American lawyers take on Catholic church at Mike Harding's former school

Last year I wrote about Mike Harding's involvement in a campaign for an apology from the Catholic church in the diocese of Salford for the physical and sexual abuse that took place at his grammar school, St Bede's, when he was there.

Mike did the interview partly out of frustration with a more traditional news outlet, the Manchester Evening News (MEN), which had been telling him that they would publish something on the subject for many weeks but which, for reasons best known to itself, had failed to do so. There were several people who'd attended the school at the newspaper. Who knows what was going on...

For some reason or other recent events at the BBC involving Jimmy Savile and Newsnight reminded me of it.

Fortunately, once this blog post was published it was picked up by a variety of other media and the MEN's position, such as it was, was over-run.

Soon afterwards I was contacted by an American law firm specialising in abuse cases against the Catholic church and was able to put it in touch with Paul Malpas, a businessman and blogger from Ireland who'd been writing about St Bede's for some time. As a result of his blog he has a network of St Bede's old boys all over the world who'd also suffered at the hands of Monsignor Thomas Duggan (above, centre) and others at the school during the 50s and 60s, and who had got in touch when he started to write about what had happened to him.

And that was all, for a while. The wheels of justice, it's sometimes said, turn slowly.

Then last week, a combination of the abrupt announcement of Mike Harding's departure from BBC Radio 2's folk show after 15 years and the maelstrom of events that has engulfed the corporation about Jimmy Savile, made me think it may be time to find out what's going on in Salford?

"We have 15 claimants with actions against the diocese," said Jef McAllister, a lawyer with AO Advocates.

"We've written the pre-action letters notifying the church that we have a case and a very extensive one. The case is proceeding and the other side is writing back: we're hoping it will either come to a resolution or go to court. There's no suggestion that Salford is dragging its feet so far, although the institutional Catholic church doesn't rise to these cases very quickly, or with a great deal of compassion.

"Through Jeff Anderson this firm has a gigantic amount of experience doing similar work in the US. He wanted to expand internationally and you could say that we're his bulkhead in England. In addition to the Salford case we have five other possibles at the moment, including some inquiries this week that were probably prompted by the Jimmy Savile case. The Catholic church is involved in some of them.

"In Salford, we're getting the case together, getting the evidence straight. It wasn't just Duggan - other people at the school were involved. What quite often seems to happen in this country is that law firms will get started and get to grips with the details as they go along. But as we're the new kids on the block we wanted to show the full dimensions of the system that Duggan ran there.

"The abuse wasn't just an occasional thing for him: Duggan was systematic in the abuse of his power. He had what you might call 'feeders' who passed potential victims his way and he was vicious in kicking boys out of the school who might report him."

Is the BBC likely to face a similar case over Jimmy Savile who - like Duggan - is dead?

"It's inevitable. Essentially Jimmy Savile was having sex on BBC premises with children and there were people around who knew about it. There is an obvious institutional responsibility and it's not dissimilar to that of the Catholic church in Salford. I've heard lawyers on the radio say that they intend to sue the BBC and I think the BBC will react quite differently to the church when it happens."

Isn't this all going to rebound rather expensively on the licence-fee payer?

"In the first instance it would be an insurance company that pays. But it's not just the BBC that's involved. There's also Stoke Mandeville and that home for disturbed girls. The BBC has had the most publicity but Savile was ranging all over the land, able to convince everyone that he was an eccentric, nice guy. There was a  similar case recently in the US involving the Pennsylvania State University football team coach, Joe Paterno, and his deputy, Jerry Sandusky, who was just sentenced to jail.

"The positive outcome of all this, though, is that people now feel they'll be believed, people who've kept the shame and secrecy to themselves for years. The only thing that solves these problems in the long run is sunlight - being open about abuse - and the continued awareness of parents and kids, as well as people who might pass by in a corridor and wonder what's going on..."

The thing that's haunted me particularly about all of this appalling stuff with Savile is that there were children in care homes and elsewhere whose stories will never come out because their lives were blighted to such an extent that an existence that was already emotionally precarious came to a premature end. He deliberately chose children without proper adult supervision - substance abuse and suicide are often the result of a terrible childhood.

