Early last August, just as Edinburgh began to buzz with the noise and colour of the arts festival, another drama began to play out in a nondescript office block off the city’s St Andrew Square. Here the Scottish child abuse inquiry (SCAI) began a three-week special hearing into a historic scandal at one of the city’s elite schools, Edinburgh Academy. Three weeks seemed hardly enough for a story spanning decades, a tale of terrible cruelty and extraordinary institutional failures that has affected the lives of hundreds of people in Britain and South Africa.
“I’ve been waiting 52 years for this moment: it wasn’t till this morning that I really believed it would happen,” said one of the crowd of witnesses gathered for the first day of hearings. Old schoolmates hugged and greeted each other: for some, this was their first meeting since the 1970s. Schoolboy humour resurfaced among the cluster of middle-aged men: “This looks like a busy day at the prostate clinic.” One ran outside for a last cigarette, another to get a packet of tissues for the tears he knew were coming.
Many of the school’s former staff members were to be named and accused in the next weeks. But at the centre of attention was one man, Iain Wares. He has been dubbed “Jimmy Savile mark II” by the MP Ian Blackford, who has two constituents among the alleged victims. Now 84, Wares is still at liberty in Cape Town.
His predation at three schools – and the failure to bring him to justice since – became the focus of this story after the broadcaster Nicky Campbell told his BBC radio audience how he had witnessed Wares assaulting a friend at Edinburgh Academy in the early 1970s.
Wares went on to teach at nearby Fettes College, but there were many other abusers and much more to the scandal at these key institutions in Scotland’s proud capital city. The sequence of cover-ups and an error-riddled extradition process have called into question the Scottish establishment itself, along with the question of how we make children in care, private or public, safe from predators today.
Many victims of child sexual abuse spend their subsequent lives silenced by feelings of guilt and shame. That was true for many of the members of this brave, loyal group of survivors, until their joint decision to speak up – most of them after Campbell went public.
They have suffered, some of them greatly: lifelong mental health problems are all too often the result of “complex childhood traumas”, especially for those whose abuse resulted in feelings of shame and guilt. According to Alan McLean KC, representing the academy survivors at the inquiry, nine of the cohort have killed themselves, “at least in part because of their experience” of the school. But along with ex-Fettes pupils, their collective decision to support each other ends the silence, and their campaign for justice has had momentous results. One of these was to get this secretive inquiry to change its rules – that’s why we’re all here today.
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The story begins in 1966 in Cape Town. A young man called Iain Wares, blond-haired, square-jawed and into rugby, and a graduate in psychology from the city’s university, took up a teaching job at a smart private school, St George’s Grammar.
Aged 27, Wares became a housemaster and school rugby coach. He wasn’t liked by the children. One who remembers him at St George’s told me that he was famous for being angry: “You knew he was a grownup to avoid.” This man, now in his late 60s, thought Wares was a sadist. The teacher, he claims, had a habit of calling up him and other boys to stand by his desk at the front of the class, pushing his hand up the back of their shorts, “and pinching really hard”.
But allegations go further than bullying. Wares “sometimes had urges to touch boys in an inappropriate manner”, he told an extradition court many years later. Within a year, Wares was either sacked or he resigned his job at St George’s. He decided, or was told, to seek psychiatric help for his “urges”. Such treatment wasn’t available in South Africa. But there was a South African in Edinburgh who could help.
By late 1967, Wares was an inpatient at the Royal Edinburgh psychiatric hospital, where he was treated by a former professor at the University of Cape Town, Professor Henry Walton. He was presumably pronounced cured, because after three months he was discharged. He went straight to start a teacher-training course at Edinburgh’s Moray House college.
In 1968, armed with a new diploma, Wares started work as a maths teacher and rugby coach at the junior school at Edinburgh Academy – then an all-boys private establishment, founded in 1824. Former pupils are known as “Academicals” – Robert Louis Stevenson is on the list of famous alumni. Proud and traditional, the school is still famous for educating the city’s professional class, not least those who would become the country’s senior lawyers and judges.
About a fifth of children boarded, far away from parental eyes. The regime was harsh and so was the discipline, often administered by the older children. Adults punished at will: a clacken (a wooden sports bat), or a leather strap called a tawse were the usual tools. Teachers were recruited without much checking – they did not have to be trained. And of course – as in all private schools at that time – there was nothing remotely resembling what we would now call a plan for the children’s safeguarding.
In this regime, adults could harm and abuse children at will. While Wares stands out, I have recorded 29 allegations against staff members at the academy, between the 1960s and 1980s. Corporal punishment was legal in Scottish private schools until 2000, but many staff were accused of assaults that would be criminal now. Others were cruel or perverse in a way not tolerable in any age. Children were ordered, and paid, to swim naked. One was locked in a shed for a weekend as a punishment.
