Anyone wondering why we are currently down one archbishop could do worse than read BLEEDING FOR JESUS: JOHN SMYTH AND THE CULT OF THE IWERNE CAMPS, by Andrew Graystone.

Back in the 1930s, a clergyman named Eric Nash decided that what the country needed was more evangelisation of the upper classes. They would all give their lives to Christ and come to rule the country, and hence all their goodness would trickle down to the unwashed masses and Britain would be a properly Christian nation, huzzah. He regarded this as being fully in line with scripture: in the New Testament, Paul can write with a straight face that he has evangelised the provinces of X, Y and Z, meaning that he has in fact evangelised the leaders of said provinces, and expects them to pass the message on.

To that end a series of camps were instituted, mostly set in the Dorset village of Iwerne (pronounced “you-urn”) Minster and aimed exclusively at public schoolboys. And not just any public schoolboys, but boys from the heavy hitting public school brigade. Eton, Winchester, that lot. It was all very muscular Christianity, majoring heavily on the utter depravity of humanity and the extreme physical suffering of Jesus to atone for it, so be grateful and believe in him, you ungrateful bastards! Nash was evidently a humourless zealot, though lauded as a saint in certain quarters, and the camps sound pretty ghastly. And in the days before proper safeguarding, they were pretty well a safe haven for people who liked to do things other than evangelise to boys, the worst offender being one John Smyth.

Smyth was a high flying QC, a moral paragon – he acted for Mary Whitehouse in the Gay News blasphemy trial – and he had a taste for beating young men until they bled (hence the title of the book), and somehow making them feel grateful for the privilege. I mean, they kept coming back, of their own volition.

(Which, I suspect, might be one reason – but not the only – that nothing was done. I am no expert on abuse but I can see how the strange notion might arise that what Smyth did was in some way consensual. The thinking would go, if the young men didn’t like it, why didn’t they just leave? There was no degree of physical coercion involved. No, but the psychological hold was clearly strong – though that is not an intuitive answer, especially when you don’t want it to be true in the first place. Whatever the reason, a predator like Smyth has his ways of keeping his prey.)

Justin Welby is an alumnus of these camps; so am I. They were much less ghastly by the time I started going in the mid-80s, though the teaching was still just as muscular and even then I was very soon questioning the exclusively public school (and male) bias. In the fifth form I had started going to a weekly Christian meeting at school, hosted by a couple of masters, because I had had ten years of compulsory, non-fun chapel Christianity at school with always the sneaking suspicion that there had to be more to it – and behold, there was. There was absolutely noting untoward about those meetings and I got a lot out of them. But they were very much satellites of the great Iwerne phenomenon, and the camps were always bigged up as something to do during the summer. Eventually, the summer after leaving school, I crumbled and went.

I am 99.9% certain I never met Smyth; I think he had been rumbled by the time I began. Though some of the people named in the running of the camps when he was involved were still around when I was there. I will also say that in the two or three camps I attended I learned a great deal to my benefit and they helped me get my head screwed on right as a Christian. Part of that was the ability to sift and filter and, you know, question. But I must also face up to the fact that I have been taught good stuff by people who effectively colluded in bad stuff.

To their credit, once the camp leaders realised what was happening, Smyth was barred. To their discredit, they did nothing so vulgar as tell the police or offer help to his victims, in case the bad publicity damaged the sacred mission of the camps. He was encouraged instead to leave the country, meaning that he just exported his practices to Zimbabwe and South Africa. All this only came to light a few years ago, in an effort spearheaded by Channel 4 and the author of this book.

The book is not without flaws. It could have been much better edited – there is a lot of repetition – and not all the piecing together of facts makes sense, though the author is convinced it does. It makes the classic error of saying “X was taught Y, therefore X believes Y,” when in fact X is perfectly capable of making up their own mind. Justin Welby did (see his most recently expressed views on same-sex marriage), and so did I.

What is more important is that the higher-flying Iwerne alumni – like Welby – effectively formed their own little evangelical mafia at the top of the church, and like all such organisations, omerta became a habit. Would Welby have acted – more quickly, or at all – if Smyth had come out of the more smells and bells, high end of the church? Who knows?

I think I got out of Iwerne at exactly the right time. There was also an annual ‘conference’ for those who has passed through the school mill and were now at university. This was where the scales fell from my eyes. I assumed that now we were all older and bigger, we could sink our teeth into more substantial discussion and argument. But no, debate remained rigidly channelled towards the right conclusion and anyway it was money I didn’t have, so I stopped going.

Ultimately Iwerne was an important stage in my Christian growth – but I got far more out of the Student Christian Movement (a.k.a. Slightly Christian Marxists) once I was at uni.

It is a very different atmosphere now in the Church of England, with much more awareness of abuse and a safeguarding officer in every parish. It would be a lot harder now for someone like Smyth to do what he did – but not impossible. Predators find a way.