently published in the local paper as fact. Cliff doesn't live in Bangor and work as a teacher, so Cliff being named n shamed when nothing has been proved against him is not going to cause much harm, but other people aren't so well insulated as Cliff.
10,000 documents everyone. Detailing the most serious crime on the part of professional people in senior positions from right across the UK over a period of decades. But you did not want to know.
The irony is that it was Fran Unsworth whom the BBC wheeled out to talk to the media following Cliff's victory. Fran appeared on this blog a while ago. She is someone who knew about the crimes detailed on this blog but who never breathed a word.
As for the problem of people keeping quiet to protect their friends: I do not have one scrap of evidence that Cliff Richard has ever broken any law in his life. But Cliff has spoken openly of his close friendship with Cilla. Cilla spoke openly of her friendship with Professor Geoffrey Chamberlain. Geoffrey Chamberlain definitely was someone who spent years concealing a paedophile ring in north Wales and a paedophile ring in south London, of which at least one of his friends and colleagues was a member. Cilla was a private patient at St George's Hospital Medical School. The secretary with only the most basic qualifications and education who dealt with the private patients – who's salary was paid for by the NHS – was a very rich woman. Inexplicably rich, as were her young adult children.