In the face of threats, a trainee priest saved his community

Hello Post readers — it’s Jack here. I first wrote about the Eldonian Village in January 2023, and The Post has been reporting on it ever since. In the last three years it has become one of the biggest and furthest-reaching stories we’ve covered. 

In today’s piece, for the first time ever, we tell the story through the eyes of the whistleblower: a trainee priest called Rhys Jones. 

Right from the start, the majority of our Eldonian coverage has been published free of charge. It’s a saga which focuses on one of Liverpool’s poorest communities, a community which hasn't always had a voice. For that reason we’ve chosen to try and get this reporting in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

But that doesn’t mean it’s been free to produce. The Post relies entirely on the support of its paying members. It’s only because of them we’re able to publish pieces like this for free. It’s only because of them we exist at all. If you’d like to join them, and support The Post, here’s the button. 

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On a cold day in early March 2023, Rhys Jones began his regular routine. He went to college during the day, part of his traineeship to become a priest, then headed to Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral for Mass. He carried his leather hold-all, as he always did. He headed down into the sacristy upon arrival, as he always did. 

But rather than getting changed into his vestments (as he always did) he walked straight through the sacristy and out the downstairs exit into the car park. A 4x4 was waiting for him. “I had no idea where I was going, but I knew I wasn’t going back to Aigburth,” he tells me.

The window view turned from monotonous stretches of motorway to something more bucolic. Ah, Jones figured, we must be in the middle of nowhere. When the car stopped, his suspicions were confirmed. There was a petrol station garage, a garden centre and a small parish church. There was also a Toby Carvery — if you were willing to walk for 40 minutes. He never made the walk. His head wasn’t in the right place for a carvery.

The church’s priest, a man who’d seen plenty in his eight decades alive, was nonetheless baffled to hear that the young trainee would need to use his quiet parish as a sylvan-safe-house for the next few months, as per the advice of Merseyside Police. And that no one could know he was there. 

The priest had a dog, called Job. Over the next two months Jones and Job formed an alliance of convenience. Job needed to be walked. Jones needed some, any, way to kill the empty hours. If you know your Old Testament, you’ll know that God puts Job through the ringer. Rhys Jones did the same. With nothing to do for two months, they just walked — miles of walking through the tedium of Lancastrian landscapes, or to the petrol station garage at midnight for a packet of Haribo through the little hatch. 

I feel slightly guilty, sitting on a grey sofa in the upstairs bedroom at the Mount Camel Hill Church in Toxteth where Jones now resides, surrounded by fat theological tomes and even fatter stacks of legal filings relating to the Eldonian Village, listening to him recount the Olympian feats of countryside traipsing the poor Terrier was subjected to. I feel slightly guilty, because in a roundabout sort of way it was all my fault. 

If the Eldonian Village now represents four years of my life, it’s far bigger than that still for Rhys Jones. The story, as told over numerous Post articles – as in the BBC, Guardian and Times – was of a small, mostly-elderly north Liverpool community who’d found themselves targeted with violence and intimidation after they’d discovered that several plots of land they believed to have owned communally had been flogged to companies registered in Caribbean tax havens, often for as little as £1. What hasn’t been told, until now, is Rhys’s role at the centre of the story from the very start.

I first met him with his grandad Brian in the McDonald’s at the foot of Church Street in the summer of 2022; post-the first threats against him, pre-the time an anonymous caller phoned him to inform him someone attending his church service that night was going to be “fucking shot”. Before long, I was speaking to him so often on the phone, so often in furtive tones, that my then-girlfriend suspected infidelity. I told her it was complicated.

Several months before that meeting, Rhys was asked by Brian to open the Our Lady of Reconciliation Church on Eldon Street for a “residents meeting”. He didn’t know what it was about, nor did he really care. He had enough on his mind as it was, having recently written to Archbishop Malcolm McMahon to express his interest in becoming a priest, with the process of applying for seminary already proving laborious. He did it because his grandad asked him to do it, and he couldn’t say no to his grandad. 

At the meeting, several residents spoke about feeling intimidated in their community — the Eldonian Village in north Liverpool. “I started to see that the people who I’d grown up with, and gone to church with, were terrified,” he recalls. Half the people at the meeting weren’t willing to tell him anything. “They were saying, ‘we can’t say too much because they’ll come round to our house’. And these were people who’d lived here since the late ‘80s — they were just normal people. And it was like: ‘what exactly is going on here?’”.

