One of my previous blog posts discussing Dr Brian Harris, the
psychiatrist from south Wales who is now on trial for historical sexual
assaults against his patients, noted how one of the patients who alleges
that Harris assaulted him attributed Harris’s success as an abuser to
the fact that he’d ‘studied psychology’. As I have commented previously,
it’s probably more down to the institutional corruption that is rife in
medicine and bodies such as the BMA, GMC and MDU.
However the comment about people who have studied psychology reminded
me of a number of other dysfunctional people, one in particular, who
have studied psychology and participated in impressive quantities of
wrongdoing. The man that I’m thinking of is the late Professor Fergus
Lowe, the former Senior PVC and Head of the School of Psychology at
Bangor University.
Fergus Lowe died not so long ago and was well-known to many people
who have passed through Bangor University in the last three decades on
the grounds of being, as memorably described by my friend Brown, ‘a
highly effective shit’. I know that I had prior warning from Brown
regarding Lowe, but even so I was interested to watch a lot of people
toady to Fergus and do his bidding no matter how unsavoury that was. A
lot of people were doing this simply because they were terrified of
him – for some reason best known to himself, at one point Fergus decided
to cultivate the company of one of the lecturers in the psychology dept
whose teenage son knew someone whom I used to be friendly with. The
teenager told my friend that Fergus had started calling in uninvited at
their house and that his father was too frightened to stop these visits
because he was both ‘in awe of’ and ‘frightened of’ Fergus, whom this
man believed was a ‘true psychopath’. I didn’t start observing Fergus
and the dynamics that surrounded him until about 2003, by which time he
had achieved a very senior position in the University. The official
narrative regarding the ‘respect’ that there was for Fergus in some
quarters was his success in turning the psychology dept in Bangor from a
semi-derelict house (which was how I remembered it in the 1980s when I
was a student) to what was allegedly one of the best psychology depts in
the UK and even considered to be pretty good in the global rankings. In
more recent times, the psychology dept has become known as one of the
depts in Bangor packed with international ‘research stars’, many of them
having been head-hunted by Fergus in his attempt at world-domination.
This always impresses people, but there is a reason why it tends to be
overseas academics in Bangor psychology rather than big names from the
UK – UK psychologists knew Fergus and would not work with him. A big
name in the British Psychological Association whom Brown knew was
approached by Bangor in about 2005 in an attempt to head-hunt him and
this man told Brown that he would never go to Bangor as long as Fergus
was involved with the University. Brown’s contacts also enlightened me
as to the source of one of Fergus’s big ‘successes’ that financed the
grand building currently housing Bangor’s psychology dept, the Brigantia
Building – namely an enormous amount of funding from Unilever some
years ago. Fergus did not land this grant through his talents and
hard-work. He landed that grant by systematically stuffing over everyone
else who was on the team, approaching the funders and making fallacious
allegations about his colleagues’ incompetence or misconduct. He was so
successful in this regard that he ended up netting the grant himself.
