Former Labour Councillor Eileen Kershaw dies

by Brian Bamford
Political activist & teacher first elected as a Labour councillor in Rochdale in 1964

WHEN I first met Eileen Kershaw at her home in Whitworth,  in 2014 she hesitated before letting me in saying, with a cheeky smile and a twinkle, that she shouldn't really be letting strangers into the house. 

I was there to get an interview about the then recently published book by Simon Danzcuk and Matthew Baker 'Smile for the Camera' a post-hoc consideration of Cyril Smith's life in politics in Rochdale and beyond. 

She had served for 33 years on Whitworth town council, Rossendale council and Lancashire county council.  But she had long been associated with Labour politicians in Rochdale and had been close to Cyril Smith throughout much of his political life, even after he converted to the Liberal Party and stood as a candidate for that party in the late 1960s and became the Rochdale Liberal MP in 1972, and he kept the job until 1992 when he stood down.

I met with Eileen on several occasions after that and we discussed the difficulties relating to the contents of the Danzcuk book.  Eileen had long known David Bartlett and John Walker who in May 1979, had first published in Rochdale's Alternative Paper [RAP], the revelations about Cyril Smith's role in the management of the hostel for teenage boys at Cambridge House in Rochdale.  According to the RAP account their was strong evidence that Cyril Smith had abused his powers as secretary of the hostel.  All this was well covered at the time in Private Eye, but the Eye was significantly the only main stream publication to run the story in 1979.  Even the local press; the Rochdale Observer and the Manchester Evening News managed to look the other way.

At the time Eileen Kershaw accepted that Cyril may have behaved inappropriately at Cambridge House, but she didn't accept that the more serious claims against Cyril, who had been a governor at Knowl View, had been established.

Eileen Kershaw, was the mother of radio DJs and broadcasters Liz and Andy Kershaw, was aged 85.  The former teacher who was first elected as a Labour councillor in 1964 to represent Balderstone on the old Rochdale county borough council.

Eileen also became a governor at Knowl View*, a residential school for boys, where Cyril Smith had for a time served as a governor.  She told me that she was unaware of any untoward behavour by Cyril at the school while she was serving there as a governor.

In 2014, following the surfacing of historic reports going back to the 1990s, beginning with the events covered in the 1991 report by Phil Shepherd entitled the 'Shepherd Report' about the risk of AIDS owing the alleged sexual activity between the lads and the claim of them 'cottaging' with outsiders.   

Eileen told me that she had never cared for the then Rochdale Labour MP, Simon Danczuk, and though she considered Mr Danczuk's book 'Smile for the Camera' on Cyril Smith was 'well written in a literary sense'.  She did suggest to me, correctly as it turned out, that she didn't believe Mr. Danczuk had actually written the book himself, and she did, even then, express some doubts about some details in the contents of the book.  But later she went on to write that 'much of the content is questionable'.   And she concluded in a letter to the Rochdale Observer that 'the real aim of [Danzcuk] writing such a tome seems to be financial',

In the 1950s, I had been taught science at Brimrod Secondary Modern School by Eileen's first husband, Jack Kershaw, a fan of Rugby League, and I knew something about the family second-hand through the former editor of RAP John Walker.   We could relate to each other through those experiences and she was very keen to talk about local politics, but she described herself as having Irish blood in her veins which perhaps made her more passionate than the your average English politician. 


*   Knowl View School was a residential school for boys with emotional and behavioural difficulties that opened in 1969 and, after a period of temporary closure, closed permanently in 1996. It was built and run by Rochdale Borough Council and had a Board of Governors. The school catered for boys across an age range of 7 to 16 years old. Cyril Smith was said to have been part of a local campaign to see it established and was present at its opening.
Early research identified that a report (only publicly available in redacted form) was written in 1991 by Phil Shepherd, an employee of the Rochdale AIDS Unit, who identified the fact that boys at the school were at risk of AIDS. The report (which became known to the Inquiry as the ‘Shepherd report’ {1}) detailed concerns about sexual activity at the school, including ‘cottaging’ in and around public toilets as well as boys being forced into sex with others. The report was sent to Rochdale’s Director of Education, Mrs Diana Cavanagh. These events attracted press reporting in 1995.^[1]
In 1995, the press reported that Mrs Cavanagh had asked Mr Shepherd not to circulate his report further. Press reporting also suggested that concerns about the children living at Knowl View had first been raised by a Dr Alison Fraser, a child psychiatrist at Rochdale’s Birch Hill Hospital.  There was also speculation in the press about a report (which did not appear to have been publicly available) by Valerie Mellor, a consultant clinical psychologist, which dated back to February 1992.  It was reported that Mrs Mellor had said there was no doubt that up to a quarter of the pupils at the 48-place school had been involved in serious sexual incidents, the activity had continued over a very long period of time and it was difficult to believe that this behaviour had not come to the attention of at least some members of staff.

