New Claim of Organised Abuse at Dolphin Square in the 1980s – General Synod Mentioned

From BuzzFeed:

David was groggy when he woke up, he says. As he looked around, he knew where he was, because he had been there before: an apartment in Dolphin Square, central London…

He was 15. His eyes flicker up to the right, reliving those moments in 1982 as if he were back there.

…Memories from the night before would intrude in flashes – being taken to a restaurant, to a table of men, and being told who they were: politicians, businessmen, senior members of the Church of England. Sometimes other boys his age were there too.

…The blood would be his, but the semen was not. He did not know then that it would take more than 30 years to try to find out whose it was.

Thus begins a lengthy article by Patrick Strudwick about the case of David, the latest person to say he was sexually abused by VIPs at Dolphin Square in Pimlico in the 1980s. According to Strudwick:

When BuzzFeed News began investigating this story, the details, which pointed to a clutch of paedophiles operating across some of our most powerful institutions, seemed at first too grim and too outrageous to hold up. That was until we started examining the evidence, until the files began to surface, forced into the open through the Data Protection Act and the coroner’s court. These files not only corroborated David’s story, but expanded on it.

In the wake of the Operation Midland fiasco, can it be that, at last, we have a story about Dolphin Square that might hold up?

Alas, there’s some sleight of hand here – the documents do not “corroborate” what David says happened to him at Dolphin Square in 1982. Instead, they are mostly concerned with police complaints made by David in 2007 and 2015 concerning Gordon Dawson, a landowner who lived at Dalby Hall in Lincolnshire, and the inquest into Dawson’s death in 2007. David maintains that these documents show how his complaints were mishandled – perhaps to the extent of a cover-up – but that’s a different kind of “corroboration” than Strudwick’s intro leads us to expect.

According to David’s account (the first name is his own, although no surname is provided), Dawson befriended his family, and then began regularly raping David. He also convinced the family to allow him to take David to London at weekends to “go to the theatre” – instead, he was taken to General Synod meetings, to a restaurant, and then to Dolphin Square.

(1) Gordon Dawson

In December 2006, according to Strudwick, Dawson was arrested after five individuals made complaints against him; David made his own complaint two months later, after hearing about this. Police told David that Dawson would be re-arrested, but after police made contact with Dawson to arrange a date for an interview, he killed himself with a shotgun. The article includes photos of David as he is now and as a teenager at Dalby House.

Some of this can be confirmed by a news report that appeared in the Skegness Standard in 2007, along with the detail that Dawson had reportedly admitted to something:

At an inquest into the death of Gordon Harry Dawson, it emerged that, since October [2006], no fewer than six individuals had made complaints to police about past.

…Evidence was heard from Pc Geoff Harrison, an officer with the police’s Skegness-based public protection unit who had interviewed Dawson, of Dalby House, Dalby, about the claims.

“He accepted some of what was being said but made a full denial of the specific allegations,” said the officer.

Pc Harrison said that in a subsequent telephone conversation, Dawson told him: “Oh dear, I can’t think who would make these things up.”

Strudwick suggests that the complaint was mishandled by the police in several respects: first, that Dawson was told in advance he would be re-arrested; second, that the police ignored warnings from David about Dawson’s firearms collection; and third, that David’s name was disclosed to Dawson.

On the first point, the article includes an image of an extract from a formal statement made by Harrison in relation to the earlier complainants:

I explained that there had been a number of allegations made against him and we needed to formally interview him about them. I arranged for him to attend Skegness Police Station on Tuesday 19th December 2006 and explained that we could arrange legal representation for him…

Unfortunately, this extract does not feature the word “arrest” anywhere. It proves that the police wanted to interview Dawson under caution, but not that they intended to arrest to him. That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t in fact arrested – but to present this extract as evidence when it’s not raises the concern that “arrested” and “interviewed under caution” have been conflated, especially given that “arrest” doesn’t appear in the Skegness Standard article either. This is not nit-picking: Strudwick has a narrative that is critical of the police, but there is nothing untoward about arranging a so-called “voluntary” interview in advance by mutual agreement.

On the second point, the article says that Chief Inspector Tom Bell told David that he may have “had a case” about the firearms – but it is difficult to see what difference it would have made, given that Dawson could just have easily killed himself without access to firearms.

Police documents acquired by David also include details of other complaints against Dawson:

Some of the allegations against Dawson, which stretch back to 1964, included the sexual abuse of boys as young as 5.

