Smiling Ernest - Background Information

Hub 2

Before I tell you about my experiences with Ernest, in his home from hell, I would like to draw your attention to a few snippets of information that are freely available on the internet. My story will be personal, recalled from my memory, and conveyed with my point of view. My experience with John Ernest Allen is unique to me – others boys had worse encounters than mine. I feel that you should know some of the public record. It will give you some background to my story.

• MI5 where alleged to have taken foreign diplomats to the North Wales homes, and gave them boys to "play" with, secretly filming them as they buggered, abused and tortured them. It was also alleged that they kept the tapes as evidence to use against the diplomats later.
• More than a dozen victims who complained of abuse by a paedophile ring have met suspicious deaths. Police officers, social workers, and prominent public figures were accused of belonging to a paedophile ring, which indulged in a relentless campaign of physical and sexual abuse in children’s homes in North Wales.
• The names of the alleged members of the ring have been given by witnesses in public sessions of the North Wales Child Abuse Tribunal, but they were suppressed by the tribunal’s chairperson, Sir Ronald Waterhouse QC, who has threatened the media with High Court proceedings if they print them.
• Those named to the tribunal included a man who bears the same surname as a prominent Conservative supporter. Two witnesses have told the tribunal of a rich and powerful man who belonged to the alleged ring.
• The son of an influential peer, who admitted to police that he had been having sex with an under-age boy from one of the homes, was never prosecuted.
• A powerful public official, who has previously been cleared of abuse, was named by witnesses who gave separate accounts to the tribunal of his alleged rape of young boys. Another reported him attending parties in Wrexham, which were supplied with boys from a child’s home.
• There were two social workers and two police officers, one of whom accused of abuse on four separate occasions and exonerated each time, and another who has since been jailed in another part of the country for gross indecency with a child.
• The accused included more than a dozen other local men, including an executive with a local authority, a senior probation officer, and a director of a major company.
• More than 80 people were named as child abusers in statements to the North Wales inquiry.
• Sir Ronald Waterhouse’s findings were published in February 2000. His report named and criticised almost 200 people for either abusing children or failing to offer them sufficient protection.
• It was also alleged that care workers acted as go-betweens for a paedophile ring that extends into the topmost layers of society. Police officers, church ministers, local authority executives, senior executives and politicians, including someone believed to be a leading supporter of Margaret Thatcher, have been identified.
• Measures were been taken to prevent the details of the official enquiry proceedings from being covered fully in the national media. In the event the press were virtually absent from the proceedings.
• There would have been no significant national coverage of this major scandal, if not for the work of a single journalist, who is Nick Davies of The Guardian.
• Waterhouse indicated that the final report would not find the "public figure" culpable of any crimes, even though he has been identified by six victims. He stated that whilst a number of the abusers will be named, those of the two police officers would be omitted.
• Thirty-nine children’s homes in North Wales were implicated. Nearly 300 people gave evidence as victims of abuse. One hundred and forty eight individuals were identified as abusers.
• John Ernest Allen, a convicted paedophile, ran a complex of homes in London and North Wales. It was alleged that he supplied children to wealthy outsiders. At the Bryn Alyn home, two senior officials were convicted of systematic sexual abuse of children in their care. Another was convicted of violent attacks on children but given a suspended sentence. That individual was accused of physical assault on 66 occasions by 66 different boys.
• It was alleged that a room at the Crest Hotel in Wrexham was regularly hired out on Sunday evenings to VIP’s who were ensured a steady supply of children for their sexual gratification.
• Two brothers who were abused by Allen were trying to blackmail him. In April 1992, one of them died in a suspicious house fire in Brighton. The other died soon afterwards in mysterious circumstances.
• One witness claimed to have been abused by 49 different people.
• Those who turned to the police or other social workers for help were met with indifference or outright hostility. Twenty-seven separate police inquiries failed to produce anything substantial. When the police finally launched a major inquiry in 1991, they secured the conviction of only four of the care workers and concluded that there was no evidence of a paedophile ring. Thirteen reports by social services went unpublished. Clwyd County Council commissioned an independent inquiry and then ruled that its report could not be published.

Like many others, I ran away a few times and I did tell the police about the abuse. I even told my mother on one occasion, but no one took the accusations seriously and we were always returned to Ernest for our punishment.