A FORMER primary school headteacher and church organist has appeared in court charged with child pornography offences.
Terry Ladlow, aged 73, is accused of downloading almost 9,000 indecent images of children between April 2005 and March 2010.
A headteacher for 20 years, he faces 24 separate charges of making and possessing indecent images of child sexual abuse.
Ladlow, who was headteacher of Great Doddington Primary School, Northants, between 1975 and 1980, appeared before magistrates in Scarborough, north Yorkshire, on Tuesday.
Ladlow is alleged to have possessed images in each of the five classification categories, including images of torture and rape.
He opted to reserve his pleas and not indicate how he would eventually be pleading during the hearing at Scarborough Magistrates’ Court, which lasted less than five minutes.
Ladlow, now of Hunmanby, near Filey, Yorks, spoke only to confirm his name, address, date of birth and indicate that he wished to reserve his pleas.
Magistrates decided to commit the case to York Crown Court and committal proceedings are scheduled to take place in May.
Ladlow was granted an extension to his unconditional bail.
He moved to Hunmanby in 2004 from Wetwang, near Driffield, Yorks, and became the church organist at St Oswald’s Church in Filey.
Ludlow began a career in primary school teaching at the age of 22 and spent 33 years in the profession in various parts of the country, including 20 years as a headteacher.
He was well-known for film-making work and created 10 educational documentaries which he sold to schools and the British Council and is known for his Yorkshire Heritage videos.
His recent projects included writing scores for silent movies and restoring historic films of Scarborough.
A local paper reported in June 1977 how Ladlow set up a school cinema at Great Doddington Primary School using his own projector.
