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SYDNEY - He was hailed as one of the finest military commanders of World War II, a tough general who rallied a dispirited Allied Army and routed the Japanese in the jungles of Burma.
But Field Marshal Viscount William Slim, one of Britain's greatest wartime heroes, has been accused of less honourable behaviour when serving as Governor-General of Australia in the 1950s. Slim, who died in 1970, has been accused of groping underprivileged British children who had been sent to Australia as part of a now discredited scheme to populate the Empire with the unwanted offspring of the working class.
The explosive claims concern visits Slim made to a child migration centre run by the Fairbridge Society in rural New South Wales.
The society was one of several child migration charities which dispatched about 100,000 impoverished British children to Australia, Canada and other far-flung parts of the Empire from the late 19th century to the 1970s.
During official visits to the Fairbridge Farm School near the village of Molong in 1953 and 1955, the former general allegedly fondled young boys as they rode in his official car.
One of them was Robert Stevens, 63, who has broken decades of silence in revealing the abuse.
"I was one of the boys invited to ride in the car. I was nine or 10. There wasn't much room so I sat on his knee. Before I knew it there was a hand up my leg," Stevens said.
"I thought, 'Heavens, what's that?' He had his filthy hand up my shorts. It wasn't a one-off. Others have talked about similar situations. Thinking about it makes me very, very angry."
Stevens, who was sent to Australia at the age of eight, now runs an art gallery in Canberra.
He decided to reveal the incident publicly out of anger that the Fairbridge Society refuses to acknowledge the abuse which children were allegedly subjected to.
He also wanted to substantiate unattributed allegations which surfaced in the Sydney Morning Herald at the weekend that Slim had sexually assaulted children.
"I'm very conscious of treading on someone's grave but I think it's time that what went on was exposed," said Stevens, who was abused by older boys. "Even though I'm in my sixties, it never leaves you. It haunts you for the rest of your life."
His account is corroborated by a second former pupil who has declined to come forward publicly but who said he was also "touched up" while riding in Slim's car.
Wounded at Gallipoli in World War I, Slim married in 1926. During World War II he fought in East Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In 1945 he retook Burma from the Japanese with his "Forgotten Army".
Russell Young, president of the Burma Star Association in NSW, said he was appalled by the allegations.
"I've never heard anything of that nature," said Young, who served under Slim as an officer with the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment.
The allegations against the war hero emerged during research for a new book, The Forgotten Children, by David Hill, a former chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
He was one of the 1000 British children who passed through Fairbridge's Molong farm school between its founding in 1938 and 1974, when it closed.
Hill was sent to Australia as a 12-year-old in 1959 by his mother, a struggling single parent from Eastbourne, Sussex.
The idea behind the Fairbridge Society and similar organisations was to take impoverished children from Britain's slums and use them to populate the colonies.
Few of the children were orphans - instead they left Britain with the consent of their parents, many of whom were too poor to afford food and clothing. The boys were trained as farm labourers and the girls as domestic servants.
Food was often riddled with weevils, girls were sexually abused by male staff members and boys were punished with severe beatings. They were dismissed by staff as "educationally retarded".
"We want an acknowledgment, both here and in the United Kingdom, that a lot of people were damaged by the experience and have lived with the consequences all their lives," Hill said.
Two-thirds of the women he interviewed for his book said they had been sexually abused at the farm school.
Stevens, who wants the organisation to set up an educational fund for the children of those who went through the system, said Fairbridge "wiped their hands and walked away".
"We should have a bloody royal commission into the buggers."
The charity, now known as the Fairbridge Foundation, continues to work with underprivileged children in Australia and Britain. But unlike Barnardo's, which has acknowledged that its child migrant scheme was "shameful" and "barbaric", Fairbridge has made no apology.
"We have conceded all along that the treatment of children was not perfect," said the chairman of Fairbridge in Australia, John Kennedy.
"But I see no moral obligation to set up an educational fund for Old Fairbridgians or their children. And what good would an apology do?"
