Introduction
Archbishop Michael Peers, then Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, offered his so-called ‘living apology’ to Indigenous peoples in 1993 for the complicity of the institutional church in the Indian Residential Schools system. Eric Taylor Woods, however, emphasizes that in the aftermath of this signal event, ‘not all parties concerned were in agreement with the new vision’.Footnote 3 Indeed, ‘for some Indigenous Anglicans, the apology came too soon; court cases had not yet been resolved, and new facts about the scale of the tragedy continued to be uncovered’.Footnote 4 On a national scale, the unfolding ‘national trauma drama’, increasingly revealed to be ongoing and intergenerational in scope, spiralled in the years before and after the apology.Footnote 5
Established as late as 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), part of the official response of the federal government to the crisis, completed its trying work in 2015. In the end, the TRC commissioners produced not only 94 Calls to Action, intended to ‘redress the legacy of Residential Schools, and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation’, but also oversaw the creation of a historical narrative of this fraught period in Indigenous-settler relations.Footnote 6 This historiographical enterprise the TRC ordained in order ‘to educate all Canadians about the Residential School experience, and how this sad chapter in our shared history has affected the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people today’.Footnote 7
Recently uncovered correspondence held in the archives of Trinity College in the University of Toronto, among the remains of distinguished theological scholar Canon Professor Eugene Rathbone Fairweather (1920–2002), concerns the episode hereafter referred to as the Watson-Ketcheson Affair. The correspondence adds to the existing narrative of decades of Anglican complicity in the operation of the Residential Schools, particularly at the peculiar, vague nexus of institutional church and public university. In this article I seize a modest opportunity to tell in fuller detail a particular instance of whistleblowing that mostly escaped notoriety because crucial evidence was omitted from the official record. Indeed, for all the depth and thoroughness of the TRC research, it seems likely that further filling out will inevitably occur as researchers dig deeper into diverse collections of documents, pursuing evidence wherever it may be located.Footnote 8
The Watson-Ketcheson Affair also underscores the extent to which various authorities willingly concealed their true knowledge of allegations of serious abuses at Residential Schools. While privately admitted but publicly hidden, it is an example of an incident the depths of which cannot be satisfactorily plumbed in the shallow official record. Important details are only accessible either by reading in between the lines, or, as in the present case, by sourcing materials retained beyond the dispositional authority of church officials. Thanks to the harrowing work of the TRC, there now exists a public record before us in Canada concerning the Schools. However, what Michael Ignatieff describes as the ‘range of permissible lies’ about these institutions remains dismayingly wide, without consideration of events like the Watson-Ketcheson Affair unfolded here, and others, perhaps still undiscovered.Footnote 9
A Note on Creators and Sources of Documents
In the course of its seven fraught years of existence, TRC researchers collected large swaths of evidence from the archival repositories of the Canadian government, along with those of the several churches historically partnered in the operation of Residential Schools, including the records of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada. Most of this documentation concerned the experiences, impacts, and consequences of attendance at these institutions for victims and survivors of abuse committed at Residential Schools, increasingly described as features of cultural genocide. The taking of Indigenous children from their families in Canada since the eighteenth century and even earlier was not uncommon, and the TRC investigation spanned a period beginning as early as 1608, though living testimony featured most prominently. This scrutiny lasted until about the year 2000, by which date the last of the Schools was closed. These varied materials were the sources recruited in the TRC’s construction of an historical narrative.
By overlooking evidence contained within the archival collections of post-secondary institutions, and other unofficial bodies in Canada related to the Residential Schools project, the TRC perhaps fell short in its pursuit of Section 1E of its mandate to: ‘Identify sources and create as complete an historical record as possible of the Indian Residential School system and legacy. The record shall be preserved and made accessible to the public for future study and use.’Footnote 10 It should be acknowledged that the expectation of creating an exhaustive record accounting for all the potential sources of relevant information may have been unrealistic, and I offer my findings, based on the extant evidence of the Watson-Ketcheson Affair, as an augmentation in service of the ambitious project, not a criticism of its methodology or structural limitations. I also present unflattering impressions of dead prelates of great reputation and pious memory, whose conduct in this incident, allegedly menacing, appears to reflect poorly on their legacies.
