The headmaster of a leading boarding school has acknowledged that a failure to root out child abuse has had a "profound and damaging" impact on the lives of former pupils.
Jonathan Anderson, who took over at £35,00-a-year Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh in 2018, said yesterday that his experience of hearing and giving evidence at the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry had taught him that victims remained troubled by their experiences "for ever".
His remarks came after the inquiry heard that his predecessor, Andrew Hunter, had become aware of some behaviour by a housemaster in 1998 but failed to take action. The alleged abuser, James Rainy Brown, took his own life amid an imminent police investigation into allegations made against him during his 52-year career at Merchiston.
Hunter had admitted in an email in 2014 to having known about the housemaster's behaviour involving "skinny-dipping" with children, saying it was "not news to him about JRB", the inquiry previously heard.
It was also claimed at the inquiry that Rainy Brown punished first-year pupils by ordering them to strip naked and sit in a bath of cold water while he watched. Some ex-pupils alleged they were badly beaten and touched inappropriately by the teacher, while one had written a journal entry claiming he had been raped by him.
Marion Crawford, a member of the Care Inspectorate, said Rainy Brown—known by members of the school as JRB—had still been driving the school bus as late as 2012, adding: "They just kept him around, it was as though they were not willing to let him go to pasture." She had eventually told Hunter that action would have to be taken against the teacher, who was suspended pending investigation.
Gareth Baird, chairman of the board of governors, described the "protracted" debate surrounding a £1 million donation Rainy Brown had left the school in his will, which was resolved "when the police gave us details about this appalling behaviour". Baird said: "It became very clear that we could neither accept the bequest nor have a memorial for him."
Baird, who attended the school himself in the early 1970s, told the inquiry he had "never witnessed any aberrant behaviour from [Rainy Brown] whatsoever". He said: "These were highly respected teachers and I think perhaps in those days... was it more accepted or not? I don't know, but I never saw it in my time at school, ever."
Baird recalled one incident when another member of staff had given his back "a bit of a rub" after he had suffered a sports injury and said: "It wasn't aggressive. But I was one of the fortunate ones who would just shake that off. I completely understand that some of my peers, it would have had a very serious impact on them."
The headmaster said the process of listening to evidence about the school over the past three weeks had made him "think very, very carefully about what we currently do".
He said: "To be prompted to ask those questions has been very powerful and useful. The other thing that I'd take away from the last three weeks is that if we don't get it right it can have such a profound and damaging effect on a person's life—it's an experience that they take with them for ever."*
"I don't think you really understand that until you hear it, if you've not been in that position yourself."
*The board would later appoint—as its Child Protection Officer and liaison—a 34-year-old biology teacher who sent explicit video of herself to pupils and had sex with multiple pupils.
