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.

I spent a wonderful couple of hours on Wednesday at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, doing my bit for the repatriation of cultural artefacts.

The artefact in question is an ornate feather cloak gifted by the Maori Wairau Pa (tribe) of South Island, NZ to my great great grandfather, Dr George Cleghorn MD. Those present were me, my mother (who is Cleghorn’s great granddaughter) and Dr Lorraine Eade of the Tokomaru Research Centre, Blenheim, NZ, who is the great granddaughter of the woman who crafted the cloak in the first place. I hadn’t realised how moving the occasion would be. Lorraine was on the verge of tears as she opened the proceedings with a karakia – a Maori incantation for blessing.

Cleghorn was an official Good Egg of the British Empire. He helped the Pa in their dealings with the Europeans and gave a lot of medical help and advice, like the importance of boiling water. Ill Maoris were expected to attend a hospital 17 kilometres away, while Europeans could use the local one. If a Maori turned up at the local one, they were turned away. Cleghorn put a stop to this and allowed them to be treated locally, especially during a typhoid epidemic, despite reprimands from his superiors.

The cloak is just one of the many honours the Wairau Pa gave him. The cloak itself was gifted to him on his retirement. What he might not have gathered was that as part of the Maori culture, such gifts are eventually returned. What with moving back to England, illness, remarriage, dying and the outbreak of World War 1, contact was lost. His widow loaned the cloak to the Pitt Rivers.

The first we heard of this was when New Zealand relatives came to visit in the late nineties. “Oh, Ben [or more like, “Ow, Bin”], you live in Oxford, go and find the cloak.” That bit wasn’t too hard: I went to the PRM and there it was in the feathered cloaks section. However, back in 1998 the museum wasn’t having any of this giving it back thing, taking the (not unreasonable) line that even though the tag on the cloak says “lent by Mrs Cleghorn”, an unclaimed loan after 90 years is pretty well a gift in its own right. But the upside was that contact with the Maoris was restored. And now, a generation later, the atmosphere is very different when it comes to cultural artefacts. It’s an exquisite piece of workmanship, so can be used to teach young Maoris a traditional craft as well as their own history, and of course it symbolises co-operation between the European and Maori communities. There are still hurdles to overcome, but a lot of that revolves around making absolutely sure it will go to a better home when, not if, it is repatriated. (Cleghorn, I’m sorry to say, draped it over his piano.) It would have been simpler if it was just a straightforward case of looting.

Watch this space …

Okay, I can take a hint. Score one for the bots. A triumph for the values you’re mindlessly trying to follow, if I may say so.

I like to review the books I read on Amazon. One of my latest reads was mostly about an obnoxious individual who was prominent in the government of Germany between 1933 and 1945. His first and last name both began with the eighth letter of the alphabet. I will just call him Himself. So, the book is called The Himself Brothers, and is by Katrin Himself, who is Himself’s great-niece, the granddaughter of his younger brother. Himself was the middle of three boys, only one of whom survived the war.

So, you will understand that it’s quite hard not to touch on touchy subjects in reviewing a book like this. The algomorons still told me I was going against their community values and asked me to edit. I did, and they still objected, and sent a warning that if this carried on then I would be unpersoned.

So, okay, I deleted it

Still not sure what my crime was, apart from saying Himself’s name a lot. I never mentioned the name of the party he belonged to, or his ultimate boss, the guy with the funny moustache, or the people he persecuted and tried to exterminate. Maybe I was just too even-minded? Did I sound like I was defending him?

You see, the impression I got from the book was that if you had met him and not known what he did for a living, he would have come across as a slightly pompous, slightly chippy middle class middle manager. He got on well with his two brothers, and he respected and loved his parents and they returned the favour. His headmaster father cared deeply about social respectability, and that seems to have instilled in all three brothers a drive towards bettering their situations and caring perhaps a bit too much about what other people thought of them. But that, really, seems to be the most negative thing Himself Senior did.

And yet.

The author is married to an Israeli so we can safely say she has put the Himself legacy behind her. She still chose to keep the family name because, well, it is her name. The legacy cannot just be shaken off. It must be explored and investigated. That is what she does. It is a brave and eye opening venture that took a lot of courage. She never does explain quite what made her great uncle what he was – and that is the point. The most sobering conclusion is that a monster like him does not have to be created through some cataclysmic event. They can just emerge, though they might still need the right circumstances to show their true colours. Without Germany’s defeat in WW1, perhaps Himself would never have risen to the heights he did; he might have stayed a relatively harmless chicken farmer with unpleasant views on race. So, how many hidden Himselfs are all around us, maybe not even themselves knowing what they are?

Well, something there upset the bots. I concluded long ago that the future is not the human race cowering from the Terminators sent by Skynet to destroy us. It’s the human race walking on eggshells in case we upset mindless algorithms that can make our lives a misery in a million passive-aggressive ways.