A PENSIONER from North Yorkshire has been jailed for downloading hardcore child porn from the Internet.

Frank Hopkinson, 66, has already served a jail sentence for sexually and physically abusing a 14-year-old boy after police found his home-made videos of the sex sessions, York Crown Court heard.

Hopkinson, a former executive at Ampleforth College, was today starting a 12-month jail term after a police raid this year uncovered more than 800 sex pictures on his computer at his retirement home in Scarborough, including 550 of boys.

"Approximately 80 to 90 per cent were indecent," said Edward Legard, prosecuting. They depicted sexual acts between boys and between boys and adults.

Judge Paul Hoffman said Hopkinson had downloaded child porn "wholesale" and had not learned a lesson from his previous sentence.

And he rejected Hopkinson's claim the sex pictures had arrived as "unsolicited" junk mail. As police could not supervise the Internet it was up to the courts to deter people like Hopkinson, who by their interest in child porn supported "widespread abuse of children".

Hopkinson, who was chief accountant at Ampleforth College until taking early retirement in 1989, pleaded guilty to six child porn offences committed this year. He was at the college for 29 years.

In addition to jailing him for a year, Judge Hoffman put him on the sex offenders register for ten years. In March 1990, Hopkinson was jailed for two-and-a-half years for a serious sex offence and gross indecency on a 14-year-old boy connected to two Middlesbrough men, and for filming his sex sessions. Teesside Crown Court heard the offences occurred at his then home in Ampleforth and at local beauty spots, and that he filmed himself beating the boy with a belt.

For Hopkinson, Taryn Turner said he only accepted that about 150 were child porn. He had not passed the pictures on to anyone else and had not intended to profit from them.

Hopkinson claimed he was still in friendly contact with the 14-year-old boy involved in the earlier offences.

He had contacts with two Internet organisations for gay men and wanted to live with people of a similar disposition and leave the country.