While, as Ronald Niezen cautions, the TRC’s creation of a historical narrative using a mostly victim-centred approach may leave ‘room for doubt and contestation over institutional responsibility and the essential truths of history’, my best intention for this work is that it may help to dispel any lingering doubts as to the necessity of the 1993 apology delivered by Archbishop Peers.Footnote 11 ‘Representatives of other institutions that were implicated in the Residential School’, were spared investigation, and, ‘generally, the only institutions to represent “perpetrators” at the national events were the former church partners’, as Woods points out.Footnote 12 Halting attempts at coordinating former Residential Schools teachers have not met with much success either, though Niezen and others speculate that had their voices been heard, then apologies like that offered by the Anglican Church might have been disrupted, with churches displacing one injustice for another, reconceiving of teachers and staff as co-victims.
The prestigious place occupied by Trinity College for some 175 years in the life of the Anglican Church is of great significance to this narrative.Footnote 13 Founded as a distinctly ecclesiastical institution, the gradual secularization of Trinity has rendered the institution a hybrid of succeeding and competing values in Canadian society. While elements of the ecclesiastical connection endure to the present, these institutional entanglements were far greater in the years in question. As a quasi-official clearing-house of theological opinions for the benefit of Canadian Anglican bishops, with Fairweather – ‘E.R.F.’ – delphically enshrined within its academic community of scholars, the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity was particularly distinguished in the years of his flourishing.Footnote 14 This role as bridge builder also renders the record created by E.R.F. and his correspondents, now in the custody of the Trinity archives, a unique source for the history and theology of Canadian Anglicanism in the period, and an example of precisely the kind of unofficial record likely in future to shed more light than may be provided by narrower official sources. The conscientious preservation by E.R.F. of sensitive documents among his archival remains, specifically a correspondence commencing in September 1952 that stretched into January 1953, dealing with a report of abuse of students by the staff of an Anglican Residential School and its swift subsequent suppression, offers rare direct evidence of wrongdoing that implicated the most senior members of the Canadian hierarchy.
The Watson-Ketcheson Affair
Probably the most frustrating detail of the Watson-Ketcheson Affair is that its shameful narrative did not wholly escape the notice of the TRC. Regrettably, the relevant but small and only partial correspondence contained in the archives of the Church, the official record scrutinized during the TRC discovery process, had the effect of disproportionately lowering the profile of the Affair. In comparison with the shocking fullness of the correspondence collected by E.R.F. at Trinity, the official record is disconcertingly thin. In particular the absence from the records of the General Synod of the correspondence of the two Canadian archbishops involved suggests winnowing to prevent scandal, or worse.
In fact, the essential history published by the TRC condensing materials from the Final Report, entitled A Knock at the Door, makes fleeting reference to the Watson-Ketcheson Affair, based on General Synod’s incomplete information. This authoritative version mentions only that ‘sometimes, staff [at all Residential Schools] protested the way students were treated. When two staff members of the Prince Albert, Saskatchewan School resigned in 1952, they complained of the harsh disciplinary regime at the School.’Footnote 15 The citation attached to this fragment of text by its anonymous author identifies the holdings of General Synod as the source of this particular complaint, and names Patricia A. Watson (1930–2015) and Victoria Ketcheson (1929–1998) as the two staffers in question.Footnote 16 Leveraging the more extensive correspondence retained by E.R.F. at Trinity, as well as the records of the General Synod, and an interview I conducted with Watson in her home in Toronto before her death, a more complete narrative is attempted in what follows.
In the summer of 1952, following their graduation from Trinity, friends Ketcheson and Watson spent time together at a family cottage in Central Ontario. Over the course of their vacation, the pair resolved to take jobs with the Missionary Society of the Church of England in Canada (MSCC). By resolution of the General Synod in 1902, the MSCC had assumed financial responsibility for Anglican-operated Residential Schools, becoming the premier missionary enterprise of the denomination.Footnote 17 In making her decision, Watson claimed to me that she mostly followed Ketcheson’s piously motivated lead. Apparently, vocational norms prevalent at the time for young women in their position were unappealing: ‘I didn’t want to be a secretary, librarian or teacher.’Footnote 18 Neither did Ketcheson. The introduction of structured theological education for women in the fall term of 1952 at the Faculty of Divinity in the form of the designation Scholar in Theology did not appeal either, nor did other graduate studies.
