Son of Manchester United Legend Willie Morgan Speaks out about Abuse at Hands of Pervert Teacher Alan Morris
By John Scheerhout
The son of Manchester United legend Willie Morgan has revealed he was among scores of pupils sexually abused by St Ambrose College pervert Alan Morris. Speaking to the Manchester Evening News, young Scott Morgan told how he was abused from the age of eleven when Morris became his form teacher and it continued until he was 16. It began as physical punishment but soon became sexual, with Morris forcing the terrified youngster to bend over a stool in a small office at the rear of his classroom where he would close the curtains and smack Scott on his naked bottom with a variety of implements. He would line up a pink rubber paddle known as the Paddywhacker, a series of canes and shoes and a leather strap on the desk before slowly choosing which one to use with his victim bent over the stool waiting for the punishment to be delivered. Now aged 43 and a businessman, Scott, the son of former Reds winger Willie Morgan, has decided to waive his right to anonymity so he can tell the full story of the abuse he suffered and give others the courage to stand up against abusers. Scott said: “I was really quiet at school. That’s why he picked on me. I just put up and shut up. It’s not the sort of thing you made a big deal of in those days. He had his favourites, those he liked to punish. You just knew when it was your turn. It was horrible. You just knew it was coming. You just shut your eyes and waited for it. Often he didn’t have to say anything. The more he hit you the more risque he got. It started off as just normal punishment which people now-a-days would say was wrong because of the sheer brute force he used.
“The whole thing was very ritualistic. You were marched in front of the class really really slowly into his little office. Sometimes he didn’t say anything. He just opened the door to his office and you knew. He’d get you in there and tell you to bend over. You knew he was behind you. Sometimes it took several minutes for him to punish you. It might have been that you had been naughty by firing rice out of a pea shooter or sometimes he just made up a misdemeanour. He once accused me of having a fight on the bus. I didn’t even take the bus to school. It was just any excuse to get you into his room. Over the years the punishment got worse and worse. When I was 13 or 14 he started telling me to pull my trousers down. After I had been hit with the cane once I was left with scars on my backside. When my mum asked me about it I just said I’d fallen over. You just didn’t say. “Punishment was the whole culture of the school. There were was an occasion when an entire class was lined up in front of the school and they were each hit with a cricket bat on their backsides. It wasn’t pretty. Most of it tended to be dished out by the Christian brothers. One of the teachers had a little white slipper. You did something wrong and you were bent over and you got a whack. It hurt like Hell. “With Morris it was getting more and more bizarre and more and more un-nerving. You would go into his little room and sometimes it would be five minutes before he hit you. The punishment got more and more strange. You could hear him going ‘hmmmmm’ as he chose the implement. Mostly I was on my own but occasionally there were other boys in there with me. He would go around hitting everybody in turn. He made us all pull our pants down. He was getting a kick out of it. The longer he could drag it out the better. Sometimes it would be one or two pupils and other times there would be nine or ten. That’s how he spent his lunch-times and always in his little room. “Before he hit you with the cane he would start poking you with it.
“I stood up to him once and refused to be punished. Morris went to the headmaster, I said I hadn’t done anything, Morris said ‘either he goes or I go’. The headteacher sided with me and said I’d done nothing wrong. The punishments still carried on after that but not as much. None of the pupils wanted to go against him because we didn’t want to get thrown out of school. What would our parents do? He ruled by fear. I wanted to be the first from our family to go to university. That was important to me. There were so many things that went on in that school. One pupil has all his teeth knocked out when a teacher punished him and he smashed his face into a desk. It was a private school and we were always told they could do what they wanted. “All the teachers knew what Morris was like but nobody spoke to him. He would never engage with other teachers. They knew what was going on but would not go up against him because he was the deputy headmaster. We were all ruled by fear.” He left St Ambrose with grades B, C and a D in his A levels. He was tipped for an A in geography but got a D because his teacher had been teaching ‘the wrong syllabus for two years’. “Everybody failed their geography paper that year but it was all brushed under the carpet,” said Scott Scott described how he tried to commit suicide when he was 19 after dropping out of polytechnic where he was studying business and finance. He had used a hose to divert exhaust fumes into his car. “I had passed out. Somebody turned up and I went to hospital. If that person hadn’t turned up, I wouldn't be here today pure and simple.” Scott admitted he felt guilty about not putting up more of a fight. He said: “I feel sorry for the kids that came after us. We should have stood up to him at the time. We should have dealt with it. Looking back, he was a hated man for what he was doing. The school knew. Everybody knew. The only people who didn’t know were the parents. There was so much fear created. We could not stand up to him.” During the trial. he declined an offer to give evidence against Morris from behind screens, adding: “This has affected my life very, very badly. I wanted to face the guy. He just looked nonchalant as if he wasn’t interested in any way shape or form. He knows what he’s done and he’s tried to drag it out for as long as possible. “He’s a sick bastard. I really feel sorry for him but I feel more for the people who came after us. If we had stood up to him and said ‘no more’ then I don’t think a lot of this would have happened, the beating and making people shake with fear. The more he’s got away with it it, the more he’s pushed the boat out. But what can you do as a child? It became second nature to him. He was doing it more and more and no-one was saying ‘no - this is wrong’. It’s hard to admit for a grown man but you became his pet, his play-thing. Your were effectively his gimp. He took pleasure from doing it and the thing that really sickens me is that he was allowed to leave the school in the full knowledge of what he had been doing and then join the church where he would be responsible for more children. That really beggars belief. He should never have been allowed anywhere near children.” Scott said he never told his late mother Patricia and only informed his father Willie, now 69, recently about the abuse he suffered. “If I had told him he would have been very very angry. It wasn’t the sort of thing you can tell your father or any parent because you would have been petrified of what they would do. And you didn’t want to leave school because all your friends were there. Where would you go? It’s so long ago now, what can he do?” said Scott. Scott, who excelled at sports, said he was sometimes picked on at school because he had a famous father but believed it was never a consideration for Morris. “Morris just picked on kids he knew wouldn’t fight back. Everything he did was methodical and ritualistic,” he said. When he was being abused, Scott only confided in his sister Gaynor although she was never told the details. She encouraged him to contact the police after the MEN broke the story of a sex abuse investigation at St Ambrose. On deciding to waive his right to anonymity, Scott said: “I just want to give other people courage to stand up against bullies like Morris.”
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