A MAN has been sent to prison for five years for the repeated sexual abuse of a Kendal schoolboy.

Peter Barber, 61, was found guilty in January of abusing the boy ‘hundreds of times’ over a five-year period in the 1980s.

The sentence was imposed at Carlisle Crown Court on Monday after the judge had received probation reports.

Barber, who committed the offences when he was living with his wife Hazel in Kendal, was also ordered to register as a sex offender and banned from working with children – both indefinitely.

Barrister Alison Whalley accepted there was not much she could say to defend Barber because he still denied doing anything wrong.

Barber had been convicted of 12 charges of indecent assault and five of inciting the boy to commit gross indecency.

The ‘specimen offences’ were just a sample of the ways he abused the boy, the court heard.

During the trial the court heard that Barber’s victim had told no-one what he was going through.

The court heard how the victim could not recall preci-sely how the abuse started, but he remembered that it had very quickly ‘developed into a pattern’, in which he was given money – anything from £2 to £5 a time – to ‘secure his participation in the various sexual acts’.

Prosecuting, Tim Storrie said: “It happened on hundreds of occasions.

“One measure of how often the boy was used in this way is that by the time it finished he had amassed as much as £500.”

It was only last year that the victim told the police.

The court heard that when he was arrested Barber, who has recently been living in Middleton Road, Morecambe, insisted that nothing inappropriate had happened.