We’re about 40 minutes into the interview and Mark Robson is laughing at himself. He does this a lot. There’s a pretty harrowing story to tell here but he’s all wry asides and knowing self-owns to cut through the gloom. A squeeze of lemon to lift a heavy dish.
The scene for this one is the 2007 Rugby World Cup and Robson is standing in the pouring rain outside the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard in Saint-Étienne. He and Donal Lenihan are there to do the commentary on Italy v Scotland for Setanta Sports, except there’s just one problem. He can’t get in.
Well, in fact, there are an infinite number of problems in Mark Robson’s life in September 2007, but the one in front of his face right at that moment is an officious chap on the gate who says his accreditation is wrong. “He was built like Oddjob, from the Bond movies,” Robson says now. “All he was missing was the bowler hat.”
The poor man couldn’t have known. Nobody did. Nobody had a clue that Robson had spent the previous two years in virtual silence, fighting depression and ME. Or that he had twice attempted to end his life. Or that on a fundamental level, getting into that stadium was about so much more than just a working gig.
READ MORE
Most of all, the guy couldn’t have known that when Mark Robson was 11 years old, he was sexually abused by Lindsay Brown, the notorious paedophile teacher at Bangor Grammar school in Co Down. The scars are lifelong and very real and manifest themselves in different ways. Sometimes it’s a self-deprecating joke. Sometimes it’s a bout of feral rage.
“I just lost it,” he says, getting up out of his chair to act it out for comic effect. “I ripped my shirt off in the rain. Donal was standing behind me and I was screaming, ‘I’m gonna f***ing kill you! Come on, you bastard!’. This is standing in the accreditation queue outside a World Cup match! Me, naked from the waist up, trying to fight this massive, muscular, Oddjobish guy.
“And poor Donal is pulling me back going, ‘I need to talk to you about your f***ing temper!’ Donal became a kind of surrogate dad to me during that World Cup. I was finding it all completely terrifying. When I was talking into the mic, I was fine. But it was all acting. I had a mask on the whole time.”
♦◊♦◊♦◊♦◊♦◊♦◊♦
You know Mark Robson, whether you know you know him or not. He’s 65 now and has been commentating, presenting and reporting on every sport under the sun for the best part of 40 years. He started on BBC Ulster and has been through UTV, Sky, Eurosport, Setanta and the rest. He does mostly rugby these days, calling the United Rugby Championship on Premier Sport and doing the world feed for the Six Nations.
He has that distinctive delivery, filtered through a northern twang so strong you could launch rockets from it. Loads of off-kilter phrases reflecting advice Bill McLaren gave him once: “Commentating is about finding different ways to say the same thing.” Risteard Cooper called him “He of the sibilant S” in these pages during the 2007 World Cup and folded him into the Après Match line-up too, much to Robson’s glee.
But you never know what people are going through. Robson was getting ready to go to the Commonwealth Games in 1990 in Auckland when he got a phone call from the RUC vice squad, as it was known then. The policewoman on the end of the line hit him with a phrase he has never forgotten: “We hear you were one of Lindsay Brown’s boys.”
Brown was the vice-principal of Bangor Grammar who doubled as one of the UK’s most notorious paedophiles. In time, he would serve two sentences for abusing boys at the school – seven years in 1998 for abuses between 1968 and 1982 and a further eight months for similar offences in 2021. He died in 2023.
Robson was 29 when the vice squad rang him up. Before then, he had held onto two certainties about Brown’s abuse. One, that he was the only one. And two, that nobody else knew. Both of them exploded in the space of a single phonecall and Robson has spent the rest of his life picking the shrapnel out of his skin.
“My first thought was, ‘How do they know? I haven’t told anybody; how do they know that I’m one of his boys?’
“What I didn’t realise was that in school, I was known as his pet, as the teacher’s pet. So everybody knew but it was never said to me.