I heard many first-hand accounts of Fergus’s wrongdoing and it seemed
quite wide-ranging. There were constant allegations of dishonesty,
plagiarism and research fraud. One person friendly with someone I know
well told me how his friend withdrew from a PhD in the school of
psychology when Fergus told her to fabricate research results. She tried
to refuse and Fergus’s response was ‘the trouble with you is that you
always want to tell the truth’. She withdrew from her PhD and now freely
tells everyone that academics are ‘liars and cheats’ – a consequence of
having Fergus Lowe as a PhD supervisor. There was an event involving
Fergus that has gone down in the history of Bangor, an event remembered
by a lot of women in the area who are now in early middle-age and whose
children used to attend the University nursery. That nursery was used by
Fergus for research purposes and it was actually where he carried out
the research – if indeed he did carry out the research that he claimed,
one can never be sure, it was Fergus after all – that made him famous,
the ‘Food Dudes’ project, an initiative aimed at promoting healthy
eating in children. Ironically at the time when Fergus was receiving
glowing tributes for this work in the media and he was giving interviews
about the importance of healthy eating, whilst Governments were using
that research as a basis for health policy, I used to watch Fergus pop
down to Morrisons in Bangor to buy his lunch – a bottle of coke and two
packs of crisps. Every day without fail. However it wasn’t Fergus’s own
taste for junk food that landed him in trouble with the mothers of
Bangor. It was the fact that somehow they had discovered that their
children were being ‘experimented on’ without their knowledge let alone
their permission. The kids had all been entered into clinical trials
without parental consent – trials which involved some kids being fed a
bad diet, whilst others received the nice healthy fruit as promoted by
Food Dudes. The middle class mums of Bangor hit the roof when they found
out that their kids might have been the ones being fed crap at the
nursery and in an attempt to defuse the outrage and rumours rocketing
around the area, the parents were invited to a meeting with Fergus in
the University Council Chamber, where he was supposedly going to
reassure them that nothing untoward had happened. I know three parents –
two mums and a dad – who actually attended that meeting and they said
that there was uproar. The dad said that when he challenged Fergus,
Fergus became so aggressive that he thought that he was going to hit
him. What is so entertaining though, is that as one of the mums said
‘Fergus forgot that there is nothing like an angry mother’ and I was
told that this was one occasion on which Fergus ended up literally
fleeing from the room faced with a gang of furious women…
It was not only Fergus’s research that was dodgy, his teaching
practices weren’t much better. In order to attract ‘world-class’
researchers to Bangor, Fergus struck very favourable deals with them,
which included them having to do very little teaching to enable them to
just get on with their research, which would of course be the factor
that pushed Bangor psychology up the league tables. But at the same
time, Fergus knew how profitable undergrads were and was determined to
pack them in. So hundreds of students would be enrolled every year. From
what I saw there were two groups of psychology students at Bangor.
There were very bright ones who wanted careers in psychology and who had
gone to Bangor because they knew that it was a highly ranked dept. Then
there were a number of rather fragile troubled students who had often
experienced the glorious mental health services and were now ’empowered’
to go to university. They were choosing psychology because they
believed that this would enable them to ‘understand myself’, confusing
it with psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. They were positively encouraged
to do this by the mental health services, because they were then
categorised in a box ticked ‘recovered’. No-one told them that the
psychology degree at Bangor was nothing to do with
psychotherapy/psychoanalysis – Bangor has a huge emphasis on behavioural
psychology and the course also involved topics such as biochemistry and
of course statistics. (At one point Bangor was scandalised because the
statistics module in the psychology dept was being taught by a man who
was of the ‘hippy’ community in Bethesda who had a very obvious drug
habit and was regularly seen cultivating the company of girls below the
age of consent, herding them into taxis and then disappearing with them.
There was very great concern expressed by a lot of people that the
University saw fit to employ this man – I was told that Fergus was quite
happy to do so because he paid him a pittance. The scandal only came to
an end when the ‘stats lecturer’ turned up to work after having
taken LSD and started playing Jimi Hendrix to the students on the
grounds that if they listened closely they’d understand stats in an
instant. This was too much even for Fergus and the stats lecturer was
employed no more.) The fragile students with mental health problems or
no previous qualifications used to encounter great difficulties and
would usually withdraw at the end of the first year having found
themselves completely unable to cope academically and would often end
up feeling very bad about themselves. Fergus knew that this was
happening but didn’t mind at all – he’d netted a years worth of fees
from them. Furthermore, I got the impression that there wasn’t much time
in the psychology dept for students who might be struggling – at one
point I discovered that a two tier system was in operation in that dept,
which involved a select few of the very high achieving students being
identified and approached in their second year and asked to join an
elite group, who would then enjoy extra tuition etc. Which was great if
you were part of that group, but what about the others – they were
paying the same fees and they weren’t told in advance about this two
tier system. However, even the very academic students often became
disillusioned with the psychology dept. Because Fergus was expecting so
little in the way of teaching from the Big Names, the students were
taught by postgrads. This is of course a common practice, but usually
this is done partly to enable the postgrads to gain lecturing
experience. Fergus however rolled out this system en masse – hundreds of
undergrads would be packed into the biggest hall in the university,
with a postgrad virtually wetting themselves with anxiety on the stage
in front of them, trying to give a lecture when they were insufficiently
experienced. This happened so frequently that the students who had gone
to Bangor to work with famous people would realise at the end of three
years that they’d barely met any of these famous people. There is
however one high profile academic in the school of psychology who does
seem to take an interest in students and whom the students all loved,
that is Professor Guilluame Thierry. I have heard fantastic things about
him – but he is the only well-known person in psychology whom I hear
the students praising.