One housemaster who allegedly assaulted many boys – sometimes using a snooker cue – liked to publicly shame those who wet the bed. The inquiry heard that he took one six-year-old outside and, in front of an audience, sprayed him with a hose and then assaulted him with it.
The accused are not all male – a female teacher from the junior school is mentioned as having administered beatings to the youngest children for sharpening their pencils in the wrong way. But the men stand out, not least those who, like Wares, combined violent attacks with sexual assaults, often in view of other pupils.
Another housemaster, Hamish Dawson, has even more accusations against him than Wares. One of his targets was Nicky Campbell. Dawson, a big man with glossy black hair and the show-off sideburns of a 70s police detective, looks out of school photographs of the time with vast confidence. Certainly no one in charge at the academy ever appears to have tried to curb him, in more than 20 years.
Dawson was a sneaky predator, fondling children in private in the cricket pavilion or in the schoolhouse he shared with his wife and daughters. But his frequent and ferocious physical attacks – one survivor talked of his head being jammed in a door (he was 10) while Dawson beat him – were done in public. It seems that he did not care who saw. But those running the school wilfully looked the other way.
Dawson was not always violent. He would tickle children while his hands wandered, and offer them sweets if they visited him in private, using the opportunity to “check if you are wearing underwear”. In the dormitory, he would sit on a boy’s bed and interfere with him sexually while masturbating. The other children watched. “When we were old enough to wear trousers rather than shorts, it was a relief because I knew he could not get to me,” one told the inquiry.
Wares’ modus operandi, it would seem, was sneakier – it had evolved from what was reported in South Africa in 1966. Campbell says he saw the teacher pull down a child’s pants in the changing room, and start masturbating him. Most of Wares’ alleged assaults took place in the classroom. A pupil would be summoned to the desk to have his work inspected, and hold it in front of Wares with both hands while the teacher’s hands went into his shorts. The rest of the class watched, waited their turn and remembered.
One of the saddest aspects of this story is that later on, in the academy senior school, abuse and bullying were rife, not least between the children who had suffered together when younger. “We were made feral. We learned that from those teachers,” one survivor said. McLean told the inquiry of “multiple incidents of penetrative rape and forced masturbation”.
Most of the men who made this happen were never brought to account. So far, only one has been prosecuted and that was for offences at a different Scottish school at which he subsequently taught: he got six-and-a-half years for offences against five boys. Dawson continued at the academy until he retired in 1983, leaving the school with accolades. Living in Cheltenham with his wife, he worked as a tour guide and occasionally as Father Christmas in a department store (he died in 2009). But Wares’ time at the school came to a halt in 1973.
Most of the boys were too frightened or ashamed to speak up, though by then he had weathered at least one complaint from parents (the headteacher declared the boy in question had “an over-fertile imagination”). Then a well-known Scottish journalist reported Wares’ assault on his son to the headteacher: the South African’s time at the academy was up.
The school might then have put an end to the career of a man who appeared to be a serious risk to children – as most of the staff knew, since the reasons for Wares’ sacking were discussed. The academy should have reported him to the police. Instead, it gave Wares a reference and recommended him to another Edinburgh school, Fettes College.
It turned out that oversight was just as lax at this grandest of Scottish private schools (Tony Blair had left it just two years earlier, in 1971). Wares was able to continue – except that, as the victims alleged, he became startlingly more violent and more public in his assaults. But, unless a parent complained, nothing happened. “Teachers walked in, saw what was going on, turned round and walked out,” one Fettes survivor said.
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Fettes College had been examined by the SCAI in 2021. It was home to a series of sexual predators, including, notoriously, its headteacher throughout the 1970s, Anthony Chenevix-Trench, who moved to the school straight from the same job at Eton. George Scott, one of Wares’ pupils at Fettes in the late 1970s, gave some shocking evidence: in one assault, Wares had pulled hair and scalp from his head and put him into hospital.
That account was picked up by a BBC radio documentary producer, Caitlin Smith. She knew that I had done investigations into coverups of historic abuse at other boarding schools, so we put together a series for Radio 4 tracking the movements of abusers from one elite school to another.
The first three parts of In Dark Corners, in which Scott and other Fettes pupils featured, went out in June 2023. Wares is one of a cast of alleged abusers in it – due to legal restrictions, we called him “Edgar”. We found that, in 1975, after accusations of one supremely violent assault, Wares had been sent back to Walton at the Edinburgh psychiatric hospital, and “treated” again for his attraction to children and for alcoholism.
