The battle of Thornton Drive
Pensioner threatened with jail after campaign of harassment against his ex-Para neighbour
A PENSIONER has been threatened with jail after a neighbours’ dispute escalated in a normally tranquil suburb.
Michael Hall used CCTV to spy on other residents and kept them awake by operating power tools or revving his camper van at 4am, a court heard.
The 65-year- old continued to be a nuisance even when a restraining was order imposed after he was convicted of harassment. This week magistrates warned Hall he could end up in prison if he does not stop harassing former paratrooper Timothy Royle and his family in what has been dubbed the Battle of Thornton Drive.
The dispute began when Hall, a retired panel beater, grew convinced that company director Mr Royle, 53, was trying to claim the gable end of his £250,000 home was a shared party wall he could use.
Mr Royle says he was merely tidying his garage, which adjoins the wall. Hall, who lives with his 71-year- old wife Pamela, put up CCTV cameras on a wrought iron gate at the front of his house so he could film neighbours coming and going in the cul-de-sac in Handforth, near Wilmslow, Cheshire.
He used his chainsaw, leaf blower and angle grinder at dawn and would start his noisy camper van at 4am, saying when challenged that he was ‘going to the shop’, Stockport magistrates heard.
Mr Royle said the cameras left his two children too frightened to play in the garden. He began keeping a video diary and filmed Hall using his noisy leaf blower at 8.15am on Boxing Day, at 8am on a bank holiday Monday and during the 2018 World Cup Final while wearing a blue boiler suit and gas mask.
In April, Hall was convicted of harassment and issued with a one-year restraining order. It banned him from pointing cameras at the Royles’ home and
‘Dispute that has got out of hand’
from using noisy equipment between 9pm and 8am.
But a week later Mr Royle, complained to police that, although the noise was not starting until ‘the dot of 8am’, he was still being filmed.
Hall – who has a 2014 conviction over a similar dispute – was arrested. This week he denied pointing his cameras at his neighbours and said one of the devices was a ‘dummy’.
‘The view was only the tarmac, my gate and my post box outside,’ he told the court.
But magistrate Andrew Sokill said failing to take down the cameras had been a ‘deliberate act’ and ‘it would have been in our rights to send you to prison.
If you come to court under the same circumstances another bench won’t be as lenient.’
Hall, who has now removed the cameras, was ordered to complete a 12-month community order, do 150 hours’ unpaid work and pay £1,050 in costs and surcharges. The restraining order was extended to two years.
David Thompson, defending, said Hall had lived in Thornton Drive for more than 20 years and ‘felt genuinely he was being trespassed upon’ following the disagreement over the party wall after Mr Royle moved in.
Saying there was no evidence other neighbours were affected, he added: ‘This is an issue that has got out of hand between the defendant and complainant.’ After the case Mr Royle said his partner and three other families had been driven away as a result of the dispute with Hall.
‘The magistrates should really have just given him a custodial sentence,’ he said.
In the Army he had ‘dealt with the IRA, bombs, explosives, gunshots you name it, but nothing has annoyed me more than this idiot’. He fears he will not be able to sell his house as a result of the row.
It is not illegal set up CCTV systems filming beyond the boundary of your property. But you must tell those being filmed and delete the footage or move the cameras if they complain.