Eastbourne subpostmaster Bob Crane went to his grave without ever knowing justice. His wife Kathy Crane was convicted and scorned. A grandchildren’s legacy of £20,000 was swallowed up by the Post Office and a court fine. The family knew nothing about Alan Bates until 2020’s Panorama and did not know who to ask, until a chance encounter in May last year. Here daughter Katy Crane tells her family’s story for the first time to Rosie Brocklehurst.

Katy Crane was 15 when she returned home from St Richard’s Catholic School in Bexhill-on-Sea in East Sussex in 2008, to find her mother Kathy crying and Post Office investigators pulling out drawers and causing havoc in her family home. They were looking for thousands of pounds they claimed was missing from the post office her parents had run in Ocklynge Road, Eastbourne for eight years.

“I remember these people downstairs opening drawers and cupboards and my distraught mother saying, ‘They tell me all this money is missing but I don’t know why’,” said Katy who is now 31, and trained as a children’s nurse at the Conquest Hospital in Hastings, East Sussex.

“Mum was charged and convicted of fraud at Lewes Crown Court in 2010 and Dad was suspended without any pay.”

The contract every subpostmaster had to sign when taking on a Post Office, often investing their life savings to do so, was so bad that even the contracts manager John Breedon, when asked at the Public Inquiry, said he would not have signed it.

Part of the contract stated: “The Subpostmaster is responsible for all losses caused through his negligence, carelessness, or error and for all losses caused by his assistants. Deficiencies due to such losses must be made good without delay.”

Justice Sir Peter Fraser

At the Group Litigation Bates vs Post Office Limited judgement in 2020, the judge, nicknamed ‘the Iron Man’ because of his hobby as an iron man triathlete, Justice Sir Peter Fraser, and one of the few judges in this scandal to have a complete grasp of IT issues, said: “There can be no excuse, in my judgment, for an entity such as the Post Office to mis-state, in such clearly expressed terms, in letters that threaten legal action, the extent of the contractual obligation upon a subpostmaster for losses. The only reason for doing so, in my judgment, must have been to lead the recipients to believe that they had absolutely no option but to pay the sums demanded. It is oppressive behaviour.”

Unless subpostmasters could prove there was some other cause, such as a bug in the Horizon system, they would have to pay. But they could not even prove bugs were rife, because evidence of such computer glitches, known by Fujitsu and others, was withheld from the defence. To make matters worse for subpostmasters, the law had been changed in 1999, on a Law Commission recommendation, so that the onus on revealing evidence that a computer was not working, (as explained in a previous article on Labour Hub) was laid upon the subpostmasters. They in turn had no access to Known Error Logs and their existence was denied by Post Office managers. It was a catch 22.

Persecution

On Tuesday January 16^th,2024, this week, in Parliament, Lord Arbuthnot, a long-term campaigner on behalf of Jo Hamilton, the subpostmistress who featured in the ITV drama in early January, said: “The Post Office was (once) the most trusted brand in the UK, because of the relationship between its subpostmasters and their communities, not because of its senior managers or the price of stamps.”

But there was a culture within the higher-ups at the Post Office that valued themselves and not the subpostmasters at the coalface. While they rewarded themselves with bonus incentives, managers and investigators assumed malfeasance was involved, against all evidence to the contrary, and apportioned blame illogically and with malevolence.

This attitude played a part in the 900 prosecuted subpostmasters, many of whom were told they were ‘the only one’ experiencing problems. From evidence that has come from live transmission of the Statutory Public Inquiry under Sir Wyn Williams, which anyone can watch, most subpostmasters were investigated by ill-trained jobsworths, often ex-policemen, and treated in such a brutal manner, it amounted to persecution.

Katy’s mum Kathy, now 68, was also told by Post Office investigators that she was the only one who had had problems with the Horizon Fujitsu IT system, which had been rolled out in all post offices in the UK between 1998 and 2000.

Stories have since emerged of hundreds of men and women who were coerced into plea bargaining on the steps of the Court – told they would be charged with theft if they did not plead guilty to false accounting and rendered terrified when informed that the charge of theft carried a likely custodial sentence. This too happened to Kathy Crane.

The Post Office had gone rogue.