According to Watson, Ketcheson ‘was as firm in her religious belief and commitment to the Anglican Church as I was not’.Footnote 19 Indeed, Ketcheson and her parents were active in the parish of St Thomas’s Anglican Church, Belleville, Ontario, while Watson claimed she came from a household of self-described atheists. Influential on the two during their student careers was the mentoring of E.R.F. and of Dean Charles Feilding of the Faculty of Divinity, which convinced Ketcheson to pursue a vocation to ministry in a time before the ordination of women. It was through these same influences – and, of course, Ketcheson’s personal charisma – that Watson admitted how, for the first time, her own atheism ‘wavered’. For Watson, ‘Fr. Fairweather was the Church’.Footnote 20 Though a famously elusive character, E.R.F.’s gracious hospitality, public witness and ministry, and legacy of profound scholarship, made it seem to many who knew him that he lived out his Christian vocation displaying particular virtue.
When openings for staff were advertised at the All Saints’–Lac La Ronge Indian Residential School, located outside Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, one of the oldest such institutions in Canada with its roots in the 1840s, the pair seized the opportunity. Founded in 1906, All Saints’–Lac La Ronge reopened in the location and facilities Watson and Ketcheson referred to in 1948.Footnote 21 Watson recalled that they were both ‘filled with romantic, idealistic notions of what was waiting for us. Something along the lines of a rustic version of St Hilda’s College [the name of the historic women’s residence at Trinity], only holier.’ The pair took the three-day train trip west, but when they reached the former army barracks newly occupied by the School they found the facilities ‘were pretty derelict. A bit of a shock’ said Watson, ‘but worse was to come.’Footnote 22
Despite being guests in the comfortably plush homes of both future Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and future University of Toronto president George Connell, just outside Prince Albert, the pair seemed miserable from the start of their adventure. Plaintive missives home from Watson to her family in Sharon, Ontario related the horrors of beatings, she said. ‘One boy, “Absolom,” was beaten every time he wet himself, apparently daily.’Footnote 23 She complained of the solitary confinement of other miscreant boys, and of the punitive head-shavings of both boys and girls, described by Ketcheson as the ritual castration of Indian children. Nor did the leadership of the School’s principal, the Revd A.J. Scrase of the Diocese of Saskatchewan, inspire confidence in their first two months of employment. In 1949 Scrase had been chided by a government official at the Department of Indian Affairs, and was told that the leather straps used to discipline students physically were not to be kept or used by individual teachers in their classrooms or elsewhere, but exclusively in the office of the principal to whose authority alone corporal punishment was delegated.Footnote 24 Otherwise, Scrase remained low profile for most of his career.
The letters home to parents began within just one day of the arrival of the pair at the School, Watson admitted. The first letter of crisis they addressed to E.R.F. at Trinity is dated only two weeks later.Footnote 25 The Excerpts from the Letters of Two Teachers, a digest of four densely typed letters E.R.F. compiled for ease of reference, related such disappointing, banal, if not condemnatory, observations as: ‘the educational standard is appallingly low – one teacher is without even her Grade XII, and another lower than that’. Or ‘I didn’t really expect a mission school to be what I expected it to be, but this is almost too much’.Footnote 26
Their letters did not consistently repeat allegations of the sexual and other abuse of students committed by the staff of the School that Watson made in our interview, and the Affair is marked by an ambivalence that would be leveraged by those in positions of authority to undermine the credibility of the witnesses, whatever the legalistic shortcomings of their testimony. In the first four letters E.R.F. condensed into his Excerpts, however, Watson and Ketcheson as co-signers described some of the worst episodes, their account tinged with embarrassed sarcasm: ‘we’re just full of delightful anecdotes – like the one about one of the firemen (an aged soul) taking the little girls to his room to exhibit himself to them or to look at them, depending on his mood (I blush).’Footnote 27 To me, Watson further claimed that there was also a janitor on staff at the School who frequently ‘diddled’ groups of young girls on the premises. In the Excerpts, the pair recited their litany of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse committed against the students by the staff, who are painted in broad strokes as including ‘the town moron, a would-be gay divorcée, one of the third sex, a nymphomaniac, a deserted wife, a philanderer, several sadists, and very few Anglicans!’Footnote 28
By contrast, Watson simultaneously recalled to me with heartfelt emotion ‘the beautiful ceremony’ at which she received the sacrament of Baptism in the chapel of All Saints’ School at the hands of Principal Scrase, who was ‘awfully nice about it’. In the event, Ketcheson acted as her sponsor. Watson remembered looking forward to Confirmation, how ‘it will be so nice to belong to a church and receive Communion, rather than just sit-in on the service’.Footnote 29
At the moment that Watson and Ketcheson together manifested a heightened sacramental awareness, fears ‘that it would be more difficult to be a Christian in a supposedly Christian society’ were also taking hold.Footnote 30 They confided to E.R.F. in their letters that they could only identify with ‘a few heartbroken souls like us – those inevitable old ladies who didn’t prepare properly for their old age and are reduced to this [working at the School] until they die’.Footnote 31 Scrase, whom Watson described to me as a dull and easy-going type, condoning just about everything and who did not bother to hold chapel services in the morning, reassured the pair, invoking the familiar and unsatisfying refrain that conditions for Indigenous children were much worse on the Reserves.
