A former teacher at one of Scotland’s most prestigious private schools who faced a catalogue of abuse charges covering a 20-year period will not stand trial, because of ill health.
John Brownlee, 88, was facing a total of 37 allegations relating to violence and torture he is alleged to have inflicted on 35 schoolboys from February 1967 to December 1987 while he taught at Edinburgh Academy.
Court papers allege Brownlee struck children with implements including a wooden bat called a clacken, a snooker cue and a golf club, as well as choking several victims by securing their school ties to a window blind and causing the tie to tighten around their necks.
The former teacher is also alleged to have forced children to sleep in soiled bedclothes, ordered them to sit in freezing cold baths and punished them by making them dig in a garden without adequate clothing in cold weather.
The court papers also allege he locked some boys in a garden shed for a prolonged time and on one occasion made a boy remove his clothes and placed a hosepipe between the child’s buttocks as a punishment for bed-wetting.
Browlee did not attend Edinburgh sheriff court on Thursday, and Andrew Seggie, defending, said his client was unfit to attend court or to stand trial due to ill health.
Graeme Clark, prosecuting, said the crown agreed that “John Brownlee is unfit for trial and the trial cannot proceed” after receiving a medical report.
Clark said: “[The report states] that he is unable to participate in a trial, follow the course of the trial, take in new information and unable to keep concentration. He won’t be able to follow the course of trial and will be overwhelmed in the course of the trial and will display behaviours such as reciting Latin and football facts.”
The fiscal depute added that all future hearings would be held in Brownlee’s absence, with an examination of facts hearing, where witnesses would give evidence about their experience while attending the school, scheduled for next March and expected to run for about 15 days.
In a statement, Giles Moffatt of the Edinburgh Academy Survivors group welcomed the decision, describing it as “truly momentous”.
Moffatt said: “For the first time in decades justice is on the horizon. From 11 March 2024, every complainer will be able to give their accounts of the violence cruelty and abuse inflicted by John Brownlee.
“As the Scottish child abuse inquiry revealed in August, Brownlee was a career-long sadist who will be remembered for his cruelty, his violence, and nothing good. We thank the authorities for setting a trial date with minimal delay.”
In August, former Edinburgh Academy pupils including the broadcaster Nicky Campbell gave 14 gruelling days of evidence to the inquiry, detailing the physical, sexual and psychological abuse meted out by a number of staff. Now men in middle age, some wept as they described a culture of violence, fear, silence and shame, where severe beatings, voyeurism and sexual assaults were so normalised that pupils were left with “no compass”.
During the hearings, there was frequent commendation of the work of the journalist Alex Renton, whose BBC Radio 4 documentary series In Dark Corners about abuse in Britain’s elite private schools prompted Campbell to reveal his own abuse. It resulted in a flood of other former pupils coming forward.
Renton’s latest examination of the ongoing fight for justice, My Teacher the Abuser: Fighting for Justice, is on BBC One on 30 November. It concerns in particular the case of Iain Wares, an allegedly serial abuser dubbed “Jimmy Savile mark II” by the SNP MP Ian Blackford. Wares, 83, remains at liberty in South Africa, where he is fighting extradition to face charges relating to his time teaching at the academy and also at Fettes College during the 60s and 70s.
