WE WERE DESTROYED
» £16k ‘shortfall’ put postmaster in jail and caused huge family split » He died alone in bedsit aged 63, still believing wife stole the money
JACQUI Huxham has a terrible memory of the last time she saw her husband Peter.
Only a few years earlier they were the happy couple running their village post office.
“It was just after the mediation session so we could get divorced after 26 years of marriage,” Jacqui remembers.
“He followed me to the car park screaming I had ruined his life because I stole the money that had got him sent to prison.
“He was desperate. His life was in pieces. And I still thought he was the criminal.”
Few more distressing stories have emerged since ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office put the 25-year Post Office accounting scandal back in the headlines.
DESTITUTE
The false accusations against Peter, who had been sub-postmaster for over 25 years until auditors found a shortfall of £16,158 in his accounts, led to him going to jail, destroyed his marriage, drove a split through his family and left him destitute and friendless.
And it ended in the worst possible way. He died aged 63 in a lonely bedsit in a suspected suicide in July 2020. It was three weeks until his body was found, after neighbours started to complain about the smell.
Peter had missed his two sons’ weddings, never got to meet his six grandchildren, and died before he knew he was a victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice, still believing it was his wife Jacqui who had taken the money. Both his own parents, too, died without knowing their son was innocent.
Son Luke, now 35 and a data analyst, remembers a happy childhood with his dad before the Horizon IT system was rolled out in post offices when he was 12.
He says: “Every
Sunday he’d take me to wherever I was playing rugby, it was always me and my dad. We never had any family holidays, because Mum and Dad were always working in the shop.
“We lived above the post office. The post office was the hub of the village, my parents knew everyone, and everyone knew our family.” It was while home after his first term studying biology at university that Luke noticed things were not right between his parents. He recalls: “Dad was more stressed, and I remember he and mum having heated conversations behind closed doors. There was a noticeable divide between them.
“One day these men in suits came in, and I remember Dad coming upstairs and looking like he’d seen a ghost, pacing up and down. He seemed in a real panic.”
The men in suits were the Post Office auditors who arrived suddenly in September 2009 immediately locking the family out of their shop’s post office counter in Starcross, Devon.
Jacqui, 63, remembers the accusations between her and Peter had already started: “It was only a couple of months before that when he told me there was money missing and I must have taken it.
“He must have been hiding it for months, because I’d noticed he’d started to drink more and more.
“I couldn’t believe he’d accused me of that. I told him that he was the one who had been taking the money, and spending it on drink.”
A few weeks later, Peter had a nervous breakdown and Jacqui sent him to live with his parents in nearby Dawlish to shield the problems from their other children,
James and Mary, then aged 19 and 14.
But word quickly got around the tight-knit village. Jacqui says: “I kept the shop going without the post office, but several times the windows were egged, or scrawled with the word ‘thief ’. I had horrible letters put under the door. But I had to carry on.
“I put everything into the running the shop, my credit cards were maxed out and we and the kids lived on baked potatoes and baked beans for weeks.
I eventually sold and ended up with nothing.”
In March 2010 Peter, on the advice of his lawyers, pleaded guilty to fraud – while still blaming his wife – and was sentenced to nine months in jail.
They divorced in 2013, by which time his relationship with his three children, as well as his two sisters, had broken down. Jacqui says: “At the end he was living a sad and pathetic life, so alone that nobody noticed when he died.”
But as details of the Horizon scandal
Horrible letters were put under the door, but I had to carry on
JACQUI HUXHAM ON HUSBAND’S BREAKDOWN
emerged the family realised Peter was innocent all along. Jacqui remembers: “Peter would spend hours on that helpline. I knew he’d been a victim too.”
Yesterday, the Department for Business and Trade confirmed Peter will be covered by the new laws to exonerate and compensate victims.
Luke, however, says he still wants his dad’s case to be heard separately.
He says: “My kids are still young but one day I’ll sit them down and tell them I loved him before stuff went wrong. And that he was innocent.”