{1}  The Shepherd report was also sent to the acting Director of Social Services and to the then Rochdale conservative councillor, Pamela Hawton in her capacity on a relevant committee.  The Mellor report was written as a result of her being sent into the school at the instigation of Diana Cavanagh in response to the Shepherd Report.

Midsummer Murders & Knowl View School

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.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0214950/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_i74

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.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R3A7XZP51EW0A6/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1849548757

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2015/10/nv-review-of-smile-for-camera.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2015/10/our-long-running-crique-of-smile-for.html

https://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2016/10/old-news-from-knowl-view.html

https://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2016/10/dodger-danczuk-doesnt-deliver.html

https://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2016/10/tonightm-danczuk-in-lions-den.html

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.

https://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-curse-of-gesture-politics.html

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.

***********

What Would You Have Done?

by Les May

RICHARD Farnell’s claim at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) that he knew nothing of the unsavoury goings on at Knowl View which came to light in late 1991 and early 1992, seems somewhat implausible.  But this wasn’t a civil or criminal trial so ‘implausible’ is the most definitive thing that can be said.

The demand by one of the solicitors at the inquiry that he resign is just theatre; a bit of playing to the gallery to make it look as if he has earned his fees and that the inquiry has achieved something worthwhile.  Even so I find it difficult to imagine that Farnell has much of a future in Rochdale’s political scene.  Like Danczuk before him he has become a liability to Rochdale Labour party.

No doubt some of the careerists who discover they have backed the wrong horse, not once, but twice, will miss him; his numerous enemies will gloat and the rest will remind themselves of Jim Dobbin’s comments in 2014 that Farnell was perhaps unwise to take on the job of Leader with questions about Knowl View still unanswered.

I agree with Jim Dobbin.   But I also think that whether Farnell ‘knew’ or not is irrelevant.  Focusing on this distracts from the substantive issue of whether RMBC acted reasonably and appropriately when the Shepherd and Mellor reports of 1991 and 1992 referred to the high levels of sexual activity amongst the boys at Knowl View, some of it coercive in nature.  Would Farnell ‘knowing’ have made any difference?

The stories about Knowl View had already had an airing in the Independent on Sunday in September 1995 which no-one seemed to notice, least of all the people doing the shouting now. When they re-surfaced in 2012, with Danczuk fanning the flames, in the minds of the public the term ‘sexual abuse’ did not have its present increasingly elastic definition. It conjured up the idea of being something that adults did to children or other vulnerable individuals.  I doubt that in the minds of most people it encompassed situations where it was ‘boy on boy’ or where youngsters actively solicited homosexual contact.

The evidence points to the fact that where the contemporary evidence pointed to an adult having had sexual contact with one of the boys the police pursued the matter and prosecuted the individual concerned. What is less clear, at least to me, is the question of what is/was the legal status of the ‘boy on boy’ sexual activity, which appears to be what was going on at Knowl View.

Had it been a mixed school I don’t think this sort of query would have arisen. I’m not anti-feminist point scoring here when I say the lad, but not the girl, would probably have have been prosecuted.

So I’m going to ask YOU what YOU would have done if you were a senior council officer and the report prepared by sexual health worker Phil Shepherd had plopped onto YOUR desk at the end of 1991 and YOU had read;

‘The present situation within the school is described by the staff as follows:
One boy who is homosexual has contact with an adult outside the school.

Several of the senior boys indulge in oral sex with one another.  

'Reputedly five of the junior boys have been or are involved in 'cottaging' in and around public toilets.  Men as far away as Sheffield are believed to be aware of this activity and travel to Rochdale to take part. 

'One eight-year-old is thought to have been involved.  The police are aware of the problem.  What action has been taken is not known. 

