Sex Abuse Cover-up Row at Elite Cape School

Noseweek
May 22, 2014

http://www.noseweek.co.za/article/3210/Sex-abuse-cover-up-row-at-elite-Cape-school

Highly respected teacher scapegoated over 30-year-old sexual abuse incident – to save school’s reputation

By end of this school term, Bishops – formally Cape Town’s (Anglican) Diocesan School for Boys – and its powerful old boys union will ever so quietly have cut all ties with Tim Hamilton-Smith, who for 40 years has been an admired and beloved master, housemaster, vice-principal and rugby coach at South Africa’s oldest private school.

The school authorities had every reason to hope the event would pass unremarked-upon by most old boys, let alone the public, because it is intended to be the final stage of a protracted cover-up; and the school chairman has said (in a confidential email) that he has received information which tells of a “long and sorry history” of such cover-ups, devised to ensure the school’s reputation remained untarnished by sexual scandal.

In Hamilton-Smith’s case, there is absolutely no reason to believe the worthy old schoolmaster and coach, who has lived on campus with his wife and two daughters for most of his working life, has been guilty of any sexual impropriety.