The Makin Review and the John Smyth Abuse Cover-up

What happened

John Smyth QC (1941–2018) was an English barrister, Conservative-evangelical lay leader, and chairman of the trust that ran the Iwerne Trust holiday camps for boys from elite English public schools (Eton, Winchester, Wellington, and others). Between approximately 1978 and 1982, Smyth subjected at least 30 boys associated with the Iwerne camps to severe physical and sexual abuse, including extended sessions of beating with garden canes in a soundproofed shed at his Hampshire home. The Iwerne organisation commissioned an internal report in 1982 (the Ruston Report) which documented the abuse in detail and was circulated within Iwerne leadership but was suppressed externally.

Smyth left England in 1984 to take a position in Zimbabwe with the Zambesi Ministries, where the abuse pattern continued; one boy, Guide Nyachuru, drowned in 1992 in a camp swimming pool under circumstances Zimbabwean police investigated as possibly connected to Smyth. Smyth subsequently moved to South Africa, where he died in August 2018 — three months after the broadcast of a Channel 4 News investigation that for the first time disclosed the abuse pattern publicly.

The Makin Review

In August 2019, the Church of England's National Safeguarding Team commissioned an independent review of the Church's handling of the Smyth case from Keith Makin, a former director of social services. The Independent Learning Lessons Review John Smyth QC — the Makin Review — was published on 7 November 2024.

The Review's central finding was that the Church of England had been made aware of the substance of the Smyth abuse pattern in 2013 — when a survivor formally disclosed to Justin Welby's predecessor and to the Bishop of Ely — and had failed to act effectively for the following eleven years. The Review identified specific named senior clergy and lay safeguarding officials whose decisions had contributed to the failure; it concluded that the cover-up was the product of "personal and institutional" failure rather than of any single individual's misconduct.

Welby's resignation

Five days after the Review's publication, on 12 November 2024, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, announced his resignation. In his statement Welby accepted "personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024." He completed his official duties on 6 January 2025. Welby was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to resign in modern history other than for reasons of personal age or health.

Broader Anglican-evangelical context

The Iwerne camps and the parallel Soul Survivor / Mike Pilavachi safeguarding case (subject of a separate Church of England investigation that concluded in September 2023, identifying a pattern of inappropriate physical relationships between Pilavachi and young male volunteers) are connected through the conservative-evangelical-Anglican infrastructure of late-twentieth-century English Christianity. Subsequent reviews and investigations have extended the institutional record across that infrastructure.

Significance

The Makin Review is one of the most consequential institutional accountability events in twentieth- or twenty-first-century Anglican history. The resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury directly because of an abuse cover-up is a structural fact previously without precedent in the Church of England's modern record. The Review's framework — separation of the individual perpetrator's actions from the institutional decision-record that enabled their continuation — is the same methodological move that anchors the Catholic-case cover-up accountability work.

Sources

• Keith Makin, Independent Learning Lessons Review John Smyth QC (the Makin Review), Church of England National Safeguarding Team, published 7 November 2024.
• Justin Welby, statement of resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury, 12 November 2024.
• Channel 4 News, investigative broadcast on John Smyth, 2 February 2017.
• Andrew Graystone, Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the Cult of the Iwerne Camps (DLT, 2021).
• The Ruston Report, internal Iwerne Trust report, 1982 — primary document referenced in subsequent reviews.
• Church of England National Safeguarding Team, Mike Pilavachi / Soul Survivor investigation findings, September 2023.