'One rent boy has been removed from the school.  The suggestion that he may return soon has angered the staff. 

'Some boys have been "forced" to have sex with others.

'This degree of sexual activity, if it is factual, points to fundamental problems within the school.’  (my emphasis, because the first action which was taken was to commission a psychologist to visit the school to ascertain whether the claims were true.)

So what would you have done? 
Would you have closed the school immediately even though it served three local authorities?
Would you have insisted on prosecuting the older boys who indulged in oral sex?
Would you have insisted that the boys involved in ‘forcing’ others be prosecuted?
Do you think the term "sexual abuse" is the best way of describing what was found?

The term I have repeatedly used about what was going on at Knowl View is ‘unsavoury’.  What people do in the privacy of their bedroom is not my business.  When these things happen in an institution like a school or a prison I find it distasteful.  They should not have happened at Knowl View.  They should not have been allowed to happen.   But they did.

The reason seems to be that in terms of priority special schools like this were at the back of the queue for resources, for visits from educational advisers and for adequate staffing.   As for the ‘naughty boys’ who were at Knowl View it may have been ‘out of sight, out of mind’, an attitude we perhaps all shared.   Also Rochdale MBC was busy reorganising its secondary education provision in the years immediately prior to 1990.   At the same time the Thatcher government was encouraging schools to ‘opt out’ of the Local Education Authority and some schools were holding ballots of parents.

The substantive question is, when confronted with a serious problem at Knowl View, which may well have been in part of their own making, did the officers concerned react appropriately or did they try to ‘cover it up’?   My view is that they acted appropriately and in a timely fashion.   If you disagree, I ask again, what would YOU have done?

I’m told there are people close to the local Labour parties who are talking about ‘a crisis of sexual abuse in Rochdale’.   If they are I can only ask, What crisis? If they talking it up as a means of bringing down Farnell there are two things to say. The first is that their efforts are redundant; Farnell has no longer any credibility and won’t want to face the electorate.  The second is that they are ‘piddling in the same pot’ as Simon Danczuk.  In 2014 Danczuk talked up the problems at Knowl View which looked like an effort to discredit Colin Lambert who has just delivered Labour an astonishing electoral result.  Is this really who they feel happy to be compared with?    Just look what happened to him.

Dodger Danczuk Doesn't Deliver!

by Les May

Last night, as predicted Simon Danczuk didn't deliver his evidence of historic child abuse to the meeting of the Greater Manchester Police Federation at the Renaissance Hotel as requested by Chief Inspector Ian Hanson chairman of the Joint Branch Board of the GMP Police Federation.  Instead Tony Lloyd, the Manchester Police and Crime Commissioner, turned up to explain to the serving police officers present what was going on as the disgraced Rochdale MP, Simon Danczuk, indulges himself in attacking the police for failing to dig-up enough evidence to satisfy the Crown Prosecution Service.  Below Les May questions Simon Danczuk's tactics in attacking the police. (Editor)

THE response by Rochdale MP Simon Danczuk to Chief Inspector Hanson’s challenge to him

'.... I will publicly call him out to deliver the firm evidence that he bases his criticism of GMP on to my office by 12 noon on Monday - and I will personally deliver it to the IPCC.’

at https://twitter.com/hashtag/knowlView?src=hash  and at http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/danczuk-ducks-out-of-debate.html  was entirely predictable.   

He is trying to use the same tactic which was so successful when he appeared before the Home Affairs Select Committee in July 2014, when instead of being questioned about his book ‘Smile for the Camera’  he managed to get the spotlight shifted onto Leon Brittan.  Now he wants to shift the spotlight from his inability to provide the evidence asked for, onto debating what he calls the ‘poor policing around Rochdale’. 

This is just a smoke screen to hide the fact that he does not have any evidence to back up his claims about Knowl View.  He knows perfectly well that Chief Inspector Hanson is speaking for the GMP members of the Police Federation who he feels have been very unfairly criticised by Danczuk.  Chief Inspector Hanson is not, and does not represent himself as, speaking for GMP.   

To put it bluntly Danczuk’s claims:

‘Everyone knows that child abuse took place on a frightening scale at Knowl View’ and ‘We've seen shocking reports documenting this...’ are bunkum.  ‘Everyone knows...’, isn’t evidence and Danczuk continually repeating it does not make it evidence. 

