Sisters of no mercy
In the pre- and post-war period, orphans were often sent to homes run by religious orders, such as the Sisters of Nazareth. There they found a disciplined regime which, they say, tipped over into violence. Now, decades later, more than 500 former inmates are suing the nuns for damages. Beatrix Campbell reports Saturday April 12, 2003 The Guardian Fred Aitken is 70 years old and still he is haunted by sounds - the racket of children "banging their heads against the walls of the dormitories". The walls were in a gothic mansion called Nazareth House, an orphanage in Aberdeen where Aitken was dispatched when he was six. There, he says, nuns regularly beat him and made him witness the violent degradation of other children. Sleep was routinely interrupted by their constant checks for children wetting their beds and the beating that followed. One bed-wetter was held out of the window by her ankles as punishment. "You woke up to this thrashing. Nuns with leather straps hanging from their waist beside their rosary beads. The strap was socially acceptable. The excuse is that it was normal in those days." Aitken, who now lives near Chester, was taken to Nazareth House after his mother died in the 1930s. He ran away constantly, and in his early teens one of his older sisters, then living in one room, took him in and tried to take care of him. He avoided school, sauntered around shops, cinemas, anywhere warm, until he was picked up and sent to an approved school for "delinquents". He joined the RAF and although other young men lay in their beds weeping for their mothers, Aitken thrived: the military were "the first people who treated me as a human being. I was clothed, fed, paid a weekly wage. And they didn't beat me." Even then Aitken was shadowed by unhappiness. In the 1960s, when he was in his 30s, he sought help. "I told a doctor about the nuns. The man said he thought I was fantasising." It was only 30 years later, when other Nazareth House survivors began to speak out about their experiences, that his childhood and its bleak effects could no longer be dismissed as his imaginings. The Poor Sisters of Nazareth were founded in the mid-19th century in Hammersmith, London, to take care of the young and the old. For more than a hundred years, Nazareth Houses all over Britain were home to thousands of children. They aren't children's homes any longer. These days the nuns look after old people. And the Poor Sisters aren't poor (the order has £154m in the bank) - they've been rebranded and they're simply Sisters.
Now the Sisters of Nazareth - the order also has houses in Australia, South Africa, the United States and Ireland - are the subject of an international campaign to call them to account for a regime of violence. In a symbolic trial in Aberdeen in 2000, one nun, known in her childcare days as Sister Alphonso, was convicted of cruel and unnatural treatment. And 40 nuns belonging to the Poor Sisters of Nazareth and the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul are named in a civil action by more than 500 people, mostly middle-aged or elderly, who are claiming compensation from the orders. It is to be a test case, in which 11 former inmates will appear in court, and is expected to be heard in Scotland later this year. Ranged against them are the Catholic hierarchy, the asylums' insurers, who insist that there must be no admission of liability, and a sceptical hauteur that flourishes across the political and legal establishment. It was voiced at the highest level last year when the reforming Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, claimed that many convictions of people accused of abusing children in institutional care were flawed and that the law was in need of review. Archbishop Mario Conti, Scotland's most senior Catholic churchman, has accused the former Nazareth House inmates of being seekers not of justice but of "pots of gold". Six years ago, Joseph Currie was wandering past Nazareth House in Aberdeen, the place where he, too, spent his childhood. In the grounds, he noticed that where once there were playing fields there was now a children's nursery. Currie was horrified and took himself to the police to tell them about his memories of the place he remembered as the "House of Hell". Currie, now in his early 50s, lives in a Glasgow tenement. Everything in his flat is neatly arranged - his shoes, his clothes, his videos, his crockery, his correspondence. Every surface is wiped clean. This is not the work of an obsessive, he says, just typical of an orphan. The military and emergency services found those abandoned, bereaved children attractive recruits because, though they lacked education, they knew how to iron their shirts, polish their shoes and obey orders. On the shelves around his Victorian tiled fireplace Currie displays old toy fire engines - it was his boyhood ambition to be a firefighter. On the mantelpiece there is a fading photograph of him in a grey bow tie with the queen of the Eurovision Song Contest, Katie Boyle. They're at the annual bash of the contest's fan club. Currie is one of the organisers. He is a fast-talking, busy man, a retired postman, "a bit of a cheeky chap, straight to the point", he says of himself. But though he is active in progressive politics and his music club, says, "I'm also very lonely, I have to admit that." He was put in Nazareth House when he was two. According to his social services records, his family was "destitute" and his mother admitted selling a pair of shoes for food. Joseph had been left alone in verminous conditions. But there was worse to come. He remembers Nazareth House as dour and cruel. For years after he left in 1967, he tried to put the place out of his mind. But that walk beside his old home provoked a rush of recollections. "As a precaution, in case I died," he made a tape-recording and put two pieces of paper in an envelope. The papers showed a copy of a newspaper photograph of Aberdeen's Nazareth House. He had put a cross by one of the windows in the eaves. On the other piece of paper he mapped all the features of the room behind that window, its pipes, floorboards, walls, doors, a cupboard. He sent the envelope to Cameron Fyfe, a Scottish solicitor, with a note naming the boy with whom he had shared that room. His map also showed a plywood panel, a false wall, and behind that panel, he said, were some significant documents.
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