A NEW Forest monk who abused two boys at a Roman Catholic school evaded justice for more than 20 years after the matter was hushed up, a court was told.

Richard White, 66, was warned about his behaviour at the public school after molesting one 12-year-old boy.

But instead of reporting him to police, the Benedictine abbot of the monastery attached to the school simply prevented him from teaching younger students.

White went on to indecently assault a second boy over the course of several months when the boy was aged 12 and 13 in 1988 and 1989.

White was jailed for five years after Taunton Crown Court heard that he lured the boy, who was interested in old books, to the monastery library, which was usually off-limits to students.

There, he sexually touched the boy and forced him to take part in sex acts, paying him 50p per time.

He was discovered after pupils from another school saw the boy had extra money to spend at the tuck shop and he admitted how he had come by it.

But again, when the matter was reported to the monastic school authorities and White, who lives in Hyde, near Fordingbridge, himself admitted to the principal what he had done, the police were not told.

The court heard the former British Army soldier, who served in the Royal Artillery, was repressing his homosexuality at the time.

He was dismissed from his teaching post at Downside School in Somerset and sent to monastic communities across the country over the next 20 years, keeping him away from children.

The court heard that after a Sunday newspaper ran an article about the scandal, the boy’s own family obtained a court injunction to keep him out of any further reports before removing him from the school, which currently charges more than £26,000 a year in fees.

Despite the publicity no complaint was ever made at the time to the police and White’s offending was only brought to light when police investigating another teacher at the school for child pornography offences found a file in school records detailing what he had done and contacted the second victim.

White admitted five charges of indecent assault and two of gross indecency with a child, relating to the second boy, at a previous hearing last November and asked for four offences against the first boy, who has never made a complaint to police, to be taken into account.

Judge Graham Hume Jones told White he was guilty of “grooming” and a huge “breach of trust”. White was placed on the sex offender’s register permanently and banned from working with children.