For years, I had deliberately pushed any thought of the children I had grown up with to the back of my mind. I had chosen to assume that things were OK for them, that somewhere out there Liam and the rest of them had jobs and houses, and wives and kids and dogs they took for walks – normal, pleasant, unremarkable lives. I had hoped, vaguely, that they were living better lives than mine. Now I had to confront the reality, which was that, as grim and gritty and difficult as my life had often been over the years, I was one of the lucky ones. I was one of the survivors.
The case against the former care workers of St Leonard’s would take place in two parts. First there was a criminal prosecution taken by the state. Only later could a civil action on the part of the victims occur. The criminal prosecution was supposed to establish the guilt or innocence of the various people who had been accused, and lay the ground for any compensation cases that would be taken against the London Borough of Tower Hamlets Council.
Sadly, the criminal prosecution was a bit of a fiasco, despite the fact that many of the former residents of the homes gave statements, some in court. The witnesses were brave. Some of the people who had suffered the most as children now had to face their demons and lay their secrets bare in front of the jury at the Old Bailey in London. It must have been painfully difficult. On 23 January 2001, one of the local newspapers, the Braintree and Witham Times, published the following about the harrowing ordeal of one of the former victims of Uncle Bill:
A woman sobbed at the Old Bailey as she told how she was raped by William Starling while resident in an Essex children’s home.
Weeping uncontrollably, the alleged victim, now 38, said she didn’t reveal her terrible ordeal at the time because she thought no one would believe her and she would be ‘locked away’.
She said the attack happened when she was ten or 11 years old. She left the home shortly afterwards but the abuse continued, she claimed.
The slim blonde revealed how Starling, now aged 74, of Rantree Fold, Basildon, would visit her at her parents’ address and indecently assault her.
He is also alleged to have attacked her siblings as well as eight other children.
‘Bill would give my mum some money to go shopping down the market and give my dad some money to go and have a drink at the pub,’ she continued.
Once alone with her she said Starling would indecently assault her.
Afterwards she claimed he would sneer at her: ‘No one will believe you, you are just a disturbed kid.’
She said that the rape happened in a shed in the back garden of the children’s home.
Starling, the retired children’s home worker, is said to have sexually abused 12 ‘vulnerable’ children over a 20-year period. Miss Sally Howes, prosecuting, told the jury he carried out a ‘cynical and calculated catalogue of abuse’ while employed by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
Starling has pleaded not guilty to 25 sexual assaults, including three rapes, four counts of other serious sexual assaults, and 17 of indecent assault and indecency with a child.
After a long trial and the courageous disclosures of other victims of Bill Starling, Alan Prescott and some of their colleagues, the case finally ended. The outcome of it was reported as follows in the Recorder newspaper on 12 October 2001:
Two former workers at St Leonard’s care home in Hornchurch have been jailed for sexually assaulting youngsters in two separate hearings at The Old Bailey.
Former magistrate Alan Prescott, 62, who was in charge of St Leonard’s care home for 15 years, was jailed for two years on Friday for abusing boys.
Prescott’s sentence was dreadfully brief, in light of all the damage he had caused to so many young lives. One cannot help but wonder if his position as a local magistrate helped him out. Bill Starling, however, received a longer sentence:
Prescott’s jailing follows that of William Starling, 74, who was sentenced to 14 years jail at the Old Bailey last April. Court restrictions however have prevented the Recorder from printing the details until Prescott was sentenced.
Prescott had admitted to a number of cases of assault, but, when I was in the home, we were all confident that his inappropriate relationships with young boys were much more numerous than the four that he admitted to:
Last Friday, Prescott, who lives in Stepney, East London, admitted that he too had been abusing boys in his care, pleading guilty to sexually assaulting four victims between 1970 and 1980.
Almost hilariously, Prescott’s dominant position in his local community seems to have been cited by his legal counsel as a point in his favour, as if the abuse of trust of his position did not make what he had done even worse than it already was:
He was described by his solicitor as a ‘pillar of the community’ and commanded great respectability.
The social worker was a Havering magistrate for 24 years, a Labour councillor in Harold Hill and chief executive of an East London charity.
He joined St Leonard’s in 1968 and became superintendent in 1976, remaining in charge until it closed almost nine years later. But by the time he was in charge, he had already started abusing his position.
The pervert plied one victim with drink before abusing him and even offered to help another with a court case in return for sex.
Prosecutor Sally Howes told the court how Prescott first struck in 1970, sneaking into a 15 year old’s dormitory before performing a sex act on him.
He was finally arrested when police investigated allegations of a spate of abuse at St Leonard’s.