Her husband’s diabetes had forced Kathy Crane to leave a job at M&S and take over the shop and post office. Bob Crane had worked for many years at Royal Mail in London before moving to Eastbourne and Ocklynge Road, when his two daughters were aged seven and nine. He was looking forward to family life and a steady job by the sea.

Horizon problems became evident in 2008. They got no help from the Fujitsu helpdesk and were at their wits end. Then the auditors came and the investigators.

By 2010, Kathy Crane had two teenage children at home and a sick husband and had had no earnings for just under two years. She was told she had no other option than to pay back a shortfall. This figure plus a fine from the court where she was convicted in Lewes, amounted to around £20,000.

“Always shy, Mum had held down a good job in M&S before helping Dad run the Post Office,” said Katy Crane, “But this criminal investigation and conviction crushed her. For her it’s like revisiting some hell. My father’s painful illness, the shame and injustice of the court case and conviction, allied to the community whispering and all subsequent money worries, apart from a small amount for Dad’s disability, destroyed her spirit.

“My mum never knew how such a large amount could have gone missing from the Horizon terminal reconciliation accounts. Mum said our Post Office’s weekly turnover was nowhere near that figure. Even me trying to find out about what happened has been difficult because Mum could not speak about it.

“I remember on the night before the court case. I did not understand the significance nor the charges. I went out with some friends and came back late. Mum and Dad must have been in bed biting their nails because my Dad shot out of the bedroom and shouted at me as to where I had been and could I not think of them. It was the first time he had ever been cross with me.

“This remains with me to this day, but I am only remembering it all now because I have suppressed it. It is too painful. I feel guilty because I went out and I did not realise what was going on. Of course, after that we lost everything, we had, but the greatest loss was losing my beloved Dad.

“Mum had to do 180 hours of Community Service. She worked in a charity shop. Then she went out to look for jobs as a carer in a home, which is low paid. I don’t think she has ever got over the trauma,” said Katy.

“Every time she went for a job, from 2010 onwards, Mum had to admit to having a criminal record. Can you imagine what that did to an honest woman?

“She had Dad to worry about. He later developed a life-threatening condition in his leg. There was nobody who could explain that she had got it wrong when she thought that after ten years, her conviction would automatically be expunged. I dd not know.

“Of course, in 2020 and with the Panorama, we found out a little more. Even just before the ITV drama was shown, we were told that she would have had to wait for an appeal to go through the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which could have taken many more years to have the conviction overturned.”

Christopher Head, a subpostmaster in Newcastle who took over a post office when aged 18 and was subsequently investigated for a large loss caused by Horizon, has since turned into one of the most informed and diligent campaigners on behalf of others. Advice from him on compensation was passed to Katy’s family this week.

“It seems we can’t even apply for the suspended pay that was taken from Dad because Mum is still a convicted felon,” said Katy. “That was never made clear when Nick Read the CEO at the Post Office now, supposed to be a new broom, told a committee in Parliament that suspended pay ‘was being returned’ swiftly. I applied on behalf of Mum last June. We sent death certificates. Proof of remuneration. And they were saying we will investigate this. But it’s now January 2024, and the last email we got in December said, ‘We are still investigating’. That was for a small amount, and they are still quibbling. Read got a bonus for ‘cooperation’, which actually means, failing to supply documents on time to the Inquiry. We have had no returned pay for my Dad because Mum still has a record. But they did not tell us that. They wasted our time, strung us along.

“We now know more about where we stand. We are talking about loss of income from the post office my parents invested in – 16 years’ lost investment, remuneration and lost profits, and all consequential loss. They don’t even mention mental health issues arising from what they did, in the compensation forms.  A viable business went down the pan. We had constant financial worries. And I had no money when I got a job, to put down on a flat, because my grandmother’s legacy was taken by the Post Office. As to stress and damages for wrongful prosecution and stigma, the price put on that by the body charged with delivering it, is we understand, just £5,000. How is this anywhere near putting us back to the position we were in when we first invested in our post office?  

“How is it lawyers for the Post Office got paid millions of pounds and Nick Read and his managers receive hundreds of thousands of pounds a year plus bonuses for destroying us and the Post Office, while most subpostmasters have had nothing, while convicted Subpostmasters can’t even apply yet, not even for lost pay which they should not have taken? We still have nothing, and they put that pay into their profits?”