"Yes. In the Salford case that there were boys who committed suicide and some who are alcoholics - who never recovered emotionally. But a much wider point is that Duggan's victims were grammar school boys in a time and a place where, even if you were from a working class Catholic family, if you could get a place at St Bede's it was a passport to a different kind of a life. To university.

"When Duggan's victims decided to take themselves out of St Bede's - or Duggan kicked them out - no one would think of saying anything against the school or him. They would drop out and become construction workers. The results have been life long."

McAllister says that he doesn't have a precise idea how long it will take to achieve some kind of resolution for the old boys of St Bede's. "But within a year would be my estimate."

Meanwhile, here's a poem by Mike Harding on the subject, reprinted here with his permission.

Dead Man in Langho, Lancashire

There's no one dancing on your grave today, unless
This summer breeze fretting about your plot
Is counterfeit, shapeshifter, and is not
The wind but the troubled restless ghosts
Of those lost boys whose lives you stole.

They had no voice then in those howling days
In that palace of bad dreams, the college
Where your bloated, princely power held sway;
In those fear carpeted corridors, your tear-tapestried room,
Oak panelled oubliette, reeking of beeswax.
It was a Catholic Cockayne, sure, only Bosch
Could have dreamed up such a world.

You took their glass-clear souls
And dragged them silently crying -
Hypocrite priest, demonic spider, cassocked fraud -
To the torments of your own foul, stinking pit.

And at the monstrous altar's benediction,
In your princely pomp you stood, a pink-faced toad
Preened and pampered in your silver buckled shoes,
(And let us never forget
The powder for your shining dome)
In a wash of candlelight and frankincense,
And held the monstrance aloft
The servant of the Carpenter in gold
Embroidered thread and precious stones.
Far louder than the rest, you, Man of God,
Sang out in tuneless tenor from your throne
A cant of love and light, humility
And charity - turning litany into lies.

Forgiveness not my gift, I travelled here
Only to bear witness to those days;
And as I stand at your graveside,
Your name in stone telling no tales,
An old man, alone and hatless in the sun,
I see that there is no one in this place today,
Unless the summer whispers on the breeze
Are revenants, the wandering unquiet souls
Of those once beautiful lost boys:
Deacey, Larkin, Allen and the rest,
Who know no rest, are now one with the wind,
Back from the dead to dance upon your grave.

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Mike Harding takes on the Catholic church

"What really disgusts me," says Mike Harding, "is that the Bishop of Salford is more concerned with the insurers than with the victims. So far there are 57 individual cases of physical and sexual child abuse that we're aware of and if all of those cases went to court the church could stand to lose a lot of money. I think he's been told by the insurers not to make a proper apology."

He's talking about his schooldays at St Bede's College in Manchester, between 1955 and 1963, and about the scores - possibly hundreds - of former pupils, including himself, who were abused by a towering figure of authority there: its rector, Monsignor Thomas Duggan.

Duggan was at the school between 1950 and 1966, and for 16 years abused at will, according to his victims, who are now in their 50s and 60s. Then in 1966 he was suddenly removed from the school and sent to Langho, near Blackburn, in a transfer that was - bizarrely given the nature of his tenure - against the wishes of his parishioners, who were almost entirely in the dark about his attacks on his pupils.

"You wouldn't think of telling your parents," explains Harding, now 66. "They wouldn't have believed it. And then life for the boys who told would have been worse. It's a terrible thing not to be believed."

The diocese recently told a delegation of former pupils that, oddly, there appear to be no extant records about Duggan at all, although Harding believes that he died a couple of years after being removed from St Bede's.

According to Paul Malpas, a businessman based in Ireland who was in the year below Harding at school, Duggan "used to meet boys in the corridors, put his arms around them and rub his face into theirs, whilst asking 'are you being pure boy?'.

"On other more secluded meetings he would put his arms round boys and lean into them, rubbing his face and his body into theirs, groaning and moaning into their ears or sometimes, with the more naive boys, [he would] threaten them with expulsion from the school for nothing in particular, just to put the fear of god into them.

