A TYRANNICAL headmistress milked £500,000 from school funds to spend on designer clothes and foreign holidays while forcing staff to clean their own classrooms with J-cloths.

Colleen McCabe, a former nun described by one former colleague as a female version of Saddam Hussein, faces a lengthy prison sentence after her reign of terror and extravagance was exposed at Southwark Crown Court.

For eight years the principal of St John Rigby Roman Catholic College in West Wickham, southeast London, spent the school’s money on 90 pairs of shoes, Gucci jewellery, expensive restaurants, trips on the Orient Express and holidays in the Mediterranean.

While pupils struggled to study in a barren library and the school stayed unheated all one winter, the headmistress filled her office with fresh flowers and skipped school to have her hair highlighted and false fingernails fitted on Friday afternoons. After a jury of four women and eight men unanimously found her guilty of 11 sample counts of theft and six of deception, the 50-year-old headmistress gasped and trembled in the dock.

Former colleagues, explaining how McCabe’s spending on the school Barclaycard went unchecked and unchallenged for so long, described her as “manipulative” and “power-mad”, a woman who concealed her corruption behind a “reign of terror”.

One former staff member said: “She was evil. It was almost anarchy there. She used people, bent them to her will. Those who resisted found their lives hell. I’m sure she could teach the KGB a thing or two.”

McCabe joined the 1,100- pupil comprehensive school as senior mistress in 1989 after 15 years as a nun in Birmingham. Within five years she had succumbed to the lure of the school’s Barclaycard after ascending to the position of headmistress in 1991.

Detective Sergeant Richard Ward, praised in court for his part in compiling an exhaustive dossier of McCabe’s spending, said that the principal first “turned her back on decency, her profession and those that relied on her for an education” in December 1994.

On a visit to a branch of Clarks Shoes, McCabe spent £98.98 of school money on footwear. It kick-started a display of greed that “would have made Imelda Marcos proud”, the court was told. In the next five years she bought 90 pairs of shoes at a cost of £7,278.30p.

As auditors at Bromley Borough Council belatedly discovered, the headmistress soon diversified. She “hammered” the school Barclaycard, spending £1,500 on tickets and champagne for Saturday Night Fever and other London musicals. She ran up an £836.25 bill dining at the Hilton restaurant, spent £377.30 in one trip to Tesco, and paid £112.91 for a pair of sunglasses, £500 for dental treatment and £423 on cosmetics and “dog treats”.

On one day alone, £10,000 left the school’s accounts. “Quite a haul for 24 hours,” Andrew Wilcken, for the prosecution, said. “This was theft on a grand scale.”

She appeared incapable of saying “No” to clothes that fitted her. Her collection of size 22-28 designs cost a fortune and would have filled several wardrobes. There was even a “string-bottomed bikini”, according to one of the receipts recovered by auditors.

The skimpy beachwear led to courtroom laughter at one stage. Andrew Pert, who was Bromley council’s chief auditor at the time, recalled that the headmistress had insisted that much of the clothing she bought was for pupils to make a good impression during work experience fortnights and at job interviews.

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