Seven years on

“Seven years after Dad died, at Christmas 2022, a chance remark with a nurse friend at Eastbourne Hospital made me realise that there might be a chance to right the injustice done to us,” Katy explained. “In 2020, my mum had seen the BBC Panorama programme which the brilliant journalist Nick Wallis was deeply involved with. It was about the overturning of some subpostmaster convictions in the High Court. It had taken so much to get the case heard, and we were not part of that group litigation because we did not even know it was happening. So, I thought there was no hope for us.

“But my friend who lives in Hastings where I did my nurse training, told me about someone who had been active fighting for more pay for nurses, and had also invited Nick Wallis to Hastings. He was to talk about the Post Office scandal and his book. I was invited to speak. Nick put me in touch with the wonderful Barrister, Flora Page at 23, Essex Chambers, an unsung legal hero in all this. She has helped many subpostmasters and when she could, has done it pro bono.“

“I began to think about all those years I too kept quiet. I had tried to forget that when I was a teenager, I could not even tell my best friend. It had churned me up. The Post Office don’t realise it is not just the individual subpostmaster or postmistress that gets caught up in the community shaming but the whole family – including the children. We kept the family secret, and we should never have had to do this as kids.

“We have not been offered an apology nor have we had any ‘reaching out’ to traumatised subpostmasters. They don’t reach out at all. They hide and lie and obfuscate.  It’s just been delay after delay. Meanwhile, the Post Office says one thing to MPs and quite another to us. All we got when we asked last year was a letter saying we should ‘find a lawyer’. But we did not have the money to do that and nor did we know how to begin.

“Dad was very ill after Mum’s conviction. I remember him staring out of the window and saying he could not cut the grass and could no longer afford to pay anyone else to help. His health declined and he ended up in a nursing home. It was the beginning of the end,” said Katy. “I know his illness was not helped by what the Post Office did to us all.

“He died in early middle age, following an amputation and never returned home from the hospital. He died without gaining peace of mind and that is hard for us to recall. He went to his grave worrying about our futures and Mum’s criminal record. I sometimes wonder if we don’t all feel guilty for surviving, when he didn’t.

“He was, nevertheless, a fighter. I am a fighter too. I understand why people caught up in this horror start to think they are the ones who have gone mad. Yet all along, the madness has come from the people in charge of the Post Office who were in denial. Even when they were given evidence of flaws, Post Office management covered it up. The Post Office managers who were culpable, must be identified and prosecuted.”

“After Dad died, my partner, sister and I decided to take mum to Florida to help her recover. But she was not allowed into the USA because of her criminal record. That brought it home to us what the Post Office had done. It felt like Mum was unwelcome in her own community, in her own country and abroad.

“They say £600,000 will be given within 40 days to those who have the documentation, once convictions are overturned. But Alan Bates himself who was the central subject of the ITV drama, is still waiting for his own claim to be settled, and his story is known about. He managed to resist prosecution, because he knew from the outset it was Fujitsu’s Horizon that was to blame.    

“My mum was frightened and hurt. What price is 16 years of shame in the community? What about the pension Mum and Dad would have had? What about the loss of happiness? What about his children’s pain? We may be able to get all Dad’s and Mum’s tax records, from HMRC to prove our losses, but it gets complicated. She worked in a care home, instead of earning good money. They took that away,” Katy added.

“Kevin Hollinrake MP, the Post Office minister, has said time and again to Parliament that we should be restored to the position we were in if none of this horror had happened. Well, it is not happening, is it?

“There are many heroes in this story, and the best of them are the wrongly prosecuted subpostmasters who paved the way, including the 61 who have so far died including my Dad, those who committed suicide. As to my Mum and Dad, I want to honour them. That is why I am telling their story now after years of silence.

“The fight is just beginning for our family for justice and the kind of future that Dad and our late Grandma wanted for us.”

It could take until early 2025 for the Williams Inquiry report to be written and published. Phase 5 of the Inquiry begins in the Spring and Summer and will see Paula Vennells and other senior people in charge brought before the Inquiry.

Rosie Brocklehurst is a journalist and press officer (retired) who worked for the Labour Party, LWT, the BBC and several charities.

Image: Wallasey Post Office. Author: Rodhullandemu, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.