The housing association that ran the village had appointed a tranche of unfamiliar new board members, including a new chair called Lee Gwynn, a friend of the son of the Eldonian Village’s founder. The group in the church decided to set up a residents' group in response and needed a secretary, but no one was keen. So Rhys’s grandad turned to him and asked him if he’d be willing to step in. And he couldn’t say no to his grandad. 

And that was it. In a whispered pact made at the back of the church his grandad would bring him to as a boy, before he lost his faith and re-found it, Rhys Jones unwittingly signed away the next half-decade, welcoming into his quiet life a rogue’s gallery of astonishing span: Anthony McGann Jr; Brookside star-turned-fraudster Philip Foster; bare knuckle boxing champion Luke Atkin; a washed up celebrity debt collector; MMA star Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson; a Lord; Boris Becker’s lawyer; King Charles’s erstwhile lawyers; the Rude strip club dynasty; me. 

But before they (or we) all showed up, Jones walked out of the meeting that night with a nice new job title (Secretary of the Eldonian Village Resident’s Association) and a list of unanswered questions so long it would have unfurled like a medieval scroll if you’d committed it to paper. When he went on Companies House that night and discovered that the village wasn’t simply operated by one housing association and charity, as everyone assumed, but rather an interconnected network of roughly a dozen companies, he found himself in the possession of an Alexandrian library of scrolls.

The story from here is a combination of the ridiculously dramatic and the ridiculously tedious. I’ve written about land deals being “back-to-backed” and explained the “blind trust issue” enough times in these pages (here, here, here, etc). The key point is that it was only Rhys’s dogged (and autodidactic — he had no experience of any of this) unravelling of the story via Companies House, the Land Registry and so on that it turned into a BBC documentary, a Sunday Times long-read (“The Utopian English Village that’s now owned offshore”), a Guardian long-read, our own reporting over the years, a court case and a sadly as-yet unmaterialised TV drama starring the actor David Morrissey. If the drama ever comes to pass I hope I pop up as a background character, ideally depicted by Timothee Chalamet.

Rhys remembers first looking up the village’s school land, a plot gifted by Father Peter Sibert and the archdiocese, on the Land Registry, and seeing this: “Last sold in 2018. Price: £1. Company owner: Banaras Holding in Nevis”. This opened a few questions, among them: “Where’s Nevis?”. He looked up the company address on Google Maps and saw a mud hut in the Caribbean. He thought he had the wrong Nevis.

I caught wind of this story in the summer of 2022, reached out to Jones and promised him The Post would cover it. He had another journalist already working on the story, Matt O’Donoghue for the BBC, and felt it was the only way to wake up the regulatory bodies who were ignoring his constant emails. As I got involved, many of the residents I approached assumed I had some kind of death wish, or at least was just a daft southern middle-class twenty-something with no lived understanding of how dangerous the real world can be. The second charge obviously holds. My only plea for mitigation is that I remain alive.

Little by little Rhys fed me his findings until the full story seemed to come into view. It was an extremely complicated story, but also a simple one: everything the village once owned had been flogged offshore. If you were to stand in the car park facing the Eldonian Village Hall and perform a clockwise pirouette, here’s what you’d see: Village Hall (sold); nursery (sold), care home (sold), bowling green (sold).

In October 2022, shortly after we sent our first Right of Reply emails, Jones’ phone rang. He was downstairs at the parish in Aigburth preparing for Mass. A voice on the other end of the phone calmly informed him that someone attending Mass that night was going to “be shot”. That someone, he presumed, was him.

Jones never told me that at the time — presumably my lackadaisical inability to register danger was best left unsullied, which I appreciate. He played me the audio for the first time when we met up last weekend at his new church in Toxteth. Mass was cancelled that night — police cars circled the church. 

I was aware that threats and intimidation were par for the course for anyone who gets involved with the Eldonians. I was aware because everyone kept saying it constantly. The previous Christmas, Jones had been whiling an afternoon away in The Atheneum — a private member’s club in the city centre — when he received a call from an elderly parishioner who lived near the Old Lady of Reconciliation Church on Eldon Street. “The church is on fire,” she told him bluntly. Appreciating the heads up, Jones hopped on a Voi scooter. When he arrived he found the nativity scene, set up by him and his grandad, had been the subject of an arson attack. Black smoke was rising from the manger (the symbolism of real life can be painfully on the nose). 

