Vishal, PIE and 80s boarding
A couple of weeks ago I got a comment asking if one James Russell had applied for any job at Kesgrave Hall, a boarding school I attended from 1989 to 1993 (ages 12 to 16). Russell had been the focus of a BBC podcast investigating his links to the murder of a young boy, Vishal Mehrotra, who was abducted from Putney, south-west London, the day of the royal wedding in 1981 and subsequently found murdered in a wood near Midhurst, West Sussex. James Russell was connected to a paedophile named Nicholas Douglass, a house-parent who abused boys at a school near Horsham, Muntham House, which took boys with behavioural problems and/or troubled family backgrounds, many of them from Ealing, a borough in West London. In the podcast it was mentioned that he had applied for a job at a school in or near Maidstone, which may well have been the former Redhill school, a boys’ boarding school with a similar pupil base to Kesgrave and to which Kesgrave stood in self-conscious ideological opposition.
As to the question of whether Russell ever applied to work at Kesgrave, as a pupil I would not have known that even if it happened when I was there. We did not know who had merely applied; we only found out when someone started, much as we only found out someone was leaving when we came back from a holiday and they were not there anymore. It’s no credit to Kesgrave Hall’s management’s diligence in recruiting care workers (they did recruit some sexual abusers and, more generally, some downright thugs), but if his target was a senior care job, as with his friend Nicholas Douglass, that job was already taken. I asked someone I knew who worked in the Croydon education department in the 1980s whether they had used Muntham House; they had. I didn’t ask why it wasn’t considered for me; in any other context, having heard about this school, I would have wanted to know why not as it was fairly close to home, but in this context, it appeared I may have had a lucky escape. (There were cases of sexual abuse at Kesgrave, but with one exception they were years before I started. I wasn’t one of the victims; most of the abuse during my time there was physical.)
A couple of weeks ago, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a series on the Paedophile Information Exchange, a “rights group” that operated in the 1970s and early 80s, which attached itself to civil liberties and gay rights groups and demanded the effective abolition of age of consent laws, claiming that adult/child sexual relationships were normal and healthy but also, through its magazine, offered personal ads through which paedophiles could hook up and manufacture opportunities to abuse children. Its members included Peter Righton, a major contributor to social work theory at the time who made his predilections clear in articles he wrote for social work publications. According to presenter Alex Renton (whose previous series was about sexual abuse at elite boarding schools), PIE’s fortunes waned after a campaign by Mary Whitehouse, a public morality campaigner, and was shut down in the early 1980s. It was noted that paedophiles who were powerful enough, including a senior diplomat, were investigated less eagerly and punished less severely than less powerful offenders.
However, the low status of the victims — boys from “broken homes” or with poor school records, often Black or Asian — also meant that police did not do much to protect them or to bring their abusers to justice. One of the victims of the Muntham House abuse told the BBC reporter that they had approached police and told them they were being abused, but were dismissed as “little coloured boys” and sent back. The police were incurious about potential links between the abusers and the murder of Vishal Mehrotra; they assumed that as “contact offenders” who abused boys in their care, they had no need to pick boys up from the streets, and thus ignored the links the men had to both the place Vishal was buried and to south-west London itself. Anything they could dismiss as coincidental or insignificant, they did. They knew that one of the abusers who had fled while on bail was in Sri Lanka, having travelled the world and taught in numerous countries in Asia and Africa, and the pensions department knew what address they were paying his pension to, but made no attempt to recapture him; he was finally deported as a visa overstayer after the BBC tracked him down. He died weeks later in Tonbridge.
Was PIE behind some of the incidents of institutional paedophilia in the early 1980s? Were any of the Muntham House abusers members? Were any of those jailed for such abuse at Kesgrave Hall, or any of the other schools they worked at around the UK, members? Did such abuse get less prevalent as time elapsed after PIE’s dissolution and the networks built up through it were disrupted by its members being arrested, or simply falling apart for other reasons? Renton’s radio series was based on his having obtained a copy of the organisation’s membership list; of those who were not famous or influential, where were they situated and did they have caring resonsibilities at the time? It is probably too late to make these connections now; it is more than 40 years on and many of those who were in such positions in the early 1980s are now very old or dead, even though the children from then are only middle-aged now. As one of the two journalists on the Vishal podcast lamented, looking for evidence now is like chasing ghosts.