But Fergus was running yet another scam among all this. Most
postgrads like to do a bit of teaching because it enables them to
supplement their PhD studentships. However I was told that Fergus was
grossly underpaying them. One brave soul decided to challenge him about
this and I think that she also tried to encourage everyone to join a
union as well. No-one would back her up – they were far too frightened –
so she went to see Fergus to confront him about the exploitation that
was happening. She told me an extraordinary tale – that as he saw her
approaching his office, Fergus marched out of his room screaming and
swearing at her, grabbed her by the hair and tried to drag her down the
corridor. I asked her if there were witnesses to this and she told me
that people were coming out of their offices to see what the racket was
about but when they saw what was going on, every single one of them
retreated back into their office and shut the door. The same person also
told me of another Fergus-related outrage. She had been invited to a
conference in Chester as part of the psychology team with Fergus.
She went out for the evening in Chester and had a really bad experience –
a man attempted to rape her. She fought him off and managed to get back
to the conference venue where she encountered Fergus. She was very
shaken and told him what had happened. He commented that she was
obviously alright now and went off elsewhere with the others leaving her
alone for the next few hours. Attempted rape of one of the researchers?
Fergus didn’t bat an eye-lid. Interestingly enough, although this
person was a good researcher and remained in the school of psychology to
pursue further work after her PhD, she was never promoted. Even more
interestingly, I discovered that she was actually writing the
publications of some of the professors in the psychology dept only to
find that they were taking her name off the work when they submitted it
for publication. So that’s how the senior staff in the psychology dept
built up such impressive publication lists…
Although I knew that Fergus did this sort of thing and encouraged
other people to conduct themselves like this as well, I always wondered
how he’d got such a foothold in the University initially. About ten
years ago I found out. During Thatcher’s administration there had been
one round of university funding cuts that were particularly savage and
had almost destroyed certain universities like Aston and Salford.
Another university that had come under attack – although I don’t know
why – was Bangor. There was a fear that the University was actually
going to be closed down, but in the end it just suffered the closure of a
number of depts, including philosophy, drama and maths. Psychology was
also earmarked for closure and at that time Fergus was an unknown junior
lecturer there. When he realised that the dept was about to be closed
down, Fergus hit on a stroke of genius – he arranged a conference at
Bangor and invited B.F. Skinner, the famous American behaviourist, to
the conference. He then told Skinner that the dept was earmarked for
closure and generated an enormous amount of publicity. Behaviourism was
becoming very unfashionable by then, so Skinner was delighted to find
another behaviourist – Fergus – and campaigned with him to prevent the
closure of the dept. A number of people were very grateful to Fergus for
this, because he saved their careers, as well as his own, and they have
remained loyal to him ever since, although they know exactly how great
the wrongdoing has been.
So whose bacon did Fergus save? Well where mustn’t much to the
Bangor psychology dept in those days, but there was a dyslexia unit –
which was actually very good but which Fergus wasn’t involved with – and
there were a few PhD students. But there was also a clinical psychology
course. That course was training the students who were being sent on
placement to the North Wales Hospital Denbigh – and they were witnessing
what was going on out there. One of those students told me in the late
80s that if you were any good, you just finished your training, left
north Wales and got as far away from Dafydd Alun Jones and Denbigh as
possible. But there were some people who didn’t do that – and some of
these deeply compromised people are hiding around north Wales at the
moment.
