A predatory public school choirmaster who believed he was ‘untouchable’ by the law after getting away with child sex offences against multiple victims for over 40 years was jailed for 12 years today.
David Pickthall, 66, whose music has appeared in a Wallace and Gromit film, carried out most of his offences at £52,000-a-year Brentwood School in Essex, which he attended as a boy and went on to teach there.
His sick crimes continued until just weeks before he was arrested in October 2021 and detectives warned he would have continued if one brave victim had not come forward, triggering his downfall.
They believe Pickthall, who has performed with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and at the Royal Albert Hall and who received an MBE in 2015 for services to education and charity, may have many more victims who have yet to come forward.
The shamed teacher admitted 29 charges against 19 people between 1980 and 2021, including 16 indecent assaults, ten counts of voyeurism and three offences of making an indecent image of a child.
Sentencing the defendant at Chelmsford Crown Court, Judge Mary Loram KC told him: ‘You are without a shadow of a doubt a predatory and manipulative paedophile who has adapted his offending over the years.
Pickthall was also working as a choirmaster in the London Borough of Havering during the period he was offending.
An online biography, that has been deleted since his arrest, details his career highlights including providing the ‘musical voice’ of villainous penguin Feathers McGraw in 1993’s Academy Award-winning animation Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers.
He also worked on post-apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later and as musical arranger on Channel 4’s Paul O’Grady Show.
A Brentwood School spokesman said: ‘Pickthall’s crimes are a shocking betrayal of the trust that children and parents place in the teaching profession.’
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