The few lines in the files that are still discernible – the odd quote from the police interview with Dawson in December 2006, for example – are all familiar: boys in his car, country lanes, shooting rabbits, trousers undone. Two capitalised words jump out in the police notes: MODUS OPERANDI.

All very disturbing – but not the promised corroboration of organised abuse by VIPs at Dolphin Square.

(2) Dolphin Square

According to Strudwick’s article, Harrison

…came to David’s house to conduct a full interview. The interview would form the basis of David’s police statement, seen by BuzzFeed News, in which he describes, among other things, being raped by Dawson in Dolphin Square. At the time the flats were not publicly linked with sexual abuse, and Harrison, says David, was more concerned with the events in Lincolnshire.

“I said, ‘Am I the only one?’ He [Harrison] almost laughed. He said, ‘No, this is huge. It’ll be the biggest case this country has ever seen.” David says the sergeant informed him the police had been investigating Dawson for nine years; that “over 20 people had come forward”.

Strudwick acknowledges that David mistakenly described the London location as a “hotel”, but explains that this was because he was “unused to such a venue”. It’s a shame that BuzzFeed doesn’t include an image of the the police statement – to see the words “Dolphin Square” on a 2007 statement would have some evidential value, although it’s not quite true that the location had not been linked to abuse allegations at this time; articles on the subject had been published in Scallywag magazine in the 1990s, and from there had eventually made their way online. BuzzFeed also saw a police statement from a neighbour who said that David had disclosed to her in 1996, although it’s not made absolutely clear whether this statement specifically mentions Dolphin Square.

In 2015, David made contact with Operation Fairbank (blogged here), the Metropolitan Police investigation into allegations of sex abuse by politicians:

David attended an interview with two officers… Many questions remained for David: Why was Dawson forewarned of his arrest? Why were firearms not removed from his house first? Why did the case close immediately after Dawson’s death? And why was he not shown the report from the internal investigation [into his warning about the firearms*]?

But there were other questions, too: Why was the information about Dolphin Square David had given to Lincolnshire police in 2007 seemingly not investigated nor passed to the Metropolitan police? Why were many of Dawson’s friends, including two men who, David had been told, co-owned the flat with Dawson in Dolphin Square, not interviewed? Why has there never been any attempt to find out who sat with him at those restaurants?

[*UPDATE: Bandini notes in the comments that the routine destruction of this report after a period of time is being reported on social media as “documents relating to child abuse inquiries going missing”. This is sensationalising: (a) there is no reason to suppose that a review into whether Dawson should have been deprived of his firearms would have revealed anything about the allegations against him; (b) the fact that David was able to get hold of police statements etc. via the Data Protection Act shows that the relevant documents in fact remain available.]

It was a “family friend” who told David that Dawson co-owned the property at Dolphin Square. Again, it’s unfortunate that Strudwick did not apparently seek to verify that Dawson had indeed been the co-owner of a Dolphin Square flat; paperwork to this effect would be strong corroboration, it seems to me.

It should be stressed that David’s claims are not like those of “Nick” [UPDATE 2019: aka Carl Beech] – he does not claim to have witnessed parties where others were abused, or to have seen murders or bizarre forms of torture. Indeed, he was unconscious during the abuse, perhaps after being drugged in the restaurant, and it was the after-effects that showed he had been abused by someone other than Dawson.

The results of the renewed contact with police in 2015 were not satisfactory:

…on 25 March 2015, Detective Sergeant James Townly, a senior officer from Operation Fairbank, responded to David’s questions. We read the email together in the hotel room.

Because David does not know exactly who the men at the restaurants were, “this is not sufficient for a crime report”, writes Townly.

(3) The General Synod and the VIPs

David’s story also includes the claim that

“We would go to church meetings at the [General] Synod.” David would sit in, bored and unaware of Dawson’s precise role there. But as they walked round Dolphin Square, says David, Dawson would tell him that people from the Synod also had flats there.

While at the restaurant:

“He would tell me there were people there [at the table] who had big military careers, people from the church ­– he would say that some are from the Synod – and then [also] MPs. There always seemed to be a parliament connection. They’d always be talking about something that had come up that day in the House [of Commons].” David would be introduced to them but, still only 15, would never be told their names.

The article adds that David “rarely” watched television or read newspapers, so that he didn’t recognise anyone.

Once more, Strudwick could have looked for some corroborating evidence here. The General Synod only meets for a few days in London each year (and mostly on week days rather than weekends), and it could perhaps have been possible to firm up some dates – and to clarify Dawson’s involvement – by asking the Church of England or consulting sources such as the Church of England Year Book. It is difficult to envisage some sort of “abuse network” developing within the General Synod, given its occasional nature.

