MY BITTER GRAPES OF WRATH
It’s the toxic feud over one of Britain’s loveliest vineyards – the son of a newspaper baron at war with the mother he claims wants to destroy his winery. ANGELLA JOHNSON uncorks his fury
‘Since Dad died she has tried to control me’
THERE are many challenges facing an English wine grower: the high cost of land and labour, the ever-present threat of bugs and disease, and, of course, the often terrible weather.
Yet in just four years, Henry Boorman has built up a thriving vineyard on his family’s 50-acre farm nestled in rolling countryside. A much-anticipated first batch of sparkling wine from the Redhill Farm Estate in Wateringbury, Kent, will be released in time for Christmas.
So it might seem strange that the biggest danger threatening the 31year-old’s fledgling business comes not from mildew or fierce competition from a thriving British wine industry, – but in the shape of Henry’s own mother, Jan.
For, as the past few days have made clear, she is running an extraordinary campaign to derail her only child. The 69-year-old has attempted not only to block sales of his popular wines, but to also throw him off the family estate. So far, she has failed.
Amid a welter of publicity, officials rejected her claims two weeks ago, and approved Henry’s application to sell wine online.
Since then she has remained silent. But sitting in the kitchen of his home on the estate, Henry is bubbling over with anger.
‘It’s pure harassment – and public harassment at that,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to air our personal difficulties, but she fired the first salvo. It’s a desperate bid to ruin my business and therefore to destroy me.’
Gazing out of the window towards the vines, he says he still cannot understand how this most important of relationships has collapsed into such hostility.
In many ways, Henry’s life has been marked by good fortune and success. His father, Edwin – the third generation of Boormans to own the Kent Messenger newspaper group – was not just a wealthy businessman but a philanthropist too, and received an OBE from Prince Charles for services to the county.
He also served as High Sheriff of Kent, representing the Queen on some official occasions.
Even Henry’s attempts at winemaking seemed blessed, as he quickly turned 20 acres of fallow land into a profitable vineyard. He has helped some of his neighbours turn their own fields over to grapes, and the village, he maintains, is behind him.
It was 2012 when his problems with his mother began. That was shortly after his father died, leaving a magnificent eight-bedroom Georgian farmhouse, plus 50 acres of farmland to Jan, his second wife.
Henry, the couple’s only child together, was made an executor of his father’s will and is the beneficiary of a number of family trusts, which include the newspaper group.
Today, the whole estate is in Jan’s name. However, Henry says his father had wanted him to share the farm with his mother, but left it in her name to avoid inheritance tax.
The main farmhouse is rented out and Henry lives on the estate with his girlfriend Christine in a rundown cottage with a leaking roof.
‘It was decided before my father got ill that it would be passed on to me because I was keen to get it running as a farm once again,’ says Henry. ‘We had just started the complicated process of changing things when Dad died very quickly from an aggressive form of cancer.’
From then on, his mother seemed bent on thwarting his every move towards independence. First, he says, she pulled the plug on his life in London by forcing the sale of their home there.
‘I had a house in Brixton with my mother on the deeds because it was the only way I could have got the mortgage, even though I actually paid it myself,’ he explains.
‘My mother had a permanent room available whenever she wanted to visit the city to shop, see friends or take in a show.
‘It was also a bolthole for her when things were not going well between her and Dad.’
But within months of Edwin’s death, Jan told her son she wanted her name taken off the deeds.
‘I asked for more time and stipulated that it would make it hard for me to work in London,’ Henry says. ‘But she said she didn’t want to take the risk – even though property prices were soaring and we had already made a 35 per cent profit.’
Effectively, he says, he was forced to sell and, believing his grieving mother needed him nearby for support, Henry agreed to return to Kent.
Still, he had to earn a living. Having given up his London-based work as a graphic designer, he came up with a plan to use some of the farmland to grow grapes for a large local wine producer, with his mother as a partner.
‘It meant returning the farm to agriculture,’ he explains. ‘I thought it was something my father would have liked. I wanted it to be sustainable and provide an income to support my mother and her lifestyle.
‘I never asked her for the farm. I came up with a sensible solution so that I could look after us both.
‘She couldn’t understand my need to make a success of something new, but
eventually came around. I’m an entrepreneur at heart, but she has more of what I might describe as a “landed gentry attitude”.’
