He left before 10pm to walk the half a mile or so to the local railway station, whereupon he laid down across the tracks and waited for the next express train to arrive.
They found his body later that night. But his suicide all those years ago — or, rather, his motive for it — is still having repercussions today.
Alan Doggett was a close friend of both Tim Rice and his songwriting partner Andrew Lloyd Webber.They chose the former teacher to conduct a recording of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at EMI’s Abbey Road studio, and also collaborated with him on several high‑profile projects. One of the letters written in the Towers Arms was for Tim Rice.
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‘Remember me, please, for the good things, the happy times,’ Doggett implored. ‘The meals, the drink, the conversation, the good companionship. Remember the best bits in my character; there were, I hope, more pluses than minuses in the mixture.’
Only hours earlier, Doggett had appeared at West London Magistrates Court, charged with two indecent assaults on a ten-year-old boy. Detectives were planning to interview all 1,000 schoolchildren who had been rehearsing with him for a forthcoming rock opera at the Royal Albert Hall in aid of charity.
Doggett, it transpired, was a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), the pressure group linked to senior Labour Party figures, which campaigned in the 1970s to lower the age of consent to four.
Why, 36 years on, are you reading about him now? It is because a decade before he committed suicide, he taught at one of Britain’s most famous and successful educational establishments.
Doggett was on the teaching staff of St Paul’s — or, to be more precise, the school’s preparatory division, Colet Court, which shares the same campus in Barnes, south-west London. Chancellor George Osborne attended both the junior and senior schools.( ….note : Barnes is also the location of Elm Guest House… )
This week, a string of former pupils came forward to reveal how they were molested by the teacher. There was open gossip among the boys, apparently, that ‘half a crown’ was the ‘going rate for a session with Doggett’.
Their year group even coined a new verb: to be ‘Doggoed’ was to be groped and fondled. They said that when they reported Doggett to the headmaster, he dismissed them as liars and punished their ‘wickedness’ by giving them detentions.’
Doggett did eventually resign in 1968. But St Paul’s allegedly ‘hushed’ up the allegations by failing to report the teacher to the police or education officials, which was required by law.
As a result, scores — possibly hundreds — of other youngsters were exposed to the risk of abuse.
In fact, Alan Doggett went on to teach boys at a second London independent school before working as a choirmaster with boys from more than 30 London schools.
We will never know how many young lives he may have ruined.
Yet Doggett, it has now emerged, was just one of six teachers at St Paul’s — that we know of — suspected of sexually abusing boys as young as ten between the 1960s and 1980s.
They include a housemaster accused of fondling pupils in the dormitory, a colleague who is said to have beaten ‘naughty’ boys, a maths tutor who allegedly kept a register of pupils he punished in private spanking sessions, an unidentified member of staff accused of indecent assault and the geography teacher Patrick Marshall.
Only last month, Marshall, 65, who was also a rowing coach at St Paul’s, was arrested over the suspected molestation of a 15-year-old boy in the 1970s. Marshall, who denies any wrongdoing, has been released on bail. Police hope to speak to more former pupils as the inquiry continues.
A seventh teacher, Keith Perry, 70, St Paul’s ‘inspirational’ head of history who taught at the school for 38 years, received a two-year suspended prison sentence at Southwark Crown Court last month for possessing hundreds of extreme images of naked boys. In internet chatrooms, he wrote of being ‘obsessed’ with boys as young as eight.
For an institution with such a gilded reputation as St Paul’s (motto: ‘Fide et Literis’ — ‘By faith and by learning’) the revelations are especially damaging. Situated near Hammersmith Bridge, both St Paul’s, which celebrated its 500th anniversary in 2009, and its junior school, have traditionally catered for the ambitious West London middle classes.
Down the years, many who have been educated here have gone on to occupy important positions in public life. Dominic Grieve QC, the Attorney General, was a Colet Court pupil when Alan Doggett was asked to leave in 1968, although there is no suggestion that he was abused.
Chancellor George Osborne was a pupil in the 1980s. Mr Osborne, we have learned, was at the school when an allegation of sexual abuse was made against an unnamed teacher. The member of staff was later arrested and questioned, but there was insufficient evidence to bring charges.
During his time at St Paul’s another teacher, Stephen Hale, was forced to resign after sado-masochistic pornography and a spanking register of pupils he had punished were found in his room by a school cleaner.
Hale left the school a day after the discovery in June 1987. However, St Paul’s told the Department of Education that he had agreed to resign for breaking the school’s rules on corporal punishment. They didn’t mention the disturbing discovery in his room.