Even Wares’ wife wrote, via her GP, saying her husband should not be allowed to teach. But Walton encouraged the school to keep him on, convinced his patient was curable. Two months later, Wares was back in his classroom at Fettes College junior school.
His assaults continued, and so did the treatment. (In medical notes from 1977 revealed to the inquiry, one of Walton’s team calls the teacher “a pleasant pederast”.) Eventually, a complaint by a parent persuaded the school, in early 1979, to move Wares on, in the traditional manner. Chenevix-Trench wrote him a glowing reference, saying the teacher was a “thoroughbred”.
The following year, Wares was back in Cape Town, with a teaching job at the prestigious Rondebosch boys’ prep school. There he stayed for nearly 30 years, retiring in 2008. We traced him and his family to a luxury retirement resort in the city. He refused to be interviewed.
In Dark Corners went to the top of BBC Sounds download charts and my inbox started filling. Ex-pupils of a host of different schools across Britain wanted to share their experiences. Among those emailing were others who had suffered at Fettes and Edinburgh Academy in the 1970s and 1980s: one of them was Nicky Campbell.
Campbell said he had witnessed a 10-year-old friend being abused by Wares, and he had himself been assaulted, when he was 12, by Dawson and by another teacher. After we had swapped notes, he used his own BBC radio show and podcast to reveal what had happened to him and dozens of his schoolmates. Some of them came forward to speak on Campbell’s programme. Dawson’s daughter told him: “Knowing that I am the daughter of a paedophile – it’s repulsive, it’s shameful, it’s disgusting.”
After 50 years of silence, the survivors and their stories were now breaking news in the UK: the coverage brought dozens more former pupils forward. Led by George Scott, Campbell and others, about 40 of these men formed a WhatsApp group and started a campaign in Britain and South Africa to galvanise the Scottish prosecutors.
Scott had previously been battling more or less alone. He had discovered that, in the face of legal problems in South Africa and errors in its own work, Scotland’s procurator fiscal had decided to abandon its attempt to extradite Wares.
The first job was to get “Edgar” named, to help other survivors and witnesses come forward. That worked: in the three weeks it sat in August, the SCAI heard from 50 people, including some ex-teachers, associated with Edinburgh Academy. “Now, the grownups are listening,” said Nicky Campbell after he gave evidence to the inquiry.
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Wares has said he never offended again during his decades working at Rondebosch, but this year a complaint from an ex-pupil led to him being charged on two counts of indecent assault in South Africa. There is no record of Fettes or Edinburgh Academy warning Rondebosch about its problematic teacher, even after former pupils of the academy and Fettes started to make formal complaints in the early 2000s.
The point that the survivors of Wares’ years in Edinburgh all make, with understandable fury, is that if the school heads had done their jobs and behaved with any regard to children’s safety, Wares’ career as a violent abuser would have ended 40 years earlier.
I have been logging allegations of sexual abuse of children and its coverup at residential schools and institutions, state and private, since 2014, when I first wrote for the Observer about the same at my own schools. There were many Wares and Dawsons: on my spreadsheet, I have 1,150 serious allegations, naming nearly 400 schools and 350 staff. From these accounts, I know that what happened at Edinburgh Academy and Fettes was far from unusual.
Enabling and harbouring sexual predators, covering up their crimes, and putting the institutions’ reputation before children’s welfare and safety were normal. The question remains: are the 160,000 children in residential care in Britain today properly safe now? More than a year ago, the English inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) concluded with a series of recommendations for new legislation to protect whistleblowers and establish a legal duty to report suspicions of abuse in institutions. While Suella Braverman was at the Home Office, the IICSA report was parked and nothing has happened.
Edinburgh Academy and Fettes College have apologised for the abuse that occurred at the schools in the 1970s and 1980s, and they have expressed sympathy for survivors and encouraged them to take their concerns to the police.
One of the survivors, Neil Douglas, who has been at the heart of the campaign, summed up a problem that worries all the men, which is that things may not have really changed in the schools. “We need to head towards an environment where, if any abuse is uncovered it must be reported externally … if anything comes out of this, mandatory reporting should be at the top of the list,” Douglas told the inquiry. Britain is fascinated and appalled by revelations about serial predators who exploited children at their most vulnerable – how come we still lack adequate law to stop another Savile, Dawson or Wares?
• My Teacher the Abuser: Fighting for Justice is on BBC One on 30 November. In Dark Corners is available on BBC Sounds.
• In the UK, the NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331. In the US, call or text the Childhelp abuse hotline on 800-422-4453. In Australia, children, young adults, parents and teachers can contact the Kids Helpline on 1800 55 1800, or Bravehearts on 1800 272 831, and adult survivors can contact Blue Knot Foundation on 1300 657 380. Other sources of help can be found at Child Helplines International
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