With British wine booming in the southern counties, notably in Kent, Henry took an intensive course in viticulture at Plumpton College in neighbouring East Sussex.
Then, putting his learning into practice, he started with two acres of vines in May 2013. He now has 20 and is looking to plant more.
But in January 2014, things started to unravel. Once again, his mother wanted to leave a project they were in together – this time the vineyard.
‘She phoned to say she didn’t want to go ahead after all,’ he says. ‘If that is not erratic behaviour I don’t know what is.’
He claims he gave her a substantial sum of money for the right to run the business on the land and that – had the vineyard been a success – his mother would have been given a generous pension to keep her in the style to which she is accustomed.
All went quiet until sometime in mid-2014 when Henry received another blow – and learned that his mother had secretly put the farm up for sale.
‘I found out from a friendly local estate agent and some farmer friends,’ Henry says. ‘I was stunned she had gone behind my back that way.’ (Since then the estate is no longer for sale, perhaps because Henry’s position as a sitting tenant makes any sale complicated.)
Then, last month, matters finally came to a head when Jan tried to block Henry’s application for an alcohol licence, which would allow him to sell his wines online.
As well as disputing his right to use the land, she also claimed residential tenants at the farm have been disturbed by the ‘nuisance’ caused by her son.
Jan, who lives in the nearby market town of West Malling, wrote a scathing letter to Ton bridge and Malling Council, saying her son ‘has absolutely no authority to run any sort of business from my premises’. ‘We are going through a legal process,’ she told the council. ‘How a son can do this to his mother I don’t know. It’s very sad.’
Henry counters with his own question: ‘How can a mother do this to her son?
‘When she learned that I was about to start selling my own wine online, she must have been very desperate. It was not a maternal reaction.
‘She didn’t think of writing or calling me to complain. Instead she sent her objection to the council, thus putting our disagreement out in the open. So I think it is important for me to try to explain what is happening.
‘We’ve asked her to return to mediation but she only gets her solicitor to send me letters, accusing me of assaulting her.
‘When I asked what I’m supposed to have done, the lawyer simply says that it’s too terrible to repeat.
‘She said she doesn’t want to take the risk it might all go wrong, but I think she cannot cope with the fact that I’m succeeding. She’d rather have me at her beck and call.
‘Since my father died she has tried to control my life. She forced me to sell my house in London and give up my career in graphic design to move back to the farm. Then, when my business took off, she tried to crush it.
‘I’ve always done everything she asked of me until now, yet she seems determined to destroy my business. She does not seem to appreciate I am trying to make the farm sustainable, to ensure it earns an income for me and a pension for her.’
He seems genuinely at a loss about how to win his mother around.
‘I don’t know why she is behaving this way,’ he says. ‘I tried to be a good son and have always been there for her.
‘If she needed someone to change a fuse or lightbulbs, or to paint a room, I would go over.
‘Sometimes I’d bring over some shopping and I tried to look in on her almost every other day. In any case, I was always at the other end of the telephone and if she needed me then I would be there.
‘The thing is that she’s always had to get her own way. That was one of the reasons why she and Dad argued so often. She can be very demanding. My mother’s problem is she has nothing to do in her life.’
So far, he says, she has refused all his attempts at mediation. Worse, the furore is making his clients nervous. He says he has also lost three workers because of the dispute.
After more than an hour listening to him pour out his heart, it is
‘When the business took off she tried to crush it’
clear that mother and son have never been exactly close. Henry refuses to comment when asked if they ever hugged but hints the bond was weakened when he was shipped off to boarding school at the tender age of six.
It is possible, of course, that Jan has sound reasons for wanting to sell the land, which is technically hers, but she declined to respond to our inquiries and her motives remain a mystery.
The stakes are high. If Henry’s mother does manage to kick him out, however, the vines will be ripped out and all his hard work would have been in vain.
He is determined to remain, however, and says the business is doing so well that he needs to expand.
‘I’ve asked an old family friend to mediate, but my mother will only speak to me through lawyers,’ he says. ‘I’m angry at her for letting things come to this.
‘I don’t want our relationship to be irrevocably damaged. She is, after all, my mother and I don’t want us to be estranged. But she appears to be in an intransigent mood.’