The Church Times news story of November 27 – ‘Makin was wrong, retired senior police officers say’ – surely vindicates the former safeguarding adviser of Ely Diocese, Yvonne Quirk.
The paper reported: ‘John’s Smyth’s abuse was properly referred to the police by the Church of England in 2013, retired senior police officers have told the Church Times. Their comments challenge the Makin review’s conclusion about the responses of the diocese of Ely, and of Lambeth Palace, in that year.’
The Makin report said in its summary of failures: ‘There was never a formal referral to Cambridgeshire Police.’
But three retired detectives with ‘extensive safeguarding experience’ told the Church Times that, ‘on the evidence presented in the report, a referral had properly been made by church authorities in 2013’.
In the Makin Review, Ms Quirk apologised to Smyth’s victims for telling one of them by email in May 2014 that she had ‘no power to compel agencies in South Africa (where Smyth was then residing) to respond to my concerns’.
She explained that her email followed a meeting with the Bishop of Ely where ‘we had agreed there was nothing more we could do unless a new lead came up from others working on the case’.
She told Makin: ‘I was angry and exhausted and had indeed lost my grip. I do not offer any excuse for that decision. I have explained the background only because I want to assure the victims of JS that I did not, at any stage, see their plight as some sort of ticky-box exercise that I could casually sign off once I had ticked enough boxes.
‘I recognise now that what I should have done was step back, take a proper break from the case and then return fresh to my part of the fight. But I did not. I fully accept the criticism levelled at me in that regard. To the victims of JS, I apologise directly and unreservedly for that. I am so very sorry. You deserved better.’
But the Church Times story shows she did everything she could in the UK to bring Smyth to justice. One of the retired detectives quoted, who has 20 years’ experience in safeguarding, analysed the steps Ms Quirk took in 2013 after learning of the abuse. This former police officer told the paper: ‘I don’t know how much more of a referral you can get.’
None of the three former officers were willing to put their name to their concerns, owing to their holding independent safeguarding positions. The paper referred in its report to the three former officers as A, B, and C.
Former officer B told the Church Times: ‘Nobody can say this isn’t a hideous, horrific case, but to say that, in 2013, no one did anything, and that it wasn’t a police referral, leading to where we are now with the Archbishop resigning, it’s just wrong.’
The Makin report recorded that the police detective who received information from Ms Quirk understood the conversation to be about giving advice. The report said the police officer, Lisa Pearson, ‘did not consider this to be a formal referral to the Police’.
But, according to the Church Times, the former detectives argue that this is ‘contradicted by the fact that there followed a meeting between Ms Quirk and two of Ms Pearson’s senior colleagues’.
Former officer C said: ‘An in-person meeting with senior officers to discuss the case was not an informal process. That’s reporting to police.’
The Makin Review gives a thorough exposee of the elitist cover-up by the clergy in charge of the Iwerne evangelical camps in Dorset where Smyth groomed his victims in the 1970s and ’80s and the appalling failure to stop him abusing boys in Zimbabwe. But it is clearly not an infallible document in every respect.
In view of the rigorous forensic testimony of the former police detectives, will Yvonne Quirk now get an official vindication from the Church of England for her efforts to report Smyth’s abuses to the police, which apparently cost her a great deal personally?
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in the UK.
