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 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 is recorded in this clipping is G. A. Ray-Hills: ‘His keenness, gaiety and conscientiousness were boundless, in the classroom, on the games field and in everything he did … 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.’

G. A. Ray-Hills features (with several 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.