October 2001

Children’s home worker jailed

A pensioner has been jailed for eight years for carrying out a string of sex assaults on vulnerable young boys at a Birmingham care home where he worked.

Arthur Birch, 82, of Wisley Way, Quinton, Birmingham was found guilty of seven counts of indecent assault and three of a serious sexual nature at a trial at Birmingham Crown Court in June.

The former Desert Rat soldier, who served in North Africa during WWII, carried out the abuse at the Tennal Assessment Centre in Harborne, in the 1970s and 1980s.

The children’s home closed in the 1980s

His co-accused, 79-year-old Eugene Devoti, was jailed for seven years in September after he had been found guilty of five indecent assaults at the centre.

Sentencing Birch on Friday, Judge Laurence Marshall said the former nightwatchman had “grossly abused” his position and ruined the lives of his victims.

But he told the pensioner, who sat in the dock in a wheelchair, that he was receiving a reduced prison sentence because of his age and also because of his physical and mental health.

“The trial required young men whose lives had been shattered by what you and your co-defendant did to confide in public their most horrible memories,” said the judge.

“By your actions, you caused these boys to abscond where they could only subsist by reverting to crime.