A JURY on Monday failed to reach verdicts in the case of a former headmaster accused of sexually molesting pupils at their £13,500 a year private school.

Colin Wheeler, aged 42, denied 22 counts of indecent assault on 11 boys between 1979 and 1998.

He was cleared of two other similar counts on the directions of Judge Marten Coates, sitting at Worcester Crown Court.

The judge discharged the jury of six men and six women after five hours and 50 minutes of deliberations.

He granted Wheeler, of Lench View, Pinvin, Worcestershire, bail and ordered a retrial at a date to be fixed.

It was alleged during an 11-day trial that bachelor Wheeler favoured a rugby-playing elite at Bredon School, Bushley, Worcs, who were given privileges but assaulted at his home in the school grounds.

As rugby coach, he was said to have groped boys as he measured their naked bodies under the guise of a training strategy.

And it is claimed he kissed and stroked his favourites and grabbed their private parts when they gave poor performances on the pitch.

Wheeler, at the school 19 years until his arrest and resignation in 1998, kept a stock of photographs of boys. Fifteen of them were 15 naked and one was pictured with his pubic hair shaved after a party.

An accomplished player himself, Wheeler was picked for Cumbria and North West Counties and was a past chairman of Cheltenham Saracens rugby club.

He went on to become the England rugby team manager for under-16 schoolboys. He was also a local parish councillor.

His aim was to develop the sport at 200-pupil Bredon so that it could compete with larger schools at the top level.

Wheeler admitted in court he measured one boy's pubic hair to reassure the late developer.

He also confessed to photographing a 19-year-old's shaved pubic hair because the teenager wanted a memento.

But he denied any deliberate touching and insisted he had no sexual interest in boys.

At the school he taught maths but his approach to rugby was different. "I didn't classify myself as a school master on the rugby field," he said. He used ripe language and was abrasive.

His barrister Mark Evans QC said high jinks and nudity were often associated with rugby.

But he claimed the measuring-up procedure was an accepted practice to determine the physical progresss of adolescents.