For much of the time, the news washes over me. Sometimes, like the latest mass shooting in America, I am stopped in my tracks by the sheer horror and futility of it all. Occasionally, the news is on a scale beyond anything I have ever seen. I refer to the conviction of the former football scout Barry Bennell. I can’t get it out of my mind. I can’t see enough TV shows about it, I can’t read enough about it.
I felt exactly the same about Jimmy Savile, following his death when everything came out. We all knew someone who suspected all along that things weren’t quite right but then we also saw that he was forever surrounded by royalty and prime ministers and senior police officers. If things weren’t all right, we’d have known all about it by now, many of us assumed. Then it emerged that Savile had acted in plain sight, as revealed in Dan Davies’ brilliant book of that name. And so, it appears, were committed the crimes of Barry Bennell.
I sat watching last night’s C4 Dispatches programme with a mixture of incredibility, anger and, ultimately, admiration for the courage of the survivors who had suffered unimaginable abuse on an industrial scale and I refer you to Daniel Taylor’s consummate piece of writing in today’s Guardian for the whole, ghastly story. I was almost transfixed by the story, awful though it was.
For every person who had doubts about Bennell, there were many others who saw him as some kind of god. When he was arrested in Florida, parents of children he abused wrote character references for him for his court appearance because this couldn’t happen to “Our Barry”. They worked inn his shop, they sent him money when he asked for it. Yet, like Savile, his evil paedophilia was virtually in plain sight. He had enormous power over young boys who believed in and trusted him, in the knowledge that only he could fulfil their dreams of making it as a professional footballer. And he abused that trust beyond the wildest nightmares of everyone who came close to him.
The interviews with the abused men have been harrowing to hear. Their courage is absolutely astonishing given the toll it has taken. Not all the boys made it into adulthood, having killed themselves along the way. Bennell might as well have murdered them with his own hands. I am not easily shocked but when I read what he had done to those boys, firstly I cried and then I felt sick to the stomach. Abusing children. What sort of monster does that?
I simply do not believe that senior figures at the two principle clubs involved did not know what was happening on their watch, or at the very least have suspicions. I appreciate that Bennell was a world class manipulator, groomer and paedophile, but there were people who had more than suspicions. Why were they not acted upon? I suppose you needed to be there to understand how and why it happened. He held in his hands the dreams of children and their parents.
My guess is that there will be legal action on a massive scale once the dust settles. If I was a senior member of the FA, now or in the past, or an official at Manchester City or Crewe, I would be very worried indeed. City, in particular, have more money than god and soon they might need it. Football clubs are no different to schools, or any other place where children are kept together away from their families. They, along with the authorities, have a duty of care. It does not matter that the football clubs have changed owners and even grounds since Bennell was at loose, the buck stops with them.
Could this happen today? I hope not and I wonder now if those people who bemoaned closer rules for running children’s football as being “political correctness gone mad” might now be able to see why it was needed.
I wish Bennell nothing but ill. He is currently in remission from cancer and part of me hopes he won’t be for long. A much bigger part of me hopes he lives a long and terrifying time in prison and that every other nutcase in prison near him knows exactly what he did. He has literally taken away the lives of some people and ruined the lives of many hundreds more. I want him to suffer for as long as possible and I am not sorry for thinking that.
