Daughter who worked 70 hours a week on farm wins £1.1m in inheritance row

‘Kept her side of the bargain’

A fight between sisters in a milking parlour led to a high Court battle over ownership of the £2.5million family farm.

Lucy habberfield, 50, stormed out after the clash and refused to return to the land she had worked for 30 years.

But she insisted her late father had promised the farm to her – a claim dismissed by her mother Jane, 81.

Yesterday a judge sided with the daughter and awarded her a £1,170,000 stake in the 220-acre property. Mr Justice Colin Birss said her father, frank, had promised her a share in the business before his death in 2014 at the age of 84.

Lucy, he ruled, had ‘kept her side of the bargain’ by toiling at least six days a week for low pay. She began working on the farm when she left school in the early 1980s, earning just £40 or £50 a week.

She was instrumental in building up the dairy herd at Woodrow farm near Yeovil in Somerset, milking the cows twice daily. the mother of three told the judge she had just five weeks of holiday in three decades, working 60 to 70 hours every week for pin money. When she married her husband Stuart in 1999, they moved to a house nearby and he began helping out on the farm as well.

the judge said ‘all the habberfield family had a temper’ and the parlour fight in 2013 between Lucy and her sister Sarah marked a turning point. it was ‘impossible to say’ whose fault it was, but Lucy and Stuart left the farm the same day and did not return.

Lucy’s mother said she was quite certain she and frank had never promised the farm would one day be hers. But the judge said Lucy was devoted to her father and he had given her assurances that her work would not be for nothing.

Statements made to Lucy by her father, and sometimes by her mother, were not idle or casual remarks, he told the high Court. ‘they were made in a manner in which it was intended Lucy would take seriously – to continue her commitment to the farm, to conhad tinue to work hard and to accept the wages and hours she was working. She did so,’ he added.

‘frank intended her to understand that the reward for her commitment would be that the farm would be hers in future. Lucy understood what he meant. Lucy been assured that the farming business would be hers in future after frank could not run it anymore. Lucy has kept her side of the bargain. She did what was asked of her.’

Jane said she wanted to be fair to all four of her children, and the judge accepted that Lucy had not been promised the whole farm.

he said that she was entitled to a lump sum of £1,170,000 as her share in the property. the judge said he hoped the cash could be raised without selling the whole farm and that Jane would not be forced to leave her home.

Last year a farmer’s son sued his elderly mother and sisters after he was ‘completely cut out’ of his dementia sufferer father’s £3million will. Sam James, 60, said he devoted his life to working for his father, Allen, on the promise that one day hundreds of valuable acres would be his.

But he claimed his mother, Sandra, intercepted his father’s will and, after he began suffering from dementia, had him sign another.

the new will, made two years before Mr James’s 2012 death, cut out Sam, despite his years of ‘graft’ on the farm and in the family haulage business.

the son claimed the will was signed only because of his father’s dementia and pressure from his mother.

She accused him of being ‘financially driven’. he lost the case.