They were shocked, Watson related, by the recommendation of one staff member that they each obtain for themselves a length of rubber hose with which to beat the Cree children enrolled as students. The anecdotal laments from the children themselves about life on the Reserves also shocked. One girl, Watson claimed, related to her the story of the ‘bad luck’ that her father had fatally shot her mother. Then, in revenge, her brother had shot her father, and he, in consequence, had landed in jail. Now she was alone in the School.
It appears E.R.F. compiled his Excerpts with a view to sharing these reports with others. Dean Feilding received the first copy. In a handwritten response to E.R.F., he proffered five suggestions for managing the situation:
∙ first, a ‘confrontation of the principal’ about the veracity of the claims made by Watson and Ketcheson
∙ next, a ‘joint letter of resignation, with full statement of reasons, letter to be sent to the proper authority, but copy anyway to H. G. Cook [Canon Henry George Cook, Superintendent of the Indian School Administration of the MSCC], to Primate [Archbishop Walter Barfoot of Edmonton], to you (as personal advisor), to me (as mutual friend of theirs and Cook’s)’
∙ third, that ‘the action [be] taken in good faith with desire to allow the Church to remedy the defects without public outcry’
∙ fourth, the observation ‘I think we should be assured either that the girls have the spiritual security to see it through, or the financial security to support life’
∙ finally, ‘I would like the advice of some official person hereabouts. However, to avoid internal tensions in MSCC I do not think in this case that Dixon [Canon Leonard Alexander Dixon, General Secretary of the MSCC, who knew the pair as friends of his own daughter] or Watts [Bishop Horace Godfrey Watts, Field Secretary of the MSCC] would be suitable’.Footnote 32
Though E.R.F.’s replies do not survive, Watson recalled to me that he suggested two possible courses of action in response to the brutality of the abuses around them. E.R.F. counselled that they should either remain in the employ of the MSCC at the School for the long term, and, with seniority, hope to reform things, or leave with a bang. On 29 November 1952, after approximately three and a half months of employment, the pair submitted a lengthy joint notice of resignation to Principal Scrase, with a duplicate copy sent to Superintendent Cook. No record of a confrontation of Principal Scrase in advance of the resignation has been identified, and Scrase later denied any such meeting occurred.