Several of the charges against Prescott were never heard by the court, presumably because of a lack of evidence after the passage of so many years or, perhaps, because the boys he had taken advantage of had grown into the men who were so wounded and distressed that they had ended up taking their own lives and were no longer available to give evidence about what had happened to them as children. This meant that Prescott never faced trial for some of the crimes he had been accused of:
He pleaded guilty to four counts of indecent assault, but additional charges of six indecent assaults and one of buggery were ordered to lie on file.
Sentencing Prescott, Judge Jeremy Roberts told him: ‘These offences are aggravated by the fact that you were in a position of power, authority and trust over your victims.’
‘You were a figure of authority in the community and it’s most unfortunate that behind the outward appearance of respectability, you were behaving in this kind of way towards the people in your charge.’
Particularly galling to learn was the fact that Prescott served very little time for the serious crimes that he had committed while the children he had abused would have to live with their memories forever:
Prescott has already spent 14 months on remand so he will be released from prison shortly. He will be forced to sign on the sex offenders’ registry for 10 years.
I was upset to learn that Prescott had received what was effectively a slap on the wrist for what had been very serious crimes.
While Alan Prescott’s main interest in life had been adolescent boys, Bill Starling found himself in more serious trouble, largely because of the lower age profile of his victims and, perhaps, because most of them had been girls:
In the other court case Starling, known as ‘Uncle Bill’, subjected 11 children as young as five to a ‘cynical and calculated catalogue of abuse’ spanning two decades.
The court heard how 74-year-old Starling, from Basildon, targeted problem kids at the Tower Hamlets run home…
His horrific spree of abuse ran from the mid-1960s to the 1980s, and his victims included three members of the same family.
He moved from child to child when the elder victims became too old for his perverted tastes, abusing two sisters and a brother…
…He bribed a number of victims with ‘money and cigarettes’ to make them comply with his twisted demands, and he raped an 11-year-old girl in a garden shed as she returned from a swimming session in the home.
Prosecutor Sally Howe
s told the court: ‘There is a noticeable similarity of background to all these complainants at their time of residence at either St Leonard’s or in Basildon.’
‘They all had difficulties of one sort or another. Some had already been the victims of sexual abuse, others were emotionally damaged by either cruel, uncaring parents or parents who, due to inadequacies of their own, were simply unable to cope with the responsibility of bringing up their children.’
Starling was convicted of 19 sexual offences relating to eleven victims – nine girls and two boys. There was one offence of buggery, two rapes, one indecency with a child and 15 indecent assaults.
He was acquitted of one count of buggery and two indecent assaults, with a further count of buggery ordered to lie on file.
Judge Jeremy Roberts sentenced Starling to 10 years for each rape and the buggery, to run concurrently. He received two years for the first seven counts of indecent assault, concurrent to each other but consecutive to the 10 years.
For the remaining eight indecent assaults and the indecency with a child, he was sentenced to two years, concurrent with each other, but consecutive to the other sentences – totalling 14 years.
The Judge told him: ‘It’s obvious from the jury’s verdict there came a stage when you fell prey to the temptation to behave in an inappropriate way towards these children.’
‘When you found you got away with it, one thing led to another, and you ended up committing this catalogue of offences.’
The newspaper also reported that the investigation was still ongoing:
The St Leonard sex abusers were finally brought to justice thanks to the courage and persistence of the Met Police’s Operation Mapperton and investigations are still going on.
The offences first came to light in 1995/6 when a complaint was made by one individual who said that he had been abused at the Hornchurch home.
Police set up an inquiry team called Operation Harmon and their evidence was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, but it was decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute.
The same individual who had made the original complaint continued to pester the police, however, and in 1998 Operation Mapperton was set up.
A huge debt of gratitude is owed to the first person to speak out and complain about his experiences at St Leonard’s because, without this initial complaint, it is very unlikely that anything would ever have been done to bring the aggressors to justice. Following his initial accusations, once the wheels started to turn, more and more former residents of the homes were interviewed, including me, and the truth had begun to emerge despite the fact that the authorities had apparently never kept proper records:
The lack of records by Tower Hamlets’ social services department caused police problems, but talking to each former child at the home quickly opened many more doors.
From speaking to the former children, now adults, and many with their own families, it quickly became clear that Starling was a major suspect.
The team worked tirelessly, taking 360 statements and travelling across the country to interview victims. In October 1999 Starling was arrested and questioned, but from day one until the present day he has denied any wrongdoing.
It became clear from the statements that Starling wasn’t the only one involved and soon Alan Prescott was questioned and arrested. There was a pattern to their victims; Starling’s being of both sexes and aged five to 14, and Prescott’s adolescent boys.
Det Con Ken Roast, part of the Operation Mapperton team, said: ‘It was quite easy for them in their positions of authority, and they were helped by the fact that they were 15 miles down the road from their controlling authority Tower Hamlets.
‘They wanted to be treated as their own little independent self-sufficient unit, and they knew that no one would believe the children if they told the truth.’
