Marion Holmes
‘My husband died before he was cleared’
Peter Holmes had been the manager of the Post Office branch in Jesmond, Newcastle, for 13 years before he was sacked and accused of stealing.
Post Office officials claimed that there was a £46,000 shortfall in his accounts but the former policeman and father of three blamed an error in the Fujitsu-developed Horizon accounting system. He was offered a plea bargain by the Post Office to drop the charge of theft for the money that was allegedly missing, as long as he pled guilty to four counts of false accounting.
In 2009, at the age of 67 and as a diabetic, “there was no way he wanted to go to jail so he said yes he would take that”, his wife, Marion, said.
He had to wear an ankle monitor for three months and was restricted to a curfew at home from 7pm to 9am each day.
Mr Holmes died in October 2015 from a brain tumour, five years before he was cleared of any wrongdoing in the scandal in April 2021.
His wife, now 78, said: “It affected Peter more looking back, all he had to do really was sit in the house, watch television or sit on the computer. He had nothing else to do, his passion was driving which he couldn’t do because we had no money for petrol.
“When he died, a lot of people sent cards and letters and they said the thing they will miss most about him was his sense of humour. And I said to my daughter, the sad thing is I forgot he had one.
“He was depressed, but I wouldn’t have got him to a doctor in a month on Sundays. The only person more stubborn than my daughter is Peter.”
She added: “I would like everybody to get what they deserve, the bad as well as the good, a lot of people have to pay the consequences for this. They have got away with it for too long.”
Mrs Holmes believes that Paula Vennells should pay for what happened.
She said: “At the end of the day, she was the head and I don’t care whether you knew all about it or not, if you’re the head of something, the buck stops with you. And it is up to you to take responsibility for all that goes on.
“But she is by no means the only one. There is people in the government that could’ve done a lot more and didn’t.
“We were not just subpostmasters, we were real people whose lives were affected.” Lettice Bromovsky and Blathnaid Corless