Exclusive: Police reopen investigation into historic sexual abuse at Mount St Mary’s College

When Mount St Mary’s College in Derbyshire announced it was closing due to financial difficulties at the end of July, bringing almost 200 years of history to an end, many former students and staff were devastated. “My parents’ decision to send me to Mount St Mary’s was important in many ways, some of which only became apparent in later years,” one former student wrote online. “I am forever grateful.” Those with children still at the private Catholic school — some of whom were already paying more than £47,000 a year in boarding fees — were so desperate to keep it open that they tried to raise a minimum of £800,000 in a matter of days, although their efforts proved unsuccessful. 

But not everyone who attended Mount St Mary’s — or “The Mount” as it was commonly known — looks back on their time fondly. One former student, Daniel*, told The Tribune his experiences in the 1980s left him suicidal and unable to have sexual relationships to this day. “I was the only person that left the boarding school with no qualifications and I spent three years fighting to save my life,” he says. “It cost me the career I could have had, the marriage I could have had — I still can’t be intimate with women.”

Daniel, who is now in his 50s, finally reported two former staff at the school to Derbyshire Police in January this year. Three months later, he was told that, because both men he accused were already dead, there was nothing the police could do. “The crimes have been recorded and will remain on our systems but will be filed with no active investigation,” Derbyshire Police wrote, in a message seen by The Tribune. “I am sorry this is the outcome and that we cannot do more in a legal capacity for you.”

But after the school shut down at the end of July, something changed. Last month, Daniel was contacted by an officer from Derbyshire Police, explaining they had decided to reopen the case and investigate after all. When contacted by the Tribune, a spokesperson for Derbyshire Police confirmed the force is “investigating an allegation of two non-recent sexual offences reported to have taken place at Mount St Marys College,” adding that “victims of sexual offences can report these crimes to us at any time, even if they happened months, years or decades ago”. When asked why the case was abruptly reopened, the spokesperson said “new information came to light relating to the identity of one of the alleged suspects” but did not explain the decision further. Daniel says he was told who the information concerned but not what police had discovered.

The Tribune understands Daniel is one of 16 people who have told the school’s founders, the Jesuits in Britain, that they were sexually abused there between the 1950s and 80s. He has long suspected the Jesuits’ decision to step back from running the school in 2006 and transfer it to a newly-created charitable trust was a response to victims beginning to come forward, something the Jesuits deny. A spokesperson told The Tribune: “Independent trusts were created for Mount St Mary’s College and two other schools to ensure strong local management and long-term sustainability. We took this step to support the schools and their communities, and it was not connected to any allegations.”

Given the Jesuits in Britain paid Daniel £30,000 in compensation and has funded his private therapy — costing hundreds of pounds each month — for almost a decade, Daniel suspects pay-outs to abuse victims could have contributed to the financial struggles that closed the school. The Jesuits were asked how much was paid in total to alleged victims of abuse at Mount St Mary’s but have yet to provide this information at the time of writing. However, a spokesperson said: "The scale of historical insurance claims was small compared with the operational costs of running the school. When three schools transferred to local trusts, all liabilities for historical abuse claims remained with the Jesuits – no historical claims were passed to the new trusts." 

Daniel also believes the victims who have already come forward are only the first of many. By telling his own story to The Tribune, he hopes to encourage more people to speak up.

Daniel joined Mount St Mary’s at the age of 12 and says he didn’t fit in well with the other children, which made him “ripe for abuse”. With the benefit of hindsight, he believes a teacher named Father David Lamb began grooming him when he was only 13. “It was all done quite innocently at first,” he says. “Quite often, at the end of class, he pretended to be busy with his hands and would ask me to get chalk out of his pocket.” Daniel liked his teacher — “he was really friendly and helpful and supportive” — so was happy to comply.

Gradually, he claims Lamb pushed his boundaries further and further, eventually persuading Daniel to perform oral sex on him more than once while he was underage. “I remember him laughing at me because I had not reached puberty and saying he ‘needed to wait a couple of years’. It was his way of saying I was not ready to bugger him yet.” 