Concluding note

The above is not meant to pour cold water on David’s claims about what happened to him in London. Just because “Nick” was a fantasist, it does not mean that the inside of Dolphin Square has never seen child abuse, or that abusers have never worked in concert there. Each allegation should be examined on its own merits.

David’s story about Dolphin Square may have merit – but it is not yet substantiated. Strudwick  has chased up some leads, but it seems to me that a number of assertions in the article could have been looked into in more detail. Also, given the decision to include scanned excerpts from police statements, it would be helpful to have seen more about what exactly was said to the neighbour in 1996 and to police in 2007.  Perhaps Strudwick’s view is that the main point is to galvanize the police into renewed evidence gathering activity themselves; at the moment, all we have is a frustrating mix of sensational disclosures and vagueness.

UPDATE: David has now given an articulate and at times emotional account of his story to Victoria Derbyshire on BBC 2. The interview lasts for about 20 minutes, and covers the same ground as the BuzzFeed article; he specifically recalls sitting in the gallery at General Synod meetings (this is consistent with the layout of the Assembly Hall in Church House). The BBC also approached Lincolnshire Police and Dawson’s surviving family, but they declined to comment.

UPDATE 2 (2022): David’s account now features in a book called Scandal at Dolphin Square: A Notorious History, by Simon Danczuk and a non-fiction author named Daniel Smith. The book reveals that David’s full name is David Ingle. Since publication, Smith has complained bitterly that allegations of abuse at Dolphin Square are being unfairly dismissed because of the lies of Carl Beech, although having Danczuk as one’s co-author is hardly conducive to credibility here given the former MP’s history of opportunism.

Despite Smith’s repudiation of Beech, the book has been commended by Mark Watts, who invested all of his credibility in Beech’s claims and who now argues that Beech’s imprisonment is a miscarriage of justice. Watts described it as a “bombshell” that “re-opens the scandal of child sexual abuse by ‘VIPs” despite continuing attempts by sections of the media to pretend that it never happened”. Smith was annoyed that this quote provided the hook for a review in Private Eye magazine (1569).

22 Responses

  1. Patrick Strudwick is the “BuzzFeed LGBT Editor, UK” – a strange choice of journalist for what we are told even the investigating officer described as “the biggest case this country has ever seen.”

    According to the deranged comments beneath Strudwick’s piece it is “pretty damn obvious” that that officer was involved – he “had to be” & “is” a paedophile. The astonishing notion that the restaurant where someone had a meal more than 30-years ago should be made to pay (“Put some pressure on the restaurant,ruin their business if you have to!!”) received 20 thumbs-up at the time of writing…

    Regarding the ‘failure’ to impound the firearms of a man who lived on “a huge country estate set in a thousand acres of land”, I’m surprised the journo didn’t express surprise at the alleged perpetrator’s continuing shooting-trips with his alleged victim – he was lucky he didn’t have his head blown off!

    We are asked to accept some highly improbable utterances & at one point “David says Harrison told him that Dawson…”
    Literally, ‘X says that Y said that Z had said…’

    It’s hard to see anything coming of this, but it’ll keep the ghouls excitedly agitated for a while, I suppose. Shame they can’t do it in private.

    • Well, Tom Watson MP is linking to the story (“A sad story. More documents relating to child abuse inquiries go missing.”) & the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire has had David sat on her couch for a 19-minute interview:

      “We would go to General Synod meetings, er, he had something to do with that, I don’t know exactly what…but we would go to those and I would sit in the gallery, I can see it now, I can visualize it now, and watch those meetings…”

      http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03t9qxr

      Exactly the same points are raised as in the Buzzfeed article: pre-arrest ‘phone calls, alleged victim’s name given to alleged perpetrator, etc., all seemingly accepted as being truthful.
      I’m amazed that no one has thought to question the copper – described as a ‘Sergeant’ by Strudwick but a ‘Pc’ in the contemporary press – to hear his point of view.

      I’m not familiar with police work but he only joined the force in 2002, having previously “worked as a qualified funeral director and embalmer” – something I’m sure the loons will have fun with.