I had been told back in the late 1980s that Dr Dafydd Alun Jones was
wielding influence in the psychology dept in Bangor and had attempted to
embezzle thousands of pounds from the University to pay for his
daughter, Dwynwen, to attend a private college in England. I was told
that Dwynwen had failed to get onto the clinical psychology course, so
Dafydd was sending her to England privately but decided that someone
else could pay for it. I was told that someone in Bangor University had
stopped Dafydd doing this and that this was actually the end of Dafydd’s
influence in the University. What I didn’t know was that this person
was Fergus Lowe. Dwynwen was doing a PhD in the psychology dept at the
time and it was widely alleged that she had only been given the place
because of Dafydd’s influence – I was told that her finals results would
never have been good enough for her to be accepted for a PhD but as is
his usual practice, Dafydd worked a fiddle. Fergus was seething and is
remembered for refusing to speak to Dwynwen whilst she was a postgrad
there. So a lot of people were very grateful when Fergus slayed Dafydd,
particularly the person whose salary Dafydd tried to steal to fund
Dywnwen’s education. But that person’s salary was actually earmarked to
fund a job for her at Denbigh – this person wanted to do clinical
psychology and the training involved an obligatory stint as an assistant
in a psychiatric hospital. That person did indeed take up the job at
Denbigh – and was appalled at what she witnessed. She decided not to do
clinical psychology after all – I suspect because of what she witnessed
at Denbigh – but stayed in Bangor to do a PhD in the psychology dept.
She still works in Bangor University today. I got to know this person
very well a few years ago because I worked with her. Whilst I worked
with her I was being threatened, harassed and arrested by Martin Jones
and Elfed Roberts et al at the North West Wales NHS Trust. This person
knew all the details and indeed read the threatening letters that Martin
was sending me. At one point she observed of Martin that ‘he’s not
going to stop this is he’. After hearing about one of the (many)
attempts to imprison me she commented that ‘you wouldn’t have survived a
prison sentence and you weren’t supposed to’. And after Martin tried to
have me arrested for making a ‘hoax call’ when I was ringing Ysbyty
Gwynedd A&E seeking medical advice, she responded ‘that was done to
try and make you look like a fuckwit so no-one would ever believe a word
that you say again’. This person also knew how corrupt the local
psychiatrists were – when I told her that Dr Richard Tranter of the
Hergest Unit had documented upon my medical records that I was being
bullied at work by the University rather than documenting that my health
was suffering because Martin Jones and Elfed Roberts were having me
arrested constantly, she was good enough to describe the allegations of
me being bullied at work as ‘bollocks and Richard knows that’.
So there is someone else as well as me who witnessed the abuses that
took place at Denbigh, who knows about Dafydd, who knows about the
wrongdoing of Fergus Lowe although he saved her salary from the
ever-hungry jaws of Dafydd and who knows the lengths that Martin Jones,
Richard Tranter and Elfed Roberts were going to in order to try and
discredit me and conceal the abuses at the Hergest Unit. This person
also knows the reality behind Professor Mark Williams and the miracle
that is mindfulness and along with Fergus Lowe held mindfulness in utter
contempt, but knew that it was making Mark Williams and Bangor
University famous as well as a lot of money. Indeed Mark Williams was
this person’s manager at one point. This person also knew about the
various local abusive psychiatrists such as Laurence Chesterman and
Marie Savage being involved with the psychology dept and pretending to
be following ‘research interests’ when they clearly weren’t.
