4 hours Ago By REBECCA DAVIS
South African advocate Jeremy Gauntlett called it his professional home in the United Kingdom (UK), with his profile on the chambers’ website describing him as “among the top counsel in the city”. Now his profile has been quietly removed, while a media inquiry to Brick Court Chambers this week went unanswered. Gauntlett’s career as one of the most high-flying international lawyers South Africa has ever known is over.
The 74-year-old advocate announced in a letter sent to the country’s leading legal bodies in late January that he had “for some time been planning to retire from practice after what has been a long and fulfilling legal career”, and that he would be doing so immediately. What has ended Gauntlett’s career is a credible account of teen grooming and sexual abuse made public by a respected Wits academic. Daily Maverick has seen an email sent by Gauntlett in 2022 in which he acknowledged the validity of this account.
Gauntlett did not respond to emailed questions this week. But that’s only one part of a much wider and extraordinarily dark story: one which begins in the UK in the 1970s, ends up taking down one of the most powerful religious figures in the world, and now poses uncomfortable questions for Archbishop of Cape Town Thabo Makgoba. “He cut a striking figure as he strode through the Royal Courts of Justice in his full-bodied wig and flowing silk gown.
He was one of the youngest and most brilliant QCs working in London. His sharp mind and self-assured manner meant that he was repeatedly engaged for high profile trials.” This description would in some ways be curiously appropriate for Gauntlett, who also became a QC (Queen’s Counsel: a British lawyer of the highest rank), albeit at an older age.
But the words instead apply to John Smyth, the man described in an official investigation last year as “the most prolific serial abuser to be associated with the Church of England”. The description appears in the opening passage of British journalist Andrew Graystone’s 2021 book ‘Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne Camps’. It was Graystone who was responsible in large part for the public exposing of the Smyth scandal.
By the 1970s Smyth was a well-known figure in the UK: a charismatic and prominent lawyer by profession. He used much of the rest of his time to groom teenage boys, using Christianity as his cover. Smyth would have his victims enter a shed he used specifically for the purpose.
There he would strip them naked and savagely beat them with a cane, while demanding that they prayed out loud. While he beat them, he would often groan with ecstasy. The beatings would last sometimes hundreds of lashes.
When he was finished, Smyth would embrace them from behind, nuzzling their back and kissing their neck. The blood would be flowing down his victims’ legs. Smyth would then apply lotion to their buttocks, and give the victims an adult nappy to wear under their clothes so the bleeding was not visible.
One victim, records Graystone, had a beating that lasted 12 hours. Another eventually had to wear adult nappies around the clock, with thick black trousers to “disguise the seeping blood”. Smyth groomed only sporty and good-looking boys.
“It was not the conventional sexual abuse that people might imagine; it was something more complex,” writes Graystone. The beatings were regularly scheduled to boys Smyth gave Christian ministry to, in punishment for a whole range of “sins”, but with a tremendous emphasis on masturbation, which Smyth encouraged his victims to confess about at length. One boy attempted suicide on the eve of a planned beating, unable to handle the torture any more but equally incapable of seeing a way out.
Smyth’s actions became known to the Church of England relatively early on, as last year’s Makin Report – also known as the John Smyth Review – has made clear. Although Smyth was not ordained in the church, Graystone’s book and the official investigation have established that he spent his time in the UK as a high-profile member of an Anglican parish church where he counselled young men; he was trained and licenced as a lay reader in the Diocese of Winchester; and carried out much of his abuse at the Iwerne holiday camps which were set up to train attendees – including the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby – to be leaders in the Church of England. His sin, in other words, was the Church of England’s sin.
By the end of 1982, writes Graystone, at least 27 adults in the UK had a “clear-sighted view of what Smyth was doing”. Smyth had to be shipped out of the UK. The knowledge that he would almost certainly continue his abuse wherever he landed up seems to have been less of a concern than the reputational liability he posed to the church while in the UK.
And so, with the encouragement and financial support of church figures and rich barrister colleagues, Smyth headed off to southern Africa: first Zimbabwe, and then South Africa. In Zimbabwe, where Smyth spent around 16 years, he would go on to abuse an estimated 90 boys. In South Africa, where Smyth spent the final 17 years of his life: we still don’t know.
There are very few heroes in the Smyth story, but one of them is yet another lawyer: Zimbabwean David Coltart. It was Coltart, the current mayor of Bulawayo, who launched what was at that stage by far the most extensive investigation into Smyth – based on disturbing accounts about what Smyth had been up to since arriving in Harare in 1985. Smyth had launched Christian camps for Zimbabwean schoolboys where nudity was compulsory in many contexts, and Smyth would shower and sleep in the boys’ area, rather than the adults’.
The beatings, of course, continued. Graystone reported, based on interviews with victims, that Smyth would be “breathing heavily” while he carried out the beatings, and that there was “no doubt that Smyth was emotionally and sexually aroused”. One boy told Graystone that the beatings were “the first time I realised that black skin could bruise”.
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