He said that the calibre of the evidence by the victims in court had been first class. He said the prosecution had expected some to crumble but they stood up admirably.
Apparently, quite a few of the children who had grown up in St Leonard’s went to court to watch their former abusers receive their sentences:
Many were in court for the sentencing, and welcomed Starling’s 14-year sentence, but were disappointed with the two years handed to Prescott, although apparently this was in line with sentences given in the 1970s, which judges have to take into account.
The article also stated that:
Det Con Roast doesn’t believe Tower Hamlets are to blame for the scandal, pointing the finger at the individuals responsible for employing the sex beasts in the first place. He said that another worker had been sentenced to 18 months for buggery in 1981, and yet there was no internal investigation. The person also continued to work for Tower Hamlets.
In the same edition of the local paper, a detailed report of the assault of one of the formers residents was described in the context of that individual’s struggle to have the names changed on the streets that now honoured the former abusers:
A victim of abuse at St Leonard’s is leading a campaign to have Prescott Close, which was named after convicted former home boss Alan Prescott, renamed.
The victim, who cannot be named, was abused by Starling. He went to the home when he was just five and was one of the last people to leave when it closed, aged 18.
Starling would threaten to send the youngster ‘to the funny farm’ unless he succumbed to his sickening advances, and told him no one would believe him if he tried to tell the truth.
He gave evidence against Starling at the Old Bailey, which he said had lifted a massive weight from his shoulders, and he is now trying to have the name of the road in which the home formerly stood changed…
The victim said that Starling was a very cunning man who would play on what the children feared the most in order to get his way.
He said that one minute he would be nice, saying he wanted to keep him at the home, and the next minute he would be acting like ‘an animal’, threatening to get rid of him.
People made statements about Starling, he said, but no one believed them. Once they did complain to social services, but when they came to question Starling he already knew of the youngsters’ allegations and had come up with an excuse.
It was only when police approached him in the late 90s and told him that they believed him, that the victim was able to open his heart to the catalogue of abuse.
He said: ‘I used to suffer from paranoia and thought people were talking about me behind my back. People wouldn’t believe us back in those days, so why should they believe us now? We were brought up to think we were liars and no one cared, then all of a sudden the police came along and said they did believe us. It was amazing.’
The Mapperton case had involved testimony from hundreds of the former residents of St Leonard’s. For the first time, someone had been willing to listen to us. It turned out that some of the cottages in the home had been worse than others, and that Bill Starling had been pretty much the leader of a paedophile ring that had been operating with impunity for years, wreaking havoc on the bodies and psyches of the children in question. Bill was the only aggressor who got anything like a substantial prison sentence, although fourteen years isn’t a lot for what he did. The police had cocked up some of the investigation and they admitted as much, but there wasn’t that much that could be done about it at this late stage in the day. The women police officers who had called around to my house had more or less admitted that there had been problems with the investigation from the outset and that the police had lost important evidence that could no longer be found. Prescott had already been in prison on remand and had served most of his sentence, so now he was due to get out.
After the case was heard, it got some coverage in the national press, perhaps most notably in an article in the Guardian, originally published on 24 October 2001, that I still find painfully difficult to read, because it describes in plain and horrifying language what had happened in the cottage opposite mine
and describes the truth behind the suicide of the man whom I had once loved as a brother and from whose life I had departed all those years ago, when I left the children’s home for the last time:
Nestling in the Essex countryside, the St Leonard’s children’s home should by rights have been a mini Utopia for the 300-odd youngsters in its care. With its 13 ‘cottages’, each housing up to 30 children, its own hospital, church, school, swimming pool and gymnasium, and generous avenues set amid 86 acres, the late Victorian ‘village’ appeared a world away from the squalid council blocks where many of its residents had previously lived in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets.
‘It was potentially idyllic,’ says Seamus Carroll, who lived there with his brothers from the age of four, in the mid-1960s, until age 17. ‘We always said, when we were growing up, it would be a wonderful place to be – if it were not for the staff, that is.’
For St Leonard’s, which saw 3,000 children pass through its doors between 1965 and its closure in 1984, was a haven not for children, but for paedophiles who meted out abuse while purportedly providing the children’s care… the lifting of reporting restrictions at the Old Bailey meant the full scale of the abuse could be, if not exposed, then at least hinted at. In a revelation largely banished from the news by the start of the bombing of Afghanistan, it emerged that one former house parent, Bill Starling, had indecently assaulted, raped or buggered 11 victims – aged from just five to 14 – over a 20-year period. Another defendant, the home’s superintendent, Alan Prescott, a former JP, Labour councillor, Assistant Director of Social Services in Tower Hamlets and, later, chief executive of East End charity Toynbee Hall, had indecently assaulted four teenage boys at various points throughout the 1970s…
Against All Odds: The Most Amazing True Life Story You'll Ever Read Page 16