“One of the other people who’d been abused by him had said to the police, ‘Oh, Mark Robson was one of his boys’. There was over 100 in the end. He died in his 80s. He got a seven-year sentence, only served three. Took Bible classes in prison, converting people. I’m sure he’s been saved and he’s all very happy now.
“But the thing about it was, I had kept it so locked tight away. I had been filling my time and avoiding the white noise and being a workaholic and doing all those things. That phonecall was like the release of a valve. It was like a tsunami then.”
He went to New Zealand for those Commonwealth Games and drank himself silly. He came back and lived out his life, always restless, frequently more angry than he was comfortable with. That phonecall was 36 years ago. The abuse itself was another 18 years before that. Yet sitting here on a Wednesday morning in Dublin, Robson is still working through it all.
“I’ve just actually thought of this,” he says at one point. “It’s a bit like Chernobyl. You think the worst bit is the reactor blowing up? Maybe not. It’s the next 50, 60, 100 years. Because once I had been abused, I knew it had been a horrendous thing and I didn’t want it to happen to anybody else.
“So I made a decision when I was 15 that I would never get married and I would never have children. Because I knew if I had children, my paranoia around their existence would have tortured me. So I would have been saying, ‘What happened at rugby practice? Why was the teacher in the changing rooms?’ I have a very clear memory of making that decision then.
“I had a number of girlfriends – we’re still close friends – and I said to them at the start of the relationship if I could see it becoming serious, ‘By the way, I’m not getting married and I’m not having children’. A couple of them, god love them, thought they could talk me out of it.
“There was one girl especially, who I went out with in my 20s. I said, ‘When you meet me in 40 years time, I will never have married and I will never have had children’. And I meet her down on the beach now when I do my sea swimming. And she’s like, in a kind of knowing way, ‘Well, at least you were honest’. So that’s the kind of hangover that sexual abuse creates. And that’s only one way it creates those hangovers.”
There were other, more visceral ways too. Those two years of depression and chronic fatigue before the 2007 World Cup were the worst of it. Robson had been living in London and working for Eurosport when it all came crashing down. His work had suffered and though he feels it could have been handled with a little more tenderness by management, just like that he was unemployed.
“All of a sudden, I have no job, I’ve got a house in London and I have no future. What the f*** am I going to do? That was really the start of a total unravelling. I sold the house. That was hard. Doing anything at that stage was almost impossible.
“My dad used to fly over to help me because he knew I couldn’t function. That was love from a father. He was an Ulster Protestant father who couldn’t do the emotional side of things. But if I said, ‘Dad, I need you to fly to London to sort this out for me’, he was on the next flight. And he would fly back with me because I didn’t like being around people.”
He retreated into himself. He disappeared off television. He moved back in with his parents and locked himself away – physically, emotionally, even vocally. Other than asking for the occasional cup of tea, he says he went more or less mute for two full years. For a man who has spent his whole life making a living from his way with words, it was as if he was erasing himself.
“I became completely agoraphobic and antisocial. Couldn’t talk. I didn’t want to talk. I could talk, but I just didn’t want to talk. I just didn’t see the point of anything anymore. But the problem with that was that because I wasn’t speaking and I wasn’t active, I was now alone with the white noise.
“I had two suicide attempts in that time. I didn’t want to be alive at all. There’s a misconception about suicidal people that it’s selfish or that they do it to hurt others. I don’t think it is that. Certainly for me and a lot of other people I’ve spoken to, it’s simply because you’ll do anything to stop the white noise.
“It’s like being in an oily abyss that you can’t climb out of. It’s the deepest abyss. It’s like a black hole but there’s oil on the sides so you can’t get purchase to get out of it. So what’s the point? I’m not going to sit in a pool of oil in darkness for the rest of my life.”
How did he make it out? Slowly. Painfully. Lots of therapy. Lots of rooting through the bins of his own denials. Somehow, over the years, he’d convinced himself that maybe what had happened to him wasn’t all that bad. Of all the evils Brown had visited upon him, that one might have been the hardest to fathom and to work through.
