Cricklade children's terror

Brother B: a severely disturbed individual who should not have been allowed to run a school

My brother Justin, who attended Prior Park Preparatory School a few years after me was so outraged on reading the whitewashed obituary for Br B that he submitted his own commentary on it to the St Joseph's College Blackpool Association.

Justin conveys quite truthfully the atmosphere of fear in which pupils lived for much of the time. It would be wrong to say that this was constant; children by their nature are able to forget, or rather to bury in their subconscious, an unpleasant moment in their lives so that they are able to adapt to a new situation and mood. And of course there were happy moments at Cricklade.

However I cannot recall any happy moments associated with Brother B and his "cheerful and breezy manner" was an invented fiction as far as I am concerned. I do remember that he complained of his lumbago on one occasion, and the Brothers' whitewashed obituary does have some value in this respect. It is clear that he was already suffering from the spinal cancer which was to kill him in 1961. However his illness does not excuse the sadistic treatment which he meted out to pupils who broke his rules, whatever they were. Sick in body he certainly was, but he was also sick in mind.

Three boys - they must have been aged no more than 10 or 11 - ran away from the school. I was part of the escape plot, and to my shame I chickened out at the last moment. The boys got as far as Bath, I think, before being picked up by the police. The details are hazy in my memory. One of them may have been Trevor Ibbott.

Bishop Joseph Rudderham, Seventh Bishop of Clifton, 1949-1974

Picture credit http://www.cliftondiocese.com/

Prior Park Preparatory School is situated in the Diocese of Clifton, and as an establishment run by a Catholic order such as the Christian Brothers, it should have been properly monitored by the diocesan authorities. Bishop Joseph Rudderham can justifiably be held to account for failing to intervene and remove Br B from the school. It would be interesting to know whether the diocesan archives contain letters from concerned parents who withdrew their children.

Many parents, as devout Catholics, would never have doubted the Brothers' words. But in the two cases of boys savagely and publicly punished and humiliated for their incontinence, cited in my letter to Archbishop Nichols at http://millstonesblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/easter-letter-to-archbishop.html the parents must surely have taken action. The two boys in question left the school and did not return.

But the memory of the mental torture that they must have endured will always remain with me, even more than the sound of the strap wielded by this "hearty sociable character" as Br B was mystifyingly described by his fellow-Brother Finian Rowe.

To force a ten-year-old boy who suffered from bed-wetting to put on a sailor-suit similar to the one pictured here, to parade him through a succession of classrooms in front of his fellow-pupils, and in each room to rain a series of blows with the strap on his reddening hands... the scene seems unbelievable. I'm still mystified as to the significance of the sailor suit. And where did it come from?

To call an assembly of the whole school to a classroom where the victim, a little boy who had soiled his underpants, was made to watch Br B displaying the filthy clothing to the child's fellow-pupils, and was then thrashed on the buttocks with the strap as he lay over a vaulting-horse... these were the actions of a seriously disturbed individual.

Yet they were both characterised by a sinister and calculated theatricality which had a logical aim. Br B wanted to impose a reign of terror in his school as viciously as any twisted prison warder, sadistic concentration camp guard or cowardly despot. He was neither brotherly nor Christian.

For the full commentary on Brother Dolan's saccharine and fictitious obituary click on http://www.stjosephsblackpool.com/obitdalycomment.htm