Battle over couple’s £5million legacy to National Trust they ended up despising
THE National Trust is to collect a £5.5 million legacy after a bitter legal row over the wills of a wealthy couple who detested the charity.
Property tycoon Michael Collins, 78, who suffers from dementia, made a will in 1990 leaving almost all his fortune to the Trust.
But he and wife Christine later clashed with the charity over plans to erect a large bird hide on the boundary between their garden and a country estate it owned. Mrs Collins led protests and the plans were eventually overturned.
Despite their subsequent hatred of the Trust, a ruling at the High Court la s t week means that attempts to get Mr Collins’s original will changed so the charity does not get the money have failed.
Mrs Collins died aged 65, in 2014, weeks after contracting an aggressive form of cancer. Her husband is now in a nursing home.
As they never had children, when Mrs Collins died, her half of the couple’s property assets transferred to her husband’s estate and are subject to his original will.
The large bequest is the proceeds from the sale of the couple’s former property in Kensington, West London, which was sold for £4.5 million last April, and their cottage in Gloucestershire, which went for nearly £995,000 in December 2015.
The High Court ruling by Judge Jeremy Cousins QC followed an application from the executors of Mrs Collins’s estate. They argued that her lawyers should have done more to ensure her half of the couple’s property assets did not pass to her ailing husband’s estate and become subject to his 1990 will.
The judge noted that in 2007 Mrs Collins lodged an application for a statutory will – executed on behalf of someone who l acks mental capacity – and ‘not surprisingly it met with resistance on the part of the National Trust’.
Following legal argument, she decided to drop the case a month after her original application.
Last week, Judge Cousins said the dispute with the Trust broke out in 2005 and ‘loomed very large’ in the couple’s lives. Mrs Collins ‘considered the attitude of the Trust’s staff to be rude, patronising and dismissive’ and she developed a ‘ deeprooted antipathy’ to the charity.
In her own will, Mrs Collins left £ 1 million in legacies – and the remainder of her estate to the Glyndebourne Opera House and the National Theatre. The couple’s only close family members, Mrs Collins’s brother Ian Pattison and his wife Eileen, said she would have wanted the bulk of their wealth to go to Opera Holland Park in West London, where she was patron, rather than the Trust.
Mrs Pattison said: ‘I have no doubt she would have wanted the money to go to the opera house, which was so much a part of her life. It is hard to believe the National Trust now seems likely to get the lot.’ Former neighbours of Mr and Mrs Collins in Sherborne, Gloucestershire, said she would be ‘incandescent’ about the Trust getting the money.
Alan and Penny Morris were fell ow objectors when t he Trust applied to build a three-bay bird hide with a boardwalk on the Sherborne Estate, which is used to film BBC’s Autumnwatch series, starting tomorrow.
One of Mrs Collins’s executors, Mary Padfield, said: ‘I’m just glad she is not alive now to see what has been going on.’
Last night, a Trust spokesman said: ‘The National Trust is not driving any action to obtain funds in this case. We are only involved as we are the beneficiary in Mr Collins’s will. Had Mr Collins ever decided to alter his will to remove the National Trust we would of course have respected that decision.’