Mick Hartley

In the early Nineties the largest child abuse investigation in Britain centred on Bryn Estyn, a care home for adolescent boys on the outskirts of Wrexham. Richard Webster has written about it in a forthcoming book:

The Secret of Bryn Estyn tells the story of the greatest series of miscarriages of justice in recent British history – how innocent lives have been destroyed, the public deceived and millions of pounds wasted in a witch-hunt against innocent people.

Early in the morning of 15 March 1992, 40 police officers took up positions in streets in and around Wrexham in North Wales. As dawn broke they swooped down on their suspects and arrested sixteen men and one woman. All but one had worked at Bryn Estyn…. According to reports which began to appear in the press in 1991, Bryn Estyn had lain at the centre of a network of evil – a conspiracy which supposedly involved the extensive homosexual abuse of adolescent boys by a paedophile ring, whose members terrorised their victims and subjected them to a regime of violence and brutality.

The paedophile ring turned out to be a figment of the investigators’ imagination. Yet rumours of its existence led to the largest child abuse investigation in Britain. The police trawled allegations from 650 witnesses, who accused 365 people of abusing them at homes throughout North Wales. When only six prosecutions followed, with only two new convictions for sexual abuse, the police and the authorities were accused of mounting a cover-up. Police officers themselves were said to belong to the very paedophile ring they were supposed to be investigating. The story became a national scandal.

A senior police officer, publicly accused of raping adolescent boys at Bryn Estyn, sued for libel and won. Still, rumours of a cover-up persisted. In 1996 the government set up the largest Tribunal of Inquiry in British history, under Sir Ronald Waterhouse. In February 2000, the Tribunal made damning findings of extensive abuse in North Wales. By then, the police trawling operation which had begun there had spread to whole of Britain. Police forces collected allegations against 5,000 former care workers and teachers, and hundreds were arrested.

But was Waterhouse right to find there had been wholesale abuse in North Wales? Or did his inquiry, and the investigations that led up to it, form part of a modern witch-hunt?

Here’s a look at the Waterhouse Report from the British False Memory Society website, from March 2000. And here’s Webster pulling apart a BBC documentary aired in 1999.