Their letter began: ‘We, the undersigned, hereby give notice of our immediate departure from the Prince Albert Indian School … It is our considered opinion that this School fails to do its duty by either God or its country.’Footnote 33 In three dense pages they outlined their view that the ‘propagation of Christianity’ was ‘shockingly neglected’, that the staff members of the School were entirely ‘unqualified … social misfits’ whose ‘treatment of the children is even worse than that of each other’. That ‘many openly consider the children “dirty breeds” and subhuman,’ and that the children are ‘maltreated, cursed at, made to bear the brunt of senile sex instincts, exposed to the most brutish forms of behaviour and nothing is said – not even a gentle remonstrance’.Footnote 34
The ‘children are allowed to run wild until whipping is the only means of discipline possible’, they continued. In the School’s makeshift prison, miscreant boys were kept in a cage made of ‘chicken wire so that the inmates are exposed’, embodying an attitude they believed was outmoded ‘even in most penal institutions’. ‘Surely’, the pair insisted, ‘All Saints’ School is a misnomer.’ Filth, neglect, violence, and ‘arbitrary standards of promotion or failure’ were all reasons why the pair claimed they were ‘morally obliged to leave the employ of the Indian School Administration in an attempt to force these deplorable conditions to the attention of higher authorities with the sincere hope that they will make every effort to relieve a situation which we find intolerable’.Footnote 35
Evidently, the higher authorities became rapidly aware of the Affair. It appears, though, that nothing much was done to relieve the situation, or even investigate the substance of the allegations, beyond soliciting a written reaction to the resignation from Scrase. Within just a few days, a flurry of correspondence poured forth between the various higher dignitaries of the Anglican Church of Canada, the MSCC, members of the Faculty of Divinity at Trinity, and others, including one government official. The first response to the fiery missive of Watson and Ketcheson within E.R.F.’s papers, dated 4 December 1952, is a handwritten letter from then Primate of Canada Archbishop Walter Barfoot. ‘My dear Eugene’, he began, ‘things may be bad in our Indian Schools but I don’t really think they are as bad as pictured in your report. However, far be it from me to try to stem the rising tide of reform.’Footnote 36 He freely admitted that ‘we have never been able to staff our Schools – either Residential or Day. The Church is to blame. Cook does the best he can with the people we’ve been able to recruit.’ He asked E.R.F. to wait, and concluded by repeating ‘Cook is not to blame’.Footnote 37
E.R.F. received another letter, also dated 4 December, from Metropolitan Archbishop Philip Carrington of Quebec. In his role as Chairman of the MSCC Executive, Carrington acknowledged receipt of a copy of E.R.F.’s Excerpts and conceded ‘I am sorry to say I think there is some truth in it, but on the other hand, I would think that there is a great deal of exaggeration’. ‘The two girls in question’, Carrington continued, ‘should realize that the best way of improving the situation is to keep their heads and stick very close to the statements which can be really proved, indeed it is better for them to be on the cautious side.’Footnote 38 Both letters from the Archbishops display a certain openness to the validity of the allegations, while abdicating any responsibility for bearing the burden of proof themselves. That same year, in the course of celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the MSCC, Archbishop Carrington complained publicly that, as far as living up to its financial commitment to maintaining Anglican Indian Schools, the Federal Government had accomplished ‘nothing’.Footnote 39
According to Watson, it was Ketcheson who met with Archbishop Carrington in person, who allegedly told her in the course of their interview that he was ‘too old and tired’ to take any substantial action. In fact, Carrington retired eight years later in 1960. For her part, Watson stated that she met with Archbishop Barfoot in an empty office at Trinity during which session, she claimed to me, the Primate threatened her verbally with litigation should she decide to go public with her allegations.
Superintendent Cook also sent E.R.F. an official response to his Excerpts. He enclosed with this message a copy of a letter already dispatched to Carrington ‘asking that the Church conduct a full enquiry into the charges … I think you will agree that such charges cannot be made and allowed to stand unchallenged … I might add that I have every confidence in the ability of Principal Scrase … and feel that the charges made by the two young ladies in question arise out of their inexperience of life outside college bounds’.Footnote 40 In his message to Carrington, Cook continued ‘I think, your Grace, you’ll agree that the charges made by Misses Ketcheson and Watson could be, in many cases, classified as libellous. This office is quite prepared to engage legal counsel to have the matter cleared up.’Footnote 41 Furthermore, ‘it [the allegations made by Ketcheson and Watson] can now be considered as information generally public to the Church. For that reason and because this Administration’s workers have had accusations of an unsavoury nature made against them, I request that a Church Committee be duly authorized to conduct a judicial enquiry.’Footnote 42
