By Peggy Curran
Montreal Gazette
October 13, 2011
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/todays-paper/Psychopath+chaplain+office/5541829/story.html
| Giles Walker, long-time documentary filmmaker, said he had long dreamed of confronting his abuser. |
Giles Walker scrambled through nettles, up a hill and over a metal fence onto the railway tracks at Hither Green, a suburb 10 kilometres from London's Charing Cross Station. He pulled out his cellphone and called a former classmate at Bishop's College School in the Eastern Townships.
"I'm standing where Harry Forster died. I thought you would like to know," he said, as a train pulled up on the neighbouring track and the driver ordered him onto the platform.
"It was absolutely absurd, just an insane thing to do," the Montreal filmmaker admits. "But I was absolutely determined to see where he died and establish for a fact that his remains were buried somewhere."
The Reverend Harold Theodore Gibson Forster had that effect on people.
"If you put 20 or 10 or five or two BCS old boys in a room, within five minutes they would be talking about Harry. It was a rite of passage.
"Everyone, I think, was pleased in a way to hear that he had died a violent death."
Last year, BCS reached a $1.1 million out-of-court settlement with more than 30 former students who said they had suffered abuse - sexual, physical, mental or psychological - when Forster served as the school's chaplain and choir master between 1953 and 1963.
Walker chose not to join the class-action suit, fearing it would conflict with his own 30-year quest for answers about the life, but especially the death, of a man who beat so many young boys for his own sexual gratification.
"I had these fantasies of confronting him in the chapel at some famous British public school, standing up and saying this man is a complete phoney."
Now in his early 60s, Walker describes his own dreaded summons to Forster's rooms as an 11-year-old boy in Wake Me in the Morning, to be published this month. It makes for disturbing reading.
"Technically, it is all sexual abuse because it was done for his sexual gratification, even though we blessedly, for the most part, were not aware that that was why he was doing it," said Walker.
"The beatings themselves were so horrendous and so methodical and clinical. You can sort of imagine a man who got titillation from beating boys would be out of control, flailing about and totally lose control. But Forster was so regimented. . It was extraordinarily intense. It always went on far longer than you could absorb. At first, it was just extremely painful. It would just go on and on to the point where you would not lose consciousness, but you would just decide you were just going to have to get through this.
"Most of us, most of the people he abused or beat, they were able to kind of make it a life experience and move on," Walker said. "Some people were much more affected than others. I was affected much more by the reign of terror than I was by the actual beating. The beating was intensely painful and memorable, but the real damage that I thought he did was this constant fear that we lived in," fears which persisted for years after Walker left BCS.
"The amazing thing was that nobody ever told their parents. Or if they did, they couched it. They didn't want to tell their parents how unpleasant or how painful everything was. You wanted them to feel that they had made the right choices."
Walker wrote the book to share what he'd unearthed about the Anglican priest's background, speckled career and the schools that had covered it up. He followed Forster's muddy trail from England to Australia, Jamaica, Rhode Island and Lennoxville, then back to Britain.
"I think if he had stayed in England, he probably would have done fine. I don't think he would have dared to do much," he said. "His sisters were there. He would have been appalled if his sisters had suddenly been confronted with accusations.
"I think he preferred to go abroad and work undercover, if you will."
Each time Forster went too far and was quietly dismissed, he would return to England, where he would apply for a new position in the colonies.
"There was one thing that Forster had working for him, and that was that these were all Anglican schools. You could run those schools without a math teacher, but you couldn't run it without a chaplain.
"He was very respected. The church services, the choir performances were just magical. Beyond reproach. And he was a member of the Anglican Church and he was confirming boys every year and that would be a long process. In those days, it was a big deal."
BCS finally sent Forster packing in 1963. Forster was teaching at Harrow when he died, one of dozens of victims of a spectacular train wreck at Hither Green in November 1967.
"I went to Harrow and found myself in the Harold Forster Memorial reading room. I read the obituary that this lovely man had written about his mentor, Harold Forster." Walker realized how tightly knit the public school world was, and how protective of its reputation. "They were all, wittingly or unwittingly, fronting for Forster throughout his career."
In the late 1960s and '70s, that distant age before Google made secrets much harder to keep, Forster's victims had only the sketchiest details of what had become of their tormentor.
"There were about four versions of Harry's death. One of them was that he had been run over at a level crossing by a train. One claimed he'd been pushed off a platform in the London underground. One was that he had been killed in a train wreck," he said. "By the time he was killed, everyone had scattered. They were just rumours."
Walker, whose extensive credits include the films 90 Days and The Way of Tai Chi and the TV miniseries Rene Levesque, originally wanted to make a feature film about Forster. "The proposed title was Retribution, which I supposed is understandable."
In the fictionalized screenplay, three boys find Forster and take the law into their own hands. "They do what we all dreamt of doing but would never dare to do," said Walker. "I don't think it could ever have happened, although we thought about it endlessly. 'How can we get revenge on this man? How can we stop him from doing this?' "
Walker never ended up making that movie, but still holds out hope it could happen. "It's a very tough subject that a lot of people don't want to tackle. Although God knows there are enough films about equally horrendous subjects."
BCS hasn't exerted any pressure to stop Walker from writing the book - "they are so battle weary." And he wants to make it clear BCS is no longer that hidebound British-style boarding school where people like Forster were allowed to do so much damage.
"For years, I had harboured anger against BCS. I blamed Forster, but I had also blamed the school for not stopping him.
"I finally came to realize that the man was unstoppable, and that there were actually people at BCS who tried to stop him.
"He was such a part of the fabric of the school.
"It was proved conclusively that the man was an extremely clever, devious, patient, psychopathic pedophile. He would very cleverly insinuate himself into the fabric of a school, to the point where he became indispensable. That's when the abuse would start."
Wake Me in the Morning will be for sale at selected bookstores and online at wakeme book.com as of Oct. 21.
Contact: pcurran@montrealgazette.com
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