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All this will be yours some day. Christine Gill expected to inherit her 287-acre family farm worth millions. She was the only child of the farmers, and both her mother and father promised it to her. She helped out on the farm for decades, and after her father died, she cared for her mother.
When will-reading time came, the entire farm went not to Christine but to a charity that neither parent seemed to support. It fell to a judge in the High Court in Leeds to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Parents who disinherit their own children usually do so for a reason – a quarrel, or the children may not need the money. John and Joyce Gill disinherited their daughter for reasons that may never be known.
The Gills owned Potto Carr Farm, near Northallerton, Yorkshire. Their daughter Christine earned a Ph.D. and embarked on an academic career, lecturing at Leeds University. She then dropped full-time teaching to go part-time, effectively waving goodbye to academic promotion.
Christine changed direction to devote more time to helping her parents at their farm. She and her husband even moved house, buying a run-down farmhouse next to Potto Carr Farm. Christine figured that the two properties could be merged some day.
Meanwhile, Christine gave birth to a son when she was in her mid-forties. It was unlikely that she would have any more children, and in fact, she did not. But her child was born while both of her parents were alive. For her father in particular, a grandchild was important, and might have affected his attitude toward the future of his estate.
Two wills dictated the farm’s future. In 1993, when John was in his mid-70s and Joyce about 70, they made mirror wills: each left everything to the other and then, on the second death, to...well, that is the entire point.
In 1999, six years after signing his will John died, aged 82. Joyce survived him by seven years, also dying aged 82 in 2006. Her will directed that farm was to go to the RSPCA. To Christine, this was literally as well as figuratively unbelievable.
The hearing in the High Court in Leeds lasted for about a week in November 2008. The judge delivered his verdict a year later, in October 2009.
After considering evidence that included testimony by several medical experts on Joyce’s emotional state, the court decided that she had been unduly influenced, even coerced, by her husband when she made her will.
John was a ‘bully’ and a ‘domineering and ‘determined’ man with an ‘explosive character.
What about Joyce?
She was submissive, an obsessive compulsive, given to panic attacks, agoraphobia and extreme anxiety. Witnesses testified that, when Joyce Gill visited her daughter, she would wear rubber gloves and bring her own cup and saucer. When visitors arrived at the farm, she would hide in a car covered by a tarpaulin.
A psychiatrist - appearing on behalf of the RSPCA – argued that Joyce was merely ‘eccentric’. A witness applied the term ‘eccentric' to John.
Christine’s shrink maintained that Joyce suffered from bona fide psychiatric disease.
The judge decided that “Mrs Gill’s fear of the risk of Mr Gill losing his temper and of him withdrawing his crucial support for Mrs Gill, combined with her timid and shy personality, her traditional deferment to him and the severe anxiety consequent upon the agoraphobia from which she suffered, unduly influenced her to make the will she did.”
The will was declared invalid.
Why was Christine excluded, and why was the RSPCA included?
Neither John nor Joyce were members of the RSPCA, and Joyce disagreed with that organisation’s anti-hunting stance. According to one witness, when he wrote his will, John was desperate for grandchildren and said that he would leave his estate to charity if he did not get one. But when he did get a grandchild, he did not amend his will.
John took his moods and his motives to his grave.
Court costs came to £1.3m, roughly half the value of the entire estate. Of that total, Dr Gill accounted for roughly two-thirds (£900,000+), and the RSPCA at one-third (£400,000). The case consumed some 2,000 man hours (£650 per hour).
Pre-trial attempts at compromise came to naught. Christine had asked for £300,000 plus two fields. The RSPCA offered £650,000 plus costs but no land.
UPDATE: February 2010 - The judge decided that most of Dr Gill's costs will be paid by the RSPCA.
UPDATE: The RSPCA is appealing against the costs order, according to the Yorkshire Post, 4 March 2010.
Six of them were still living. The number, according to old Hiram’s will, should always have been twelve. …What would John Hiram have said in the matter, could he have predicted that some forty-five gentlemen would take on themselves to make a law altering the whole purport of his will, without in the least knowing at the moment of their making it, what it was that they were doing?
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857)
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