This meant that Hale was not placed on the national list of teachers barred from working with children. Today, his whereabouts are unknown.
Again, it should be stressed that there is no suggestion that the future Chancellor was subjected to abuse.
Nevertheless, both he and Dominic Grieve before him attended public school at a time when, to quote a recent leading article in The Times, ‘licentious and disgraceful behaviour by men was considered to be just part of the culture. Not especially attractive perhaps, but best ignored.’
It was a culture which certainly seemed to have prevailed at St Paul’s.
One former pupil who spoke out wished to be known only as Stephen. He was 11 when Doggett began abusing him and his friend. ‘It was the Manchester United v Benfica European Cup final [in 1968],’ he said. ‘We were sitting on the floor and Doggett’s hands were groping inside our pyjama bottoms. He wouldn’t leave us alone.
‘When I next went home, the school had telephoned my father to complain that I’d made up some terrible stories about Doggett. Dad asked me what had been going on.
‘When I told him, he said he believed me and I’d done the right thing in speaking out. But when I got back to school, the two of us were summoned to the headmaster’s study.
‘He was furious. He said we were wicked for making up such awful lies. Doggett was so appalled and embarrassed by the disgraceful things we said that he’d decided to leave the school. We should be thoroughly ashamed of ourselves.’
Another former pupil, Luke, now 59 and married with adult children, says he was abused by Doggett and two of his colleagues.
One of them, he alleged, was Paul Topham who, when duty master, would invariably switch off the lights in his dormitory, then sit on his bed and reach under the covers with his hand in the dark.
Luke told no one and nor, he said, was there any discussion of Topham’s more brazen public assaults in the swimming pool at weekends when bathing naked was compulsory.
‘If Topham was supervising, he’d be in the water in his turquoise shorts,’ said the alleged victim, now in his 50s. ‘If you rested against the side of the pool, he’d swim up from behind and rub himself against you.’
In 2000, after years of blocking out these memories, he did finally report Paul Topham to the police.
By then, Topham was an Anglican clergyman with a wife and three children. Ordained in 1986, he took up a chaplaincy in the Diocese of Europe, a network of Christian communities serving Anglicans abroad.
For a number of years, he was based in the Toulouse region of South-Western France.
Rev Mr Topham denied any impropriety and was not prosecuted. He died in 2012, aged 80. His obituary was published in a church magazine under a photograph of him, his late wife and their baby granddaughter.
At the time of his death he was living in Hampton, Middlesex. A neighbour said: ‘I never knew Rev Mr Topham as I moved here shortly after he died, but everyone said what a lovely, kind man he was and I’m shocked to hear about these allegations.’
Luke’s former housemaster also evaded justice; he, too, is believed to dead. Naughty boys would find themselves bending over a chair in his study with their pyjama bottoms pulled down. A beating with a slipper, hairbrush or plimsoll would then ensue.
Afterwards, Luke (and other pupils who had got into ‘trouble’) would have to sit on the housemaster’s lap.
‘At the time, I didn’t realise what was happening,’ he recalled. ‘I just remember being cuddled and feeling puzzled because he’d always end up going very red in the face.’
The allegations, at least against Alan Doggett, are reinforced by several biographies of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
One referred to Doggett having been ‘let go at Colet Court because he had sexually molested one of the choirboys’. Another used a similar phrase, saying Doggett ‘had been let go, with rumours of homosexual predilections swirling about him’.
Doggett’s association with Lord Lloyd-Webber began when he previously taught his brother, the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, at another London school. Later, he invited Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice to compose a pop cantata for an end of term concert at Colet Court. They came up with a 20-minute piece called Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat.
A musical publisher attended the performance, liked what he heard and Joseph was extended, recorded, and finally staged commercially.
Not long after that first performance at Colet Court, Alan Doggett left the school.
Rice would later speak at Doggett’s funeral. In his own 1999 autobiography, he wrote: ‘I cannot believe that Alan was truly a danger, or even a minor menace, to the many boys he worked with over the years. It has been known for young boys . . . to manufacture or exaggerate incidents when they know and disapprove of a teacher’s inclinations.’
In a statement, St Paul’s stressed that none of the alleged abuse concerned staff or pupils currently at the school, but called for ‘living suspects to be investigated and subjected to the proper processes of justice ... the school deals quickly, sensitively and resolutely with any concerns or allegations of abuse.’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2592068/How-paedophile-scandal-hushed-George-Osbournes-old-school.html