Boys as young as six allegedly beaten and sexually assaulted at Roman Catholic school in Yorkshire, inquiry into child abuse hears

Priests at a leading Roman Catholic school abused boys as young as six, including beatings and sexual assaults, the national inquiry into child abuse has heard.

Former pupils at Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire gave evidence to a hearing in London on Wednesday, and written statements by other former pupils were read.



Many of the allegations centred on two priests, Piers Grant-Ferris who was jailed for two years in 2006 for 20 counts of indecent assault on boys in his care, and another priest referred to as RCF4.

One witness who spent 11 years at Ampleforth College and its preparatory school Gilling Castle from 1965 to 1976, said RCF4 had treated him “disgracefully”. “He was physically violent from the outset… I was physically and psychologically abused,” he told the hearing. RCF4 had been “nasty, cruel and physically violent towards me”.

In his second year, when the witness was eight years old, he said Grant-Ferris would walk behind boys sitting at long refectory tables for meals and select children for beatings. “If he stopped behind you and tapped you, then you knew it was you. If he stopped behind someone else and tapped them, one thing that disturbs me to this day is the feeling of relief that it wasn’t going to be me,” he said.

Once he was beaten in the chapel confessional by the priest after being told to take off his clothes. “It was always with his hands … and his hands would always linger on one’s bare bottom after each smack.”

On another occasion, the witness said Grant-Ferris told him to undress and lie face down on the priest’s bed. “He proceeded to take my temperature rectally. I didn’t even know people could have their temperatures taken rectally, I’d only ever had a thermometer put in my mouth. I begged him not to do it, because I didn’t know what was happening, but he continued anyway. I think technically that was a form of rape.”

Grant-Ferris, the son of a Tory peer, was “the full authority figure” the witness told the hearing. At the school, there were “sexual overtones and currents all the time”, he added.

After he left school, the witness suffered a “total psychological collapse” which lasted seven or eight years. “I wasn’t able to do anything, I couldn’t function.”

He said he believed that Basil Hume, who was abbot of Ampleforth Abbey for 13 years until appointed archbishop of Westminster in 1976, had been aware of abuse at the schools. “I have no doubt he knew exactly what was going on at the time.”

Another witness, who was sent to Gilling Castle at the age of six, told the hearing that he and other boys would cry under their blankets at night as monks wearing long black robes patrolled the dormitories. Grant-Ferris was known as “Pervy Piers” among the children, he said.

According to yet another statement, Grant-Ferris was “handsome and aristocratic” with a perpetual mood of excitement.

This witness also described how another teacher had put his hand down the boy’s trousers “to check my breathing” when he was auditioning for the choir. As a result of his experiences, he said: “I became a very quiet child who didn’t talk to people much.”

The inquiry also heard from a female former pupil at Ampleforth College, who left the school in 2010. She said that a music teacher, Dara De-Cogan, had sexually abused her over a period of years. De-Cogan was jailed for 28 months earlier this year pleading guilty to 10 charges of engaging in sexual activity while in a position of trust.

The witness said that he had groomed her from the age of 13, and his abuse resulted in her self-harming. “I thought I deserved to be punished somehow for what I was doing … [self-harming] gave me a sense of numbness.”

On some occasions, De-Cogan gave her marks out of 10 for oral sex, she said. “He would comment on it as if it was a piece of homework.”

Child protection procedures at Ampleforth were “very poor”, she said. Because of earlier convictions of monks, the college had an “obsessive emphasis on the completion of paperwork, but common sense and looking at what was in front of their faces - that went by the wayside.”

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse began a three-week hearing on Monday focusing on the Benedictine schools of Ampleforth and Downside. In some cases, abusers were permitted to stay in their posts and allowed to have contact with children and other vulnerable individuals, the hearing was told earlier this week.