£1m fight as Oxford don is cut out of will – after mother fell for woman half her age
AN Oxford University professor is locked in a £1.25million court battle after his mother fell for a female lawyer half her age and cut him out of her will.
Distinguished archaeologist Chris Gosden says his mother Jean Weddell, a pioneering doctor, had ‘resolved’ in 2003 to leave him her London home.
But he was disinherited after she formed a civil partnership with Wendy Cook, a barrister 37 years her junior, in 2007. Miss Weddell made a new will, leaving nothing to her son, with whom she had been reunited after giving him up for adoption as a baby. She sold the house in Kennington, south London – now worth £1.25million – without telling him. And when she died aged 84 in 2013, she left most of her estate to Miss Cook, according to documents lodged at the High Court in London.
Professor Gosden, director of the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford University and a fellow of Keble College, is suing the solicitors who drew up a trust scheme for Miss Weddell in 2003.
He claims that the scheme, designed to minimise inheritance tax, ought to have protected the house, or the money from its sale, and delivered it to him, his wife Jane Kaye – a law professor at Oxford – and their two children. There is no suggestion of wrong-doing by Miss Cook, who is not a party to the legal action.
Miss Weddell, who in 1947 had been one of the first female students at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London, gave birth to her son around the time she qualified as a doctor, according to obituaries online.
She gave him up for adoption and he was taken to live in Australia. He returned to the UK and ‘re-established a relationship with his mother’ in 1987, the High Court writ states.
Miss Weddell worked around the globe after qualifying in 1952. One of her first roles was helping to set up a children’s hospital in Korea following the end of the war there.
She also treated youngsters with tuberculosis in Jordan, carried out ground-breaking work with stroke patients and travelled widely as a lecturer for the World Health Organisation. She was a keen bellringer and in her retirement worked a tour guide at Southwark Cathedral before she and Miss Cook moved to the Isle of Wight.
Professor Gosden is one of the UK’s top archaeologists. He was curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, is Professor of European Archaeology at the university and is a trustee of the British Museum.
In the writ, he says that according to a will she made in 2003 his mother planned to leave her estate to him and his wife. At the same time, she set up a scheme that put her home into a trust that promised to deliver the property, or the money from its sale, into the hands of her son and his family in a tax efficient way.
But following her death, Professor Gosden was told the value of her estate amounted to less than £5,000. He and his wife are suing solicitors Halliwell Landau, who they say drew up the trust agreement leaving a legal loophole. The firm denies
‘Re-established a relationship’
being at fault. Katherine McQuail, for the solicitors, says in their defence to the claim: ‘The claimants’ remedy for any step taken by Miss Weddell... was to sue her.’
It was not the lawyers’ role to advise Miss Weddell on the advantages, or disadvantages, of the trust and they had not acted for, or advised, Professor Gosden and his family in any capacity.
The solicitors deny the objective of the trust was to achieve a transfer of the property to Professor Gosden. They acted neither negligently, nor in breach of contract, and could not have prevented Miss Weddell dealing with the property as she wished, Ms McQuail says.
The case came before the High Court last week for a pre-trial review. The full trial, set for four days, will start before Christmas. Professor Gosden declined to comment.