"As a punishment of last resort and this could be for failing a monthly Latin test or some such evil crime, a pupil would be sent up to Duggan. His preferred method of punishment was to tell the pupil to remove his clothing below his waist and stand naked in front of him whilst he spoke to the boy of his poor record. He would then either lean him over the arm of a sofa or put the lad over his knee and wallop him with a strap and at the same time fondling his rear end to presumably make the pupil more pliant."

Harding was one of the (slightly) luckier ones and was never sexually abused. "I don't know why - maybe he didn't fancy me. But I used to get a hammering from him physically. My best friend - who I've known since the age of five and went through school with - was [sexually abused]. I'm so angry about it all."

And with good reason. For although Harding moved on successfully into adult life, forging a career in music and comedy - these days he makes Radio Two's folk show, which is on at 7pm on Wednesdays - he says that the campaign with which he is involved, to get a fulsome apology from the church for what happened at St Bede's, is motivated largely by the knowledge that many of his former classmates' lives were irredeemably blighted by their experiences at Duggan's hands.

"There are two cases that I know of for sure that were terminal," says Harding. "There was one guy who threw himself under a train and another who died in a crack den in Manchester. Both were abused and it marked them for life. I went to university with the one who died of the overdose and we stayed friends afterwards. He would bring up the subject whenever school was mentioned. He messed up his life through alcoholism and then wound up on drugs."

Harding's involvement in the campaign began last year. "I was emailed by a friend in America, who'd been abused himself, about a blog that was being written by Paul Malpas. He'd had former St Bede's pupils writing to him from all over the world, saying that it had happened to them too over years and years."

But recent meetings with representatives from the diocese of Salford, which was directly responsible for the school at the time, have failed to produce a result. You can listen to a recording of the first meeting here.

At that meeting it was admitted that the church had long known what Duggan's time at St Bede's had involved. "Some of the boys who were abused by him had gone into the priesthood and so it was known about. But if these rumours were going around for so long, why was nothing done earlier?" asks Harding. "Father Barry O'Sullivan, who came as a representative of the diocese, said that he'd been waiting for it to come up for years."

Harding says that it's not the campaign group's intention to bring approbrium on the school, which is now an independent grammar that accepts girls and boys, and is no longer entirely run by priests - though there are several on its governing body, including the chairman.

"It's changed beyond all recognition," he says. "What I want is a full apology from the church in the same way that an apology was made for the industrial schools in Ireland."

"All these men have come forward after all these years," says Harding, "because they want the truth out. Many are not young men any more and they want some kind of closure. At the time they each thought they had been singled out because there was some defect in them. But it wasn't their fault and the church owes them an apology.

"What I've seen so far is a statement by the Bishop of Salford [see below] that makes it look as if the abuse is something that was 'reported' and 'alleged'. He's not actually acknowledged that it took place.

"What the church has always done is see this kind of abuse as being in breach of canon law, and dealt with it by moving priests around and putting them in safe houses. But in fact these were criminal acts that took place.

"I lost my religion when I was 14 because of the barbarity of that school, the hypocrisy of the priests - Duggan wasn't the only abuser - and because I had a theological problem with the notion of an omniscient creator who saw it all. I began questioning my faith because of physical abuse at school and it led me to question the whole of Christianity.

"I think what we've heard about so far may turn out to be the tip of an iceberg. If any other former pupils at St Bede's want to add their testimony they can contact Paul on malpas46@eircom.net."


* This is the text of an apology drafted by the Rt Rev Terence Brain, the Bishop of Salford, and originally intended for publication in the Manchester Evening News. "I am shocked and saddened by the complaints from some former pupils of St Bede’s College which have been brought to the attention of our Safeguarding Commission.  The complaints have been made against the late Monsignor Thomas Duggan and relate to the period of time from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, when St Bede’s was a diocesan school. Although it is not suggested that there was a culture of institutional abuse at St Bede’s, nevertheless the abusive behaviour which has been reported has no place within the Catholic Church.  I acknowledge and am deeply sorry for the pain and distress reported to have been suffered by those affected."

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