by
Les May
THE
TV land of Midsummer
is a fictional
place
of pretty villages and dark deeds. People
who always like to grab the moral high ground may complain there
aren’t enough non-white faces, but no-one can complain that the
stories are not intricate with a wealth of suspects.
Blood
Will Out,
which
was episode 4 of season 2, involved
an ex-military landowner, a bunch of Travellers led by another
ex-military man who obviously had a grudge against the landowner who
in turn was determined to drive the Travellers from the village and a
man, who had in the past exchanged wives with the landowner. His
daughter had followed her mother. When the landowner is found dead
from the blast of a shotgun Barnaby and
Troy have
the task of sorting through the list of suspects.
We
finally discover that it was landowner’s step daughter who had
pulled the trigger. Her motive, she was being abused. But there was
a twist in the tail. Barnaby assumed, as you probably did, that it
was sexual abuse. It wasn’t. The victim got his way in the family
by beating her with a leather belt. He
tried to
do
it once too often and got shot.
After
the publication of the book Smile for the Camera
by Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker. in April 2014 I devoted much of
the next two and a half years to untangling the truth and falsehoods
in stories about Cyril Smith that this pair were telling. My basic
concern was that they were conflating two separate issues. Smith’s
antics at Cambridge House hostel in the early 1960s with the goings
on at Knowl View school in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Solid
evidence of Smith’s antics at Cambridge House was published in 1979
in Rochdale's Alternative Paper (RAP)
when Smith was very much alive and able to sue if RAP
got it wrong. He
never did. The unsavoury events at Knowl View were sexual activity
between the boys, some of it coercive.
These
were detailed in a report to Education and Social Service officers,
the
‘Shepherd
report’
and confirmed in the ‘Mellor
report’. The
significant contents of the former were later published in an article
which appeared in the Independent
on Sunday
in September 1995.
Danczuk
and Baker muddied the waters about what really happened at Knowl
View. As
a result any subsequent
‘evidence’
from individuals is tainted. They
did it by conflating two separate issues, Cyril Smith’s antics at
Cambridge House and the reports
about what
went on at Knowl View. Long before their book was published we had
TV documentaries based on Danczuk’s unsubstantiated claims about
Smith’s involvement at
Knowl View, claims which were not made in the Independent
on Sunday
in September 1995, though
in both cases
the source
seems to have been the same.
Without
throwing in the Knowl View connection they had only the stories that
we already knew about Smith’s antics at Cambridge House when he was
a member of the Labour party. This
story, regurgitated from the May 1979 edition of RAP,
would
not have filled a book and without a book there would have been no
lucrative contract.
We
are seeing this same conflation again. It is happening in the local
press where lazy journalists, who cannot be bothered to sort the fact
from the fiction simply recycle the same old stuff ad
nauseum,
Cambridge House, Knowl View, Cyril Smith
equals a story to fill a corner of the paper.
And
it is happening again with a local parents group which are
managing to conflate Cambridge House, the grooming and sexual abuse
of girls by a group of asian men, and the unsavoury events at Knowl
View.
Danczuk’s
book muddied the waters about Knowl View. Has this led us into
making
the
same mistake as Barnaby made in the Midsummer Murders drama? Have we
been led along
the path of assuming
that any abuse by adults at Knowl View was sexual in nature?
I
am prompted to ask this because of
a story which was passed to me by two people I have known well for
many years. It was recounted to them by the mother of a boy who had
been a pupil at Knowl View.
He
had
run away from the school and made his way home. She telephoned the
school and said she would
take him back in a little while. Before she could do this two burly
men appeared at her
door. When she opened it her son ran upstairs. The men said they
had come to take her son back. One man went upstairs. The boy
screamed. When she looked her son was being held by his legs and
dragged down the stairs. She complained to the school. Nothing
was done about it.
If
this story is true and if it is typical of what was going on at the
school, then this is the real scandal of what happened at Knowl View,
not
some vague innuendo about Cyril Smith being involved in sexual abuse
at the school. We
will never know whether events like this were commonplace, or even if
they happened, unless men now in their later thirties are willing to
break their silence. If they feel they want justice it will be too
late when the perpetrators are dead.
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