Malsis School: Former teacher loses appeal against sexual abuse convictions

Peter Holmes, who worked at Malsis School, was jailed for 12 years in September, after he was convicted of 13 counts of indecent assault and 16 counts of gross indecency.

During his trial at Bradford Crown Court, the jury was told he had forced some pupils to use a rowing machine while they were naked and made others strip and give him massages.

Holmes, who is now 73, also groped a number of pupils and rubbed Deep Heat into several boys’ thighs, when he was working as an English teacher and a rugby and cricket coach between 1976 and 1991.

He was convicted after David Hope, who raped a boy while working at the school as a music teacher in the 1980s, was jailed for 17 years.

Holmes’s legal team appealed against the conviction in the Court of Appeal, claiming the trial judge had made an error by refusing to accept there was “no case to answer” for 11 counts of gross indecency.

They said the judge had “misdirected the jury” about what gross indecency means, as he did not explain that it must require “some form of intercrural contact”.

They also claimed that mistakenly allowing the jury to hear allegations about those 11 counts had a “prejudicial effect”, meaning that Holmes did not receive a fair trial and all of his convictions “should be quashed”.

However, the three judges dismissed the appeal, following a hearing last week.

In their ruling, they said Holmes’s lawyers should not attempt to define gross indecency because it “has an ordinary meaning which juries have been able to determine and apply without difficulty for many years” and “boundaries of the offence” have been set in previous cases.

The ruling added: “It was apparent from the appellant's own evidence at trial that he knew what were proper boundaries for his behaviour.

“He gave evidence that he had not acted or conducted himself in the grossly indecent way alleged by the complainants but it is apparent from their verdicts that the jury were sure that he had.”

Holmes’s legal team also appealed against his prison sentence, claiming it was “manifestly excessive and wrong in principle”.

But the Court of Appeal judges dismissed this appeal and ruled the sentence was “just and proportionate”.

The ruling stated: “This was a teacher carrying out sexual offending against 18 separate children in serious breach of trust, over a sustained period of time, which had caused very real harm to those children.

“For some of the complainants the effects of the offending had lasted throughout their whole life. In these circumstances the judge was entitled to consider that a determinate sentence of 12 years was just and proportionate.”

North Yorkshire Police said that when complaints were first made about the teacher in the 1990s, officers could not reach the teacher because he had moved to Taiwan.

But the investigation was reopened in 2018, when fresh complaints were made, and detectives tracked him down at his home in Bristol.

They took dozens of witness statements from former pupils and staff connected to the preparatory school, which closed in 2014, before he was charged.