“He was very nice to me and he got me presents and he looked after me. He was hitting some of the other boys that he didn’t have any attraction to but he wasn’t hitting me. He was being nice to me.
“So I think that was the most difficult thing to deal with – that even though I knew it was horribly wrong, part of me had enjoyed the experience. When you’re older, you realise that’s part of his grooming technique. But at the time, you’re 11, 12, 13 years old, you don’t know what a grooming technique is and you kind of normalise it in a strange way. I used to look forward to being alone with him because then I would get that attention.”
♦◊♦◊♦◊♦◊♦◊♦◊♦
Over time, Robson built himself back up. It wasn’t straightforward and it was far from linear but he cobbled himself together as he went. Through sheer force of character, he forged a broadcasting career for himself, following sport around the globe and bringing the thing he loves into people’s living rooms. He freely admits he stumbled plenty along the way.
“I refuse to let anybody else control me. And once my antennae sense another person taking advantage – it might only be a security guard saying, ‘You’re not getting in here with that pass…’ – I can feel myself burning inside. I can explode very, very quickly.
“It’s because of the control that Lindsay Brown had over me and my life. Once I got out of it, I said to myself, ‘Nobody is ever doing that to me again’. So I got myself in terrible trouble. I’ve walked out of three jobs because of me losing my temper with management.
“I left UTV, I left Sky, I left Eurosport – well, it was partly my fault. I’ve been so self-destructive in my career. Sometimes I wonder how I’m still broadcasting because I’ve blown so many great opportunities.”
Lindsay Brown lived to be 83 years old and only died in 2023. When Robson heard the news, his initial reaction was anger. For years, he had harboured notions of what he’d do if he ever got to meet him face to face.
“When he died, I went through a terrible time really because I wanted to kill him. And I did try to find him. I kind of located him to a safe house in Scotland. He lived in safe houses in Scotland and France. When he died, he was under investigation for further offences. He was relentless.
“But once I got over the initial fact that he was dead and the deep trough of thinking, ‘Well, I’m never going to get him now’, after that passed through my system, there was a great release. It was like, ‘He’s gone. He’s gone.’ I’m going to use this as a foundation stone for the future.”
There is a freedom to him now. Last summer, he spoke publicly about the whole thing for the first time on a podcast for BBC Northern Ireland. Afterwards, a slew of other victims got in touch, thanking him for his courage. There’s a documentary in the works with him and some of the others taking part. This weekend, he’s doing Connacht v Glasgow in Galway. He is recovering.
“I would say the last three or four years have been great. It’s only in the last few years that it’s washed through my system and I’ve been able to stand back and look at myself and go, ‘Gosh, this must be how other people live’.
“Imagine having this your whole life, feeling quite content with life and enjoying things and enjoying people and enjoying being outside and doing all those things. Because in the past, I didn’t really enjoy anything very much. I was always hiding behind that veil, that destructive veil caused by the abuse. So it was like being behind a set of black curtains and peeking out.
“I was doing that all the time. Most people who’ve worked with me over those decades, they’ll see me as the cheeky, funny, sarky, irascible, sometimes very angry, ‘sibilant’ Ulsterman. But that was only 30 per cent of the truth.
“I used to wake up in the morning and look at the clock and dread the fact that it was only 9 o’clock and it was now 13 hours before I could get back to bed. Now if I wake at half-six, I’m like, ‘Great, I have a longer day. I’ll get up and go for a run’.
“So that’s the message I would send out to anybody. You just don’t give up. You stick at it. Hopefully someday things will turn for you. And it’s about finding that little nugget that works for you, to help you begin the climb up the oily sides of that wall.”
♦ For support: Samaritans on freephone 116 123 or text HELLO to 50808 or email jo@samaritans.ie.
Pieta Freephone: 1800 247 247 or text HELP to 51444.
Or visit www.yourmentalhealth.ie
