12. Transfer to Byrne House
As the summer of 1981 faded, Byrne House hardened from threat into destination. “The Big House.” “The Colditz of Care.”
Snot got his way. At the end of September, Ryan was sent there.
The lane to Byrne House was half a mile of tunnelled hedgerows. The Big House stayed hidden until the very end. Dead end. Castle doors. Staff houses scattered through the grounds. Greenhouses smashed into dens. A secure unit. A myth.
Ryan arrived cocky. He’d learn fast.
13. Byrne House: The Regime
Byrne House by day was busy: seventy staff, endless activity. By night it shifted shape. Boys summoned to staff flats. The infamous “flat list” read out before supper, same names again and again: Packette, Tipper and others. Ryan never once made the list. At the time he felt cheated. Later, he thanked his Higher Power.
Night staff worked at the far end of corridors. Anyone leaving Hogget’s flat had to pass them. They saw everything and said nothing.
Ryan became tight with Stan Wolli, an ex-cop with a pot belly, who traded tea and late-night phone calls for gossip. Stan wanted names, incidents, the flavour of each day. Ryan obliged when it suited him.
The gardens and sheds provided cover for solvent sniffing, alcohol, sex with local girls, scraps with local lads from the huge estate beyond. Violence, boredom, bravado, secrets. Always secrets.
14. Violence as Currency
Violence was daily routine. Punishments were sport.
The “corridor run” initiation: two lines of boys down a long corridor armed with forty-year-old leather boxing gloves, bamboo canes ripped from gardens, Doc Martens, table tennis bats, pillowcases full of shoes. New lads sprinted through and got battered. Some, like Ryan, were chased all the way, black and blue for days.
There was the “double Chester”: two staff wrenching your arms behind your back, bending you forward while another booted you in the chest.
Winter fun: being chucked into the frozen swimming pool, smashing the ice.
Dirty snowballs forced into mouths. Ice-cold showers. Toothpaste rubbed in eyes. Chairs kicked from under you. Fingers bent back, wet towels whipped, heads down toilets and flushed.
Psychological punishments: no home leave, no visits, no youth club, no rides out, no contact, total isolation from anything that resembled normal life.
Staff encouraged fights between boys. Murder Ball in the gym with a medicine ball, no rules, injuries ignored. A Bruce Lee film night could end with an all-out brawl on the stairs. Staff laughed or lost control, but the atmosphere of sanctioned violence remained.
Shower time brought too many male staff watching. Paul Wilson — Shaggy hair, wellies-- dead legs, nipple pinches, squirting water up boys’ backsides — was later convicted of sexual offences. Others followed similar routes.
Self-harm became common: glass from broken greenhouses used to carve skin, blood as language. Ryan carries scars on eyebrows and forearms as ghost-notes of those days.
15. Education Denied
“Education” at Byrne House was a joke.
Matt “Chooch” Matthews, head of education, cared more for trains and war stories than teaching. One art teacher with dark glasses and wandering hands. Rugby-playing staff who could jog but not teach. A “house skills” sewing class Ryan secretly enjoyed, and used later in life.
Most of Ryan’s school hours were spent in gardens or lifting weights in a self-declared gym. Stephen Morris lurked there too often, eyes on boys’ bodies. Later, he’d be convicted for abusing younger boys in Alyn House.
No one left Byrne House with academic qualifications. Not one. Ryan knew this long before the Whitehouse Inquiry that cost thirteen million pounds to say the same thing.
The reports about him from that time painted him as violent, immoral, beyond help. Page after page of condemnation. Had he died before 1992, that’s all his children would ever have known about him.
He would not let that stand.
16. Absconding & Top Dog
In a system where you either bullied or were bullied, Ryan adapted. Fast.
He remembered the boys who chased him after the corridor run and kept receipts. As he grew, he took them on one by one. By the time he was “top dog”, they regretted every extra shot they’d landed.
He became the most prolific absconder Byrne House had seen. Slipping out, hitching rides, disappearing. The threats of lost privileges meant nothing.
“Stick your home leave up your arse. Fuck your pocket money and fuck your youth club too.”
Staff knew not to rely on being able to beat him into line. Some instead leveraged his status: “We’ll get Tanner on you.” Ryan played along if there were cigarettes or chocolate in it. Give a slap, take a biscuit.
He was learning how power actually worked. Skewed lessons, but lessons all the same.
17. Ty Gwyn (II) & Other Houses
After Byrne House, Ryan bounced back to Ty Gwyn, now as an older, harder teenager. Ty Gwyn had become, in his words, “a teenager's unit of fun.
He treated it as a bedsit: come and go as he pleased, vanish for days, return when broke. He had a brief, fumbled sexual encounter with a student from Manchester. The Inquiry never traced her.
Eryl House, earlier, had been comparatively calm. If he’d been allowed to stay…
Instead, aged sixteen, Ryan was effectively evicted into a world he wasn’t prepared for.
18. Andrea Taylor & The First Cameras
Andrea Taylor first appeared in Ryan’s life at the Yellow House Project: tall, heavy smoker, some vague deputy role. Later she turned up at Byrne House on placement and took a shine to Ryan, offering advice he mostly ignored.
In 1990, out of the blue, she reappeared working with a Yorkshire Television producer. Ryan was in a joinery workshop called Spindles when Geoff Barber — dusty hippy boss with a pointed beard — yelled:
“Tanner, there’s a woman on the phone for you, she reckons she works for Yorkshire Television. Don’t forget us when your name is up in lights over Hollywood, will you?”
It was a call that changed Ryan’s life. He never forgot Geoff for passing that handset — or for still owing him three weeks’ wages.
Taylor told Ryan his childhood had been ruined by the homes, and there was a possibility of compensation.
“You and the others are entitled,” she said. “They failed you badly and ruined any chances you had of a decent education.”
Ryan thought of his non-education; gardening and weightlifting instead of school work. The idea of getting something back hooked him.
He met the film crew in a pub (free beer, maybe food). They toured Byrne House, Yellow House, other units. Ryan took to the camera; the camera took to him. Taylor whispered prompts, fed narratives, all the while nursing her own buried agenda — revenge on the Snots and the managers who’d sidelined her.
The documentary made Ryan a “go-to” contact for hacks. TV, radio, newspapers started with him or Taylor. He had addresses, phone numbers, stories, and a willingness to help.
The police and politicians noticed. So did certain newspapers.
Taylor would later front-page as “Our Andrea Exposes Monsters,” recasting Snot as a sexual abuser rather than the violent bully he was. Ryan didn’t buy it. He knew the difference. Taylor won her war. Ryan was left managing the fallout of being half-truth’s poster boy.