On the occasions that Daniel refused Lamb’s advances, he claims the teacher punished him by refusing to intervene when older boys bullied him, perhaps even encouraging their behaviour. He describes one particularly violent incident when a group of older boys attacked him in the middle of the night and forced a Tipp-Ex bottle inside his anus, which he struggled to remove for the next three days. Another former student named Matt Carr, who wrote about his memories of the school after its closure was announced, also remembers it as a place where unusually vicious bullying went unchecked, although he does not claim to have suffered sexual abuse. “Violence was embedded in the school from top to bottom like a stick of rock,” he wrote.

Daniel says Lamb’s abuse only stopped when he left the school after failing all of his O Levels at the age of 16. “After that, I just went off the rails really,” he recalls. By the time he was ready to tell the Jesuits what had happened, he was in his 30s and discovered Lamb was already dead, having taken his own life in 1999. Daniel says he was told that his former teacher killed himself after he was summoned to the Jesuit’s headquarters in London to answer questions about allegations of child abuse; he was removed from active ministry the same year. The Tribune understands that one of the allegations concerned Lamb’s time at St Aloysius' College in Glasgow, where he worked from from 1972 to 1981 before joining Mount St Mary’s. Lamb worked at the school in Derbyshire until 1988. 

Letters sent by the Jesuits to Daniel and seen by The Tribune acknowledge his allegations euphemistically, with one recent letter referring to “concerns about which you have been engaging with the Jesuits in Britain for a long time”. However, in face-to-face conversation, Daniel says members of the church have been willing to admit that he was sexually abused by Lamb. 

One interaction that particularly stands out to him is a conversation he had with a safeguarding officer for the Jesuits. He alleges she told him to “never think he was the only one” and that “the things that happened at the school in the 1980s were unspeakable,” which led him to believe sexual abuse at the school was unusually rampant at the school. When contacted by The Tribune, the safeguarding officer said she was referring more generally to the problem of sexual abuse at boarding schools and denied describing the situation at Mount St Mary’s as particularly bad. “I don’t think there’s a boarding school in the UK that has not had some kind of abuse in the past,” she said. “During that time, sexual abuse was not recognised in the way it is nowadays.”

When it comes to the second man reported to Derbyshire Police — the former headmaster Father John Grummit, who died aged 79 in 2009 — Daniel says the Jesuits always declined in conversations with him to describe his behaviour as sexual abuse. “The most the Jesuits admitted to is that he had some strange practices,” he says. However, The Tribune understands that three alleged victims of Father Grummit have approached the Jesuits about incidents in the 1970s and 80s, all of which were referred to the police.

The former headmaster was widely known among students for being fond of caning, always on bare backsides, which he allegedly once told Daniel was “to make sure we didn’t have a book down our trousers”. Daniel remembers being caned by Grummit “on a weekly basis” and that boys would compare the welts they received. “He had different canes, including one called ‘the tickler’, which was very thin and left a red rash, sometimes breaking skin.”

Daniel remembers one incident that convinced him this behaviour was more sinister than simply an old-fashioned approach to discipline. “He woke me up in the middle of the night and accused me of masturbating,” Daniel says. “Then he took me down to his office, told me to pull my trousers down to my ankles and caned me for killing unborn babies.” Daniel alleges he was told by Derbyshire Police that the new information which prompted them to reopen the case related to Grummit.

When contacted by The Tribune, a spokesperson for the Jesuits in Britain said: "We take our safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously and have strengthened our practices over the years to ensure our communities and institutions are safe places for all. We fully support the reopening of any investigation into complaints of historical abuse and stand ready to cooperate as needed.

“If you have been affected, or have any concerns, we encourage you to speak confidentially with our safeguarding professionals via safeguarding@jesuit.org.uk.”

*Name changed to protect his identity.

This article was amended on 5th September to add a further comment from the Jesuits in Britain and the number of complaints about Father Grummit.