See no evil

J. B. Smith was my English teacher when I was aged 16 and I owe him much. He left the school in 1967 after just three years and below is a clipping from the school magazine that records his departure: ‘His views were often startling, sometimes unorthodox … he believed that English could be enjoyed at the same time as it was taught in a scholarly way, he felt strongly on national and international problems’. He introduced me to new writers and asked good questions. Before the long summer holiday he suggested I read Anna Karenina and then, back at school, asked not just if I’d liked it but why. I wrote for him – who else was there? – long essays on Lawrence and Blake and another on King Lear in which I argued that Lear was a fool for not recognising the goodness of Cordelia and he deserved all he got.

The other teacher whose departure in 1967 is recorded in this clipping is G. A. Ray-Hills. He gets an even warmer send-off – ‘His keenness, gaiety and conscientiousness were boundless … He will long be remembered at Loretto with affection and gratitude, as a French teacher of undoubted genius and as a man of wide and varied interests and of sparkling personality who contributed so much of value to the school’ – but I was lucky to escape him.

G. A. Ray-Hills features (with certain other teachers) in the 200-page report on this school published by the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry in 2023 and available online (‘Case Study no. 9: Volume 1. The provision of residential care in boarding schools for children at Loretto School, Musselburgh, between 1945 and 2021’). This is from the summary:

• Guy Ray‑Hills, a charismatic and flamboyant teacher at Loretto junior school, the Nippers, between 1951 and 1967, was a prolific sexual predator of junior and senior boys throughout his tenure. He groomed many children and established abusive sexual relationships with them. Some were isolated incidents, but others lasted for years.
• Children whose parents lived abroad, often thousands of miles away, were particularly vulnerable to Guy Ray‑Hills.
• Ray‑Hills’s behaviour was widely known about by pupils. It was blatant and headmasters and other staff must also, or ought to have, known about it. He was the subject of a number of complaints from the 1950s onwards.
• Guy Ray‑Hills lost control and beat children sadistically, particularly those he did not groom for sexual abuse. He knocked a child out by punching him.

The children at the junior school where Ray Hills taught were aged between 8 and 13. The abuse ‘included masturbation, oral and anal sex. It was regular, and it was illegal.’ It was also known to what the report calls ‘the senior leadership team’, who did nothing – maybe, the report speculates, because of ‘concerns about the risk to the school’s reputation, or a failure to appreciate the enormity of what was happening, or a failure of governance …’ Also: ‘There is no indication of any thought being given to the impact on children of Ray‑Hills’s abuse and, rather than take steps to protect other children from his paedophilic appetites, the actions of the school paved the way for him to access children again.’

Ray-Hills left the school with references that described him as ‘exceptional, enterprising, hardworking’ and ‘ignored the history of complaints about him abusing children’. Ray-Hills continued to teach, and abuse, in other schools until he retired in 1991. He died in 2010.

Jimmy Savile. Epstein. Trump. And everyone who turned a blind eye.

CBe newsletter January 2026

Here we go again. First, a reminder that Telegraphy by Farah Ali is published this month and there’ll be party for the book at Burley Fisher Books, 400 Kingsland Road, London E8 on 15 January – full details here. It’s a free event and there’ll be money behind the bar but the bookshop would like you to tick the Add-to-Cart box if you’re minded. Please do. Please come.

Next: Erin Vincent, Fourteeen Ways of Looking, published in March, finished copies due any day. Next, Mike Bradwell, Axholme, June. Anonymous puff quote for Axholme, which may or may not actually appear on the cover: ‘Pisses all over Cider with Rosie.’ Rude and funny and a lot more, this is village life in England in the 1950s – for me, hitting 75 later this month, almost yesterday. Next, Penelope Curtis, The Fall, September: interwoven stories (told mostly from the perspective of the sidelined women) of people who cross paths over time in a single small village in Lincolnshire – Isaac Newton measuring the motion of heavenly bodies; the Rev. Charles Hudson, intent on climbing the Matterhorn; the actor David Niven, intent on women.

Mickey Mouse manages to be both an emblem of the Walt Disney Company, a beacon of global capitalism, and a derogatory term used by Tory MPs to decry the kind of college courses taken by people seeking vocational qualifications. CBe is a kind of Mickey Mouse operation – it’s held together with string and sellotape – but is now into its 19th year.