      • The ‘giving of name’ is clarified, in that David admits that he gave permission for the police to do so though he now regrets it. To be fair to him, the accusations against Dawson do seem of a different quality than the Dolphin Square stuff. He seems disappointed that the inquiry was shut down in 2007 but before the fateful example of Saville there was little precedent for investigating a dead man. And though he may have mentioned a London connection to the police, had he at that point mentioned other abusers?
        You can understand why Operation Midland couldn’t make much progress when they didn’t know what the offences were or who the perpetrators might be. But they did make reasonable efforts, including interviewing relevant people https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/child-abuse-survivor-calls-for-inquiry-into-police-handling#.sd0B90jBg
        I was left with the impression that sadly there was probably nothing that could give this unhappy man closure.

  2. Perhaps the notion that the restaurant should be penalized isn’t so far fetched. After all, the only possible interpretation of David’s story is that a probably drugged teenager could collapse in there on a regular basis without the management wondering if something funny was going on. Odd that none of the other diners noticed, though.

  3. According to Wikipedia, the Dolphin Square complex has always had it’s own restaurant. Did Dawson and his fellow abusers never eat there?

  4. 6 other boys also complained about Dawson and may also have been taken to Dolphin Square ?

    • I suggest you re-read Richard’s article carefully, David, as it is far from clear that ANYONE ever referred to Dolphin Square until recently, let alone six other ‘boys’.

      Didn’t you learn your lesson with your cheer-leading for both the Op Midland torture/murder claims AND the Toffington Hall torture/murder nonsense?

      (Consider that a rhetorical question as I see you are STILL spreading the rubbish about Elm…)

      Worth noting, perhaps, that he will have been 15 1/2 at the time the alleged abuse started – abuse which supposedly carried on for over two years (i.e. for at least three-quarters of the time-frame involved he was over the age of consent).

      Given that we hear of shopping-trips (“photos, paintings, a briefcase”) & the fact that he didn’t just, you know, walk out of the restaurant or simply refuse to go to London in the first place, we might reasonably wonder what exactly is being described here.

      P.S. I could have sworn I’ve seen David’s face before, liberating balloons or at an Exaro cult-meeting, perhaps? Maybe I’m mistaken.

      • A Dolphin Square investigation is still going on. As many as 20 boys were being abused by Dawson, so they need to start interviewing them.

      • Why stop at 20, David? Your statement would be just as truthful if you had said “as many as two hundred / thousand / million…”

        And they need to start interviewing them, do they? The David of the article doesn’t even know what he is claiming happened to him & doesn’t know who else it may have involved – but it happened more than 30-years ago & involved a man who has been dead for almost a decade…

        Aye, that sounds like a priority! For God’s sake…

      • The Lincs police officer Geoff Harrison told David there were 20 others making the same accusation.

      • The ‘SAME accusation’, David? Nope, that’s you daydreaming again. Anyway it is based solely on the complainant’s version of events which includes (as previously mentioned) the unlikely statement from the copper that: “It’ll be the biggest case this country has ever seen.”

        We have discussed previously your fascination with fictional detectives, but in the real world people rarely speak in such a ludicrous manner. I’ll leave you to wonder why a Pc was apparently in charge of a 9-year investigation (meaning it began 4 or 5 years before he gave up his previous occupation).

        Best call on Holmes!

      • Dolphin Square – many more witnesses than publicly known have come forward. Police. Investigations continue.
        I know there was more than one tall blond man, other that HP.

      • Having gone view what happened to daivd you become someone else that how you deal with it back in those day you could not speak about it because you blame yourself that what happened when are abuse for long time walk around feeling shame so I said you get the right help you need from right people

  5. I find it extraordinary that there is apparently grief because an alleged abuser is given the name of his accuser. If he cannot know who is accusing him and of what how can he possibly defend accusations?

    • A good point, although I think the specific suggestion is that the supposed naming took place over the ‘phone prior to being questioned (or arrested, as claimed by the article):

      “David adds that he knows this because, he says, the sergeant rang him after phoning Dawson, and told David he’d disclosed to Dawson the identity of the latest accuser.”

      We’ll just have to take David’s word for it that this is what happened, I suppose.
      I’m interested as to what magical emailing system the officer was using which allowed him to try and claw back his sent message, and also why his signed statement was not witnessed… but not all that much, to be honest.

      • (Whoops, I’m referring to different individuals in last paragraph, not one.)

      • Quite apart from the fact the CPS has now told police to stop investigating dead men for obvious reasons the dead cannot be pursued and valuable resources are diverted from child abuse cases of the present- I know factually that serious sex abuse cases are headed by no less than an Inspector though DCs may do the grunt work. This has been the case for over 30 years at least.