And no, we have not seen ‘shocking reports’ because the two reports which might throw some light on what was happening at Knowl View, the 1991 report of Philip Shepherd and the 1992 report of Valerie Mellor, have not been published by Rochdale Council and it shows no inclination to let us see them for ourselves.   

I have seen a copy of the Shepherd report and whilst it is certainly ‘shocking’, what it refers to is sexual activity between the boys at the school and to some boys who were visited Rochdale town centre accompanied by care staff, ‘cottaging’ at the Smith Street toilets.   

In other words what it reveals is poor supervision by some care staff.  Whether the responsibility for this being allowed to happen should lie with the care staff involved. the headteacher, the governors or the Director of Education is a subject for discussion after the reports have been published in full.   

As to what Danczuk means by his comment, ‘...ensure the public understand how the police reach decisions regarding serious crimes like child abuse’, I do not understand unless he is trying to blame Chief Inspector Hanson’s colleagues for the decision that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute anyone, which was in fact taken by the CPS.   

I hope that Chief Inspector Hanson and his GMP colleagues in the Police Federation will keep the pressure on Danczuk to produce the ‘very specific information that backs up his comments’, not let him shift the debate onto things which suit his agenda of getting himself back in the limelight and will publicise as widely as possible his inability or unwillingness to ‘put his money where his mouth is.

If Danczuk wants to do something useful he could try putting pressure on his friends in Rochdale Council to publish the Shepherd and Mellor reports.  Until these have been published he should refrain from making any more inflammatory comments about Knowl View.

'Old News from Knowl View?'

by Les May

Operation Jaguar was launched following reports of both physical and sexual abuse that at Knowl View residential school for boys from 1969 until the school closed in 1995.

After reviewing 13 files of evidence submitted by Greater Manchester Police (GMP) relating to 27 suspects and 16 complainants the Crown Prosecution Service decided that no prosecution should take place and GMP have indicated that no further action will be taken in relation to these allegations.

Some of these allegations were made public in 1995 in an Independent on Sunday report which was based upon a 1991 report submitted to Rochdale’s education department by AIDs worker Philip Shepherd.  This is what the report actually said.

One boy who is homosexual has contact with an adult outside the school.  Several of the senior boys indulge in oral sex with one another.

Reputedly five of the junior boys have been or are involved in 'cottaging' in and around public toilets.  Men as far away as Sheffield are believed to be aware of this activity and travel to Rochdale to take part.

 
'One eight-year-old is thought to have been involved.  The police are aware of the problem.  What action has been taken is not known.

'One rent boy has been removed from the school.  The suggestion that he may return soon has angered the staff.

'Some boys have been "forced" to have sex with others.'

and this is what Simon Danczuk and Matthew Baker claim it says in their book ‘Smile for the Camera’.

'In matter of fact language, the report described the extreme sexual abuse that young boys had been subjected to.  Boys were beaten and raped continually by men as far away as Sheffield who had travelled to Rochdale to take part.' page 112

A few lines later they quote their informant Mr Martin Digan as saying, 'These boys were sold to paedophile gangs.'  Of course neither they nor Mr Digan provide any evidence for this.

What Mr Shepherd’s report clearly indicated is that the major problem was sexual activities between the boys, some of it seemingly coercive.  A later report by psychologist Valerie Mellor came to substantially the same conclusion.

Last week, both Mr Danczuk and Mr Digan have appeared on television complaining about the decision of the CPS not to prosecute.  But faced with statements from Mr Danczuk about what happened at Knowl View which are so clearly at variance with what Mr Shepherd actually wrote, one must have some sympathy with the GMP which has been faced with the task sorting the fact from the fiction.  At any time in the past two and a half years Mr Digan could have dissociated himself from what Mr Danczuk claims he said but I am not aware that he has chosen to do so.

The eagerness of Mr Danczuk and Mr Baker to implicate Cyril Smith in the unsavoury activities at Knowl View has served only to confuse the issue still further.  As I show in my earlier review of their book ‘Smile for the Camera’ they provide no evidence that Smith was involved in any kind of abuse at Knowl View.  I doubt this will stop Mr Danczuk peddling his stories.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/boys-in-special-school-were-at-risk-of-aids-1600318.html

http://northernvoicesmag.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/nv-review-of-smile-for-camera.html