'Pain passes; humiliation lasts' Witnesses relive their fear as justice is finally done

The enormity of the abuse suffered at the hands of the Edinburgh Academy housemaster John Brownlee became clear when the first witness was asked a simple question about the moment his mother left him alone at the elite private boarding school.

- Severin Carrell, Libby Brooks

John Graham, now a trim 56-year-old, was asked: how did he feel? Until then fluent and factual in the witness box, Graham froze.

His face crumpled. In that moment, Graham again became the eightyear-old boy who had felt "not good" that day, but now with the awful adult hindsight of the abuse he would endure there.

"I didn't know these people. I didn't know this place. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be."

Graham's graphic account at Edinburgh sheriff court this month of being a child repeatedly assaulted, beaten and abused at Brownlee's hands, set the scene for nine harrowing days of witness accounts that exposed, in their words, a vicious sadist who relished inflicting pain.

According to the lengthy indictment, Brownlee, now an 89-year-old with advanced dementia, terrorised young boys for more than 20 years at Dundas House, where he lived with his own family alongside boarding pupils, and at the academy's junior school, where he became deputy head.

Declared unfit to stand trial on health grounds, the 36 charges against him were heard in a rare quasi-trial process known as an "examination of facts" overseen, without a jury, by Sheriff Ian Anderson. Witnesses including Nicky Campbell, the BBC broadcaster, recounted the items Brownlee employed over those two decades. Those included his repeated and degrading use of the clacken, a spoon-like bat Brownlee repeatedly used "with a golf swing" to strike the boys' backsides; a cricket bat, a broken snooker cue, metal and wooden rulers sometimes brought sharp edgedown on a child's knuckles, his own brogues, fists and open hands.

"He had a hair-trigger temper on him," Graham said. He witnessed another boy being "annihilated" once in the junior school dining hall: "Smashed him down on the floor, just laid into him; he was kicking him, just battering him."