        However a complainant may initially be interviewed by a DC (though normally it would be two, one a Sergeant) to access how credible the complaints are. No PC would ever interview a complainant about sex abuse.

        One of the fictions being perpetuated today is that police never took sex or child abuse cases seriously in the past. This is a terrible slur on all police officers who are family people just like anyone else.

        A couple of points :
        1. Mariana infers Jimmy Savile has been ‘investigated’ by police when absolutely no such thing has happened and mores the pity. The Met put a statement on their website specifically stating they would not be investigating complaints about Savile for the reason- he was dead. What they did do is allow the NSPCC to compile a list of complaints but not one was or is to be investigated.

        The various multi-million pound inquiries that have happened including Dame Smith’s most recent one have approached the Savile affair from the angle that the majority of complainants are truthful and only excluded the really fanciful ones : Savile abused me assisted by an army of Martians and so on.
        # on that note I think Dame Smith’s BBC report will go down in history as one of the most bizarre legal documents of recent times. My legal eagle pals are still scratching their heads at her seemingly naive ability to just accept an accusation with no proof at all and have pointed out some real howlers and fictions. That does not mean everyone was not truthful & I’m no closer to understanding Jimmy Savile’s life after a welter of tabloid balderdash- Satanic orgies and so on.
        2. Bandini : even if the Buzz Feed complainant was over the age of 16 that still would have been a criminal offence at the time. The age was not lowered until a long time after.
        3. As for the talk of “the biggest case this country has ever seen.” – anything is possible but this seems a very odd statement. The sad truth is that sex abuse cases in that time period although newsworthy never rated the sort of headlines they do today. One only has to read old newspapers from the era on the net to understand a case involving a rich but not famous person would have probably been mentioned after sentencing with perhaps small paragraphs updating during a trial. Certainly male-on-male abuse rarely made a headline – it just did not excite the general public (the only criteria editors really care about) and were relegated to after Page 3 unless perhaps a politician & murder was involved as in Jeremy Thorpe.

      • Sam is right, I did wrongly suggest Savile had been investigated. I suspect others have made same error, leading people like David and Operation Midland’s Nick to hope that something indeterminate can somehow be done about dead abusers. Sam is also correct about the press’s former lack of interest in stories in any way connected with homosexuality. One way of catching readers’ interest was to hint at a VIP connection. Journalists attached such rumours to various cases involving male prostitution or organized abuse, of which Elm Guest House was perhaps a conspicuous example. BTW I should have put Fairbank not Midland in my earlier post.

  6. I know what you went through David you become in third person it’s how you deal with it back in those days you learn not to talk about it and the reason is you blame yourself and you’re walking around in shame that’s why you could not talk I hope you get the right house from the right people that’s what makes the difference

  7. I don’t suppose any of these “Dolphin Square” victims ever say hust how they knew it was Dolphin Square?
    The place is a huge complex of apartment blocks with a number of entrances, not all of them helpfully marked with “Dolphin Square”; it also looks a lot like several other Central London apartment complexes, so somebody who isn’t familiar with the area wouldn’t nessessarily know where they were. And I can’t imagine abusers actually telling their victims where they are being taken.

  8. Dolphin Square stories are too numerous to dismiss. Police investigating Roddam Twiss report seeing him visit DS, and he reffered to it himself as ‘a den of iniquity for 30 years’.

    But if anyone doubts the stories of a number of Westminster vincinity flats being used for sex parties involving boys and young men – they only have to read accounts of the S&M club run in the flat of a former Secretary General of Synod. His partner created a club with 20-30 weekly clients, a roster of rent-boys, monthly orgies and a ‘headmasters study’ for discipline and sexual acts. The narrative of this setup is highly detailed. The origin of this story? The organiser himself. A former Synod member who was earning a living from this business. The location? A few streets around the corner from Church House in a flat formerly owned by the Church of England. It was fully written up by an investigative journalist who stung the organiser in a recorded interview. The organiser also appeared on a BBC documentary ‘Men for Hire’ in 2005.

    The clientele for these services in Great Peter Street match the accounts of Dolphin Sq narratives. Westminister, civil servants, Synod members, showbiz personalities, members of royal households, etc. And in this instance, the account all comes from the organiser himself who boasted of his clientele to the journalists.

    The Dolphin Sq narratives look credible and deserve full police investigation. David’s testimony of his experience is powerfully credible and links Dolphin Sq directly with the owner of a flat, another Synod member, who police were investigating before his death for abuse of many boys.

    None of this can easily be dismissed. Nor should it be.

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