Furthermore, this someone also knew that a nurse who had done a PhD in
Bangor’s psychology dept was being falsely presented at Ysbyty Gwynedd
as a ‘clinical psychologist’ and was carrying out ‘assessments’ that
only clinical psychologists are permitted to do. There was one thing
that this person did know that I didn’t however – on one occasion after
we had finished discussing the activities of the dreadful Dafydd, I
mentioned dear old Dr Peter Higson, the current Chair of the Betsi,
former clinical psychologist at Denbigh, lecturer at Bangor psychology
dept and currently member of Bangor University Council. This person told
me that Higson was a big mate of Fergus’s and ‘he didn’t shag the
patients but he did shag the students’. As readers may have gathered I
knew this person very well and I was quite upfront with her that I
was writing to the Welsh Govt about the things that had happened to me
at the hands of the mental health services and that one day I intended
to publish the whole story. What I didn’t realise at the time was that
this person was gathering as much info as she could from me and I
suspect was informing those we know and love of my every move – because
unbeknown to me she was co-authoring a book with Richard Tranter and was
also busy doing deals with psychiatrists such as Rob Poole to establish
the Centre for Mental Health and Society at Bangor University. When she
heard that the dreadful Raj Sambhi had imprisoned me at the Heddfan
Unit no doubt she thought that I was finished and no threat to any of
them anymore.
So who is this totally unscrupulous person who is now working with
people whom she knows concealed the sexual abuse and illegal detention
of patients, who knew about the scams that passed for ‘research’ in the
psychology dept and who knew that Martin Jones and Elfed Roberts were
doing their best to frame me in an attempt to imprison me but
nevertheless co-authored a book with the man who was writing lies on my
medical records in an attempt to cover their tracks? Step forward
Professor Catherine Robinson, who sadly it would seem did pretty much
anything to get herself a Chair at Bangor University. The irony is that
when Catherine was awarded that Chair I sent her an e mail
congratulating her and saying that I was glad to see someone getting a
Chair without behaving like a shit. Little did I know….I always wondered
why she never replied to that e mail. Oh well, the good thing about not
having a job in a university Catherine is that you can publish whatever
you want and you don’t have to kowtow to er, criminals.
Sadly I believe that Catherine and her ilk are the legacy of Fergus. A
psychologist who has now retired from Bangor University observed that
Fergus did indeed stamp out the influence of the dreadful Dafydd from
Bangor University, but he just replaced it with his own toxicity. A
generation of academics were not mentored properly and were led to
believe that the only way to advance yourself was by bullying, cheating,
deception and by keeping absolutely silent even when you know that
terrible things are happening. Someone used the phrase ‘dangerous
deference’ to me the other day – I think it’s an affliction affecting
many in north Wales (and the NHS generally). Fergus is now dead –
although no-one seems to know what he actually died of, who knows
another psychopathic psychologist might have killed him – but the
effects of him live on. After Fergus was made Senior PVC, there was a
big problem because no one else from the psychology dept wanted to step
into his place as Head of Dept, because they knew that he’d be
constantly on their back. Eventually the post was filled by one
Professor Oliver Turnbull. I know of two incidents involving Turnbull.
One involved him attempting to coerce an artist from Bethesda into
selling one of her artworks priced at £10,000 to him for £800. He tried
this because he’d noticed that she was participating in the trials run
by the psychology dept in order to supplement her income, so he struck
up a conversation with her in order to assess just how poor she was.
When he realised that she was struggling for money, he offered her a
pittance for the painting that he was after. She refused and was
surprised to be told by Turnbull that ‘you’ve got to sell it to me
because you’ve got no money so you’ve got no choice’. She had no money
but she did have principles so she walked away. The other incident
involved Turnbull and the Bangor psychology dept appearing in Private
Eye a few years ago. A student in the psychology dept at Bangor had
complained of being sexually harassed by one of her teachers. Turnbull
had written a rather inappropriate e mail, questioning whether this
student really had been harassed or whether she was just a weak student
and should they therefore remove her from the course. Unfortunately for
Turnbull, he cc’d the e mail to a number of people including the student
herself by mistake. Someone took the e mail to Private Eye and Turnbull
disappeared on gardening leave for a few months. However he reappeared
eventually – and I understand that he is now PVC for Teaching and
Learning at Bangor no less.
http://www.drsallybaker.com/uncategorized/hes-not-the-messiah-hes-a-very-naughty-boy/
