DJ Nicky Campbell among former private school pupils attacked by ‘sadistic’ teacher, court rules

A former teacher at a leading private school inflicted “sadistic cruelty” on former pupils including the BBC presenter Nicky Campbell, a court has ruled.

John Brownlee, who was a housemaster at the Edinburgh Academy, was found to have physically and emotionally abused dozens of children, causing them lasting “mental terror” between 1967 and 1991.

However, he will escape punishment as the 89-year-old was deemed unfit to stand trial.

Brownlee was instead found to have committed the abuse at an examination of facts hearing without a jury, in which 42 former pupils, including Campbell, gave evidence.

He was found to have assaulted some children with items including a cricket bat, snooker cue and a leather strap. Boys were slapped, kicked or punched and some were left unconscious as a result of the beatings.

Giving evidence earlier this month, Mr Campbell told how Brownlee had pummelled his neck and skull for about 20 seconds in a ritual described as a “knuckle dance”, and referred to his former teacher as a “pathetic little sadist”.

Some of Brownlee’s victims were as young as eight years old, with Edinburgh Academy, which opened in 1824, operating junior and senior schools.

Brownlee was found by Edinburgh Sheriff Court to have committed 31 assaults and one charge of cruel and unnatural treatment.

Outside the court, Graeme Sneddon from the Edinburgh Academy Survivors Group, read a statement describing Brownlee as a “violent monster” and said he had caused “a lifetime of untold damage to everyone concerned”.

He added: “This took place in a primary school, where it was known he was extremely violent towards pupils, and yet nothing was done to protect them as he was the deputy headmaster and other teachers were scared of him.”

Writing on social media 62-year-old Mr Campbell posted: “We did it.” The BBC Radio 5 host later said that he had “been weeping in my wife’s arms” after learning of the court’s verdict.

Last November it was ruled that Brownlee, who still lives in the Edinburgh area, was unfit to stand trial due to advanced dementia.

It was claimed that he would have become “overwhelmed and would have been likely to recite Latin and facts about football in court.

Katrina Parkes, Scotland’s Procurator Fiscal for historic child abuse said that it was now a “matter of public record” that Brownlee had committed the acts he was accused of.

“John Brownlee has been found to have committed acts of great cruelty, to have terrified those he was entrusted to nurture during his time as a teacher,” she said.

“The intimidation of and the use of force upon children, and the protection of those who inflict it, has no place in Scottish society.”

Among the rituals Brownlee performed while a teacher at the school was to line boys up to be beaten with the clacken, a bat used by the academy for a traditional ball game known as hailes.

Brownlee’s 83-year-old wife, Margaret, told the hearing that the allegations against her husband were “absolute nonsense” and that she had never seen him hit any boys.

However, Sheriff Ian Anderson said the testimony of the boys Brownlee abused had been “credible and reliable”.

He said that even accounting for the standards at the time, when corporal punishment in schools was allowed, his actions could not have been considered “reasonable chastisement”.

“Many of them [the charges] could never be considered in that category and those that might have been went beyond what would have been reasonable at the time bearing in mind the age of the boys and the excessive force used,” he said.