In the coming weeks, months and years, residents in the area woke to find targeted graffiti on their walls (“Maureen’s a grass”), a journalist covering the story was treated to threatening home visits from a celebrity debt collector, and I received a call in the middle of the night informing me one of the village’s residents had had his door crowbarred in.  

And it just kept escalating. Shortly after the publication of our first article, Jones began to realise the same car was parked outside the college where he was studying every day. Then the 2am phone calls began — with heavy breathing on the end of the line before the caller hung up. 

It was after a few months of this harassment that the police made the recommendation that Jones leave Liverpool — arrangements were made for him to be whisked off to the rural parish (he can’t tell me the exact name of the church lest he one day have to return). He recalls worrying at the time that his college lecturer would think his excuse for not turning up to class seemed a bit far-fetched. 

After two months in the wilderness, though, he eventually got so bored that he decided his own life was worth the risk (the countryside will do this), said goodbye to the dog and the priest (“one of kindest men you’d ever meet”), and returned to Liverpool. After another year of emails — Jones, as I well know, is one of the most persistent communicators this country has ever produced —  the Charity Commission finally opened a statutory inquiry into the Eldonian Village’s primary charity.

After that, the charity’s trustees were removed and a new board appointed, including Jones as Secretary to the Board of Trustees. On the day it was voted in, the scene at the church was more ‘Anfield on derby day’ than ‘small charity with £42 in the bank elects a treasurer’. A long line of police cars positioned themselves outside, as did the son of the village’s founder, Anthony McGann Jr, who sat in a battered Audi with his friend, celebrity debt collector Shaun Smith. Since then McGann Jr has tried and failed to have the charity wound up by claiming it owes him the money he spent on expensive lawyers trying to squash The Post’s reporting in 2022. The charity lives on, under new leadership, and recently hosted a football camp for 300 children from the area. For the first time in a long time, its original stated aim — to serve the residents of the village from the “cradle to the grave” — is being acted on.

Another first: I spoke to McGann Jr for the first time last November. He accused me of going after him with “fucking big sledgehammer” and told me his father, a pious man, had been “shit on by the whole world” after his death. He was certainly right to identify the centrality of faith to this story. Rhys sees his own role as Catholicism practised, not preached. And the church, Our Lady on Eldon Street, is the cynosure around which this patch of Liverpool clusters. So let’s finish the story where it started, at Mass on Eldon Street. 

Leaving the Camel Hill church in Toxeth, Rhys tells me the building now covers an area that used to have four churches. And 20 priests have become one plus a trainee: Father Silviu Climent, a dry-humoured Romanian, and Rhys. On his way out Rhys tells a parishioner he won’t be joining Mass with her tonight, he’s off to his old haunt. The parishioner looks like he’s announced he’s having an affair. “They can be very territorial,” he tells me.

At Eldon Street, he slips into his vestments and I sit with Brian near the back. Brian is almost 70, and was brought to Eldon Street when he was a child by his grandparents. He was “missing in action” for a period of his life (Rhys’ phrase), but when Rhys’ older brother was born Brian wanted him to be baptised, so he struck a wager with Father Sibert: he’d do the baptism on the basis Brian attended church a few times. That few times turned into every time. Sibert’s sister is one of the trustees for the new-look charity. 

Then, Rhys was born. Every Saturday night Brian would take him to Eldon Street; the circle of life. Like Brian’s, his faith wavered as a teen, but by the time he joined the infamous resident’s meeting he was applying to become a priest himself, and the faces surrounding him were the ones he’d grown up with. “The people who were in the hall that night highlighting fears, highlighting concerns…. Those were the same people who I sat next to on a Saturday night who ran the kid’s club during Mass, who used to slip you a fiver when you were five years of age and tell you not to tell your grandad.”

After Mass, and with something approaching sentimentality, I walk with Rhys onto the Eldonian Village and he reflects on the last five years, in their full surreality. The legal threats, the death threats, the months wandering the wilderness, the extremely amusing discovery that Anthony McGann Jr had explained to his lawyers that the allegations against his name were ridiculous because he “exchanges Christmas cards” with Liverpool’s ex-police chief Andy Cooke, the whole thing. “You just keep going,” he says. “That’s really all there is to it.”

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