Child abuse inquiry hears two boys were beaten to death at Smyllum Park orphanage in Lanark

Two of the witnesses gave evidence in person, their identities protected by pseudonyms, while statements were read out from two more former residents – Jim Kane and Frank Docherty, who both died last year, before they could attend in person.

READ MORE: Abusers could yet face justice as Crown Office re-examines cases

The inquiry heard a catalogue of horrific claims about the treatment of children sent into the care of the charity, including:

* “Routine” beatings, and children at Smyllum Park being force-fed by nuns, even as they were vomiting

* Bed-wetters being forced to stand with their soiled linen around their necks before being made to take a cold bath

* A nun at another home run by the order in Newcastle pinning a boy against a wall and holding a bread knife to his throat

* Another nun at the same home picking up an infant, dropping him, and kicking him before he hit the floor.

“David”, who was born in 1957 and stayed at Smyllum Park from 1959 until he was seven, told the inquiry he had seen a nun punch and kick his friend Sammy Carr as he lay on the ground, after the six-year-old had accidentally burned David’s hand while playing with a match.

David said the blows to Sammy’s head and upper body were so brutal he had jumped on top of his friend pleading with the nun – who under the inquiry’s rules cannot be named – to stop.

READ MORE: Abusers could yet face justice as Crown Office re-examines cases

He broke down yesterday as the inquiry heard that the boy had died 10 days later after being admitted to hospital.

David said that beatings at the orphanage were routine.

He told how he was sexually abused by a nun who rubbed his penis with her thumb while talking to him about bedwetting.

He also described abuse by a lay female member of staff who had asked him to help change beds.

In August 1965 when he was aged around seven he had been moved to St Vincent in Newcastle.

Colin MacAulay QC, counsel to the inquiry, said: “In your statement you go on to say it was another place run by psychopaths.”

Describing an incident when boys were queuing for washrooms, David said a nun had taken offence to something he had said.

“She pinned me up against the wall with her forearm with a bread knife to my throat," he said.

"I genuinely thought I was going to die.”

READ MORE: Abusers could yet face justice as Crown Office re-examines cases

Another witness, identified as “Fergie”, spoke about girls being beaten with hairbrushes if their hair was tangled, and being force fed with porridge.

“You would be held by your neck or chin and porridge forced into your mouth,” she said.

“This happened to me. Sometimes you were being sick and still being forced to eat”.

She also described nuns using crosses as weapons to hit children and regular verbal abuse.

“You were called devil’s child, devil’s spawn, immoral, you would be nothing in life, you were the scum of the earth, in their books.

"Not even your parents wanted you,” she said.

In a sworn statement made prior to his death in 2016, former Smyllum resident Jim Kane told the inquiry that deaths of children at the orphanage had gone unrecorded, including that of a 13-year-old boy who had died of a brain haemorrhage, after being struck with a golf club by a member of staff.

In an opening statement, John Scott QC, senior counsel for In Care Abuse Survivors (Incas), said the name Smyllum will be “forever associated with suffering”.

He said: “Either people knew because they were involved or they knew and did nothing to stop it or or noone cared enough about the children at Smyllum to take an enough interest to find out what life was like in this showpiece home.

“ The Smyllum Way did not involve only one or two abusers, it involved many abusers and took place over decades.”