Plainly paederastic
From Mr Patrick West Sir; Philippa Wragg's description ('My son's agony', 19 April) of the disgraced organ master Denis Cochrane strikes me as odd. Wragg describes him as an influential and admired man, far from 'the image of a shifty man in a dirty raincoat'; in fact, 'Cochrane looked like what he was: a wellestablished, middle-aged teacher'.
Like my peers at school, I remember Mr Cochrane as a fat, sweaty bully of clearly different sexual appetite. He was every bit the image of an oily nonce. Why else would we have referred to his pupils as 'Cochrane's Bum Boys'? He was renowned for his unpleasant tactility and extremely bad temper. On a school trip to France, I recall, he decided that all 40 pubescent boys 'smelt'. He insisted that we take off our tops so that he could spray us individually with deodorant. That, thankfully, is the closest he got to me, I've always believed Catholic schools have had a raw deal in the media, and I am grateful for the fantastic education I received at one, yet it is disheartening to hear of a certain individual I respected and trusted being Cochrane's character witness at the trial, I'm annoyed, too, that in order to protect Cochrane's victims we cannot even name the school at which he committed these crimes. The institution has got off pretty lightly.
Too many teachers' careers have been ruined by malicious and untrue allegations from pupils, but at the same time many young people's lives have been ruined by teachers whose activities went unreported or overlooked. Even the dogs on the street knew he was a grubby paederast.
Patrick West London W6
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