Michael Tringham traces the expensive consequences of avoiding a bill
The Booth family’s probate troubles started with a £7,000 builder’s bill that farmer Edward Booth preferred not to pay. It has reached a Jarndyce-like finale—compounded by intestacy, allegations of forgery, secret gifts, false under-valuation, bankruptcy, even an illegitimacy, three separate trials—and an estimated six figures in legal costs, according to losing litigant Norman Booth, who told the Huddersfield Daily Examiner: “I shall have to pay [my siblings] out but there will be nothing left for nobody because the fees have to come out of the estate.”
Looking behind the legal reasons why Norman Booth lost his appeal against his siblings’ claim based on their mother’s intestacy shows how, from one small event —itself long since settled—unexpected consequences may flow.
Almost 40 years ago Edward Booth bought Silver Ings Farm in Skelmanthorpe, West Yorkshire, of which he was the tenant, from the Saville Estate. By the 1980s he had entered into a farming partnership with his son Norman. Around 1982 he engaged a local builder to renovate two cottages, which his daughters Linda and Joan