Days later, Carrington updated E.R.F. that ‘I have now received a large number of documents from the Authorities with regard to statements made by two young ladies in connection with a certain School. I am wondering very much whether these two girls have acted wisely.’Footnote 43 Even the testimony of Laval Fortier, federal Deputy Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, who had paid an official visit to the School in the fall of 1952, was solicited by Cook. In a concise letter, Fortier volunteered that his ‘general impression of the School was good’.Footnote 44 Scrase ‘looks interested in the welfare of the children and their education’, he continued, and ‘appears to be well liked by the Indian children, if I judge by the way they smiled at him when we were visiting around’. Evidently, E.R.F. never received a copy of the letter signed by all ‘the members of the whole staff’ of All Saints’, written by Scrase in response to the charges brought by the pair. In its text, he emphatically rejected their allegations. The letter, addressed to Cook, is lengthy, consuming nine pages of tightly packed type in which Scrase attempted to discredit Watson and Ketcheson as ‘gossipy’, ‘snobbish’, ‘untidy’, ‘seen picking up cigarette butts when they have run out of tobacco’, as being ‘not in favour of our Church, not in favour of state prayers, and the national anthem, anti-everything’, as well as a disappointment to those, including E.R.F., who had provided character references to the MSCC.Footnote 45 ‘Are they living in the right country?’ he accused.Footnote 46
Significantly, Scrase also contradicted Watson’s version of how the two arrived at All Saints’ in the first place, indeed of their very involvement with the MSCC. Scrase claimed that ‘one [Ketcheson] arrived, followed by the second [Watson] … she [Ketcheson] had been hired at Gordon’s Indian School and then left without a word, leaving them in the lurch’. ‘They are the social misfits themselves’, he disparagingly announced, suggesting an inappropriate attachment between the pair.Footnote 47
The charge of disloyalty to both the MSCC and the nation, and that, subversively, Watson and Ketcheson touted reservations about prayers for Canada in an era of paranoia related to the Second Red Scare, as well as a thinly veiled suggestion of an illicit intimacy between the pair, was damning. The imputed Anglo-Catholic queerness of Watson and Ketcheson, the bad habits formed in their students by E.R.F. and others, in the rarefied liberal ethos prevalent at Trinity, these were to blame for misperceptions of abuse and neglect, Scrase assured his superiors. It does appear from records held by the General Synod, however, and in contradiction of Watson’s comments to me, that Ketcheson was indeed the first to go west in the employ of the MSCC, that she was employed briefly at Gordon’s Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, and that after she abruptly quit the place, Watson followed her to All Saints’.
The final two pieces of correspondence related to the Affair retained by E.R.F. were, first, a self-deprecating letter of contrite apology co-written by Watson and Ketcheson and addressed to Carrington, as well as a bizarre, nastier, and mocking, draft parodying its text, never sent, in which E.R.F. may have also collaborated. Apparently intimidated by the repeated threats of litigation, the pair recanted, acknowledging and bewailing their broad condemnation of the School’s entire staff, and of the School as an institutional component of systemic injustice. Sublimating their frustrations, the three privately mocked their spiritual fathers, satirizing the prelatical features of their discreditable conduct, as well as the feigned grovelling of the text of their own apology, perhaps hinting evidence of holy foolishness in the remains of E.R.F. All this, despite Dean Feilding’s insistence that ‘this problem is one of pastoral care, not legal action (the text of 1 Cor. 6.1 has been going constantly through my mind since the fuss began)’.Footnote 48 In their apology the pair confessed that ‘we have learned, much to our regret, that certain charges made in our letter resigning our positions at the Prince Albert Indian School … have been interpreted as applying to the School staff as a whole. We wish, therefore, to apologize for any careless statements which have given this impression....’Footnote 49
Conclusion
In the span of a mere two months, the potential scandal of the Watson-Ketcheson Affair, an indictment of an entire Residential School and the mission it manifested, was strategically dissipated by the most senior officials of the Anglican Church of Canada and the MSCC, acting with the support of the Canadian government. This furtive activity meant there was no investigation of the substance of the allegations made by the whistleblowers, and no complete official record of events was left intact in either church or university. By pivoting from the substance of the allegations made by Watson and Ketcheson to the question of the collective culpability of the staff, senior-most officials successfully deflected the naive onslaught with threats of litigation. The matter of the truth of certain significant biographical and chronological elements of the Watson-Ketcheson Affair, the inevitable twists of narrative, provenance and memory, perhaps intended to conceal, can be a diversion from the real crisis then unfolding in the Indian Residential Schools for which Archbishop Peers, on behalf of the Church, would apologise in 1993. As Malcolm Gladwell suggests, ‘When monsters roam free, we assume that people in positions of authority ought to be able to catch them if only they did their jobs. But that might be wishful thinking.’Footnote 50
As a matter of biographical record, Tory Ketcheson died an apostate to Anglicanism, according to her widower, never attending church again after she returned home from the ordeal. Pat Watson, who in life affirmed to me her identity as an atheist, declined a funeral in any church, and withheld her obituary from circulation through the extensive network of Trinity alumni who still remember both fondly. E.R.F. died in laurelled retirement, and is understandably still revered at Trinity College.
