Bitter feud destroyed our island retirement dreams... and left us homeless
THEIR retirement dreams looked both simple and realisable. They wanted to be close to their daughter, watch their grandchildren grow up and enjoy the comfort of a brand new island bungalow built to their specifications. But the reality of Clifford and Wendy Jones’ twilight years is the stuff of every grandparent’s worst nightmare.
They have lost their home on the Hebridean isle of Barra along with the life savings they used to pay for it. Worse still, they are estranged from their daughter Samantha and fear they will never see their grandchildren Abigail and Holly again. All have moved to Australia and contact has been severed.
Retirement for Mrs Jones, 74, and her 83-year-old husband, who has suffered two strokes and can no longer walk, is now eked out in a one-bedroom flat in the Midlands where they pay £600 a month rent from his pension.
In truth, says his wife, he should be in care, particularly as he is showing signs of dementia, but it would take all his pension to pay for it – which would leave her homeless.
The couple’s desperate plight can be traced back to one critical mistake: they did not speak to a lawyer before entering into a financial arrangement with their daughter and son-in-law Stephen Muir. They thought there was no need – they were family.
‘It never entered our minds to get a contract,’ says Mrs Jones now. ‘ She was our daughter. We had no reason to believe anything l i ke this would happen.’
But the unthinkable did happen. They say they spent £90,000 building their retirement bungalow after their son-in-law offered a plot on his land. They failed to grasp, however, that his status as landowner also made him the owner of the new house.
That discovery would rip the family apart. It gave Mr Muir the right to rent out the bungalow his in-laws had paid for and – quite legally – pocket the income. It also resulted in the Muirs spending the rest of their savings on a long legal battle which cost them tens of thousands of pounds and got them nowhere.
Now the final insult: the home they paid for has been sold for £150,000 – none of which they saw – and their daughter and family have started a new life in Queensland, Australia, refusing to have anything to do with her parents or brother Cliff.
‘I just cannot believe that our daughter has gone along with it all,’ said Mrs Jones, close to tears. ‘Both her father and I find it absolutely incredible.’
The Muirs, on the other hand, contend the elderly couple have only themselves to blame – and that they moved to Australia for a fresh start after the Joneses ‘destroyed our happy home life’.
It was at Christmas 2010 that the seeds of the extraordinary feud were sewn. The Joneses were living in a villa in Castalla near Alicante in Spain but, as he neared 80, former salesman Mr Jones longed to return to the UK.
Money was the main impediment. Property prices had tumbled in Spain after the credit crunch and the couple feared they would not get what they paid for their villa a decade earlier. That would leave them struggling to afford something suitable back home.
Spending Christmas with their marine biologist daughter and her family in Barra, they discussed the problem a nd a s ol uti on was proposed.
Mrs Jones recalled: ‘Our son-in-law said “you could build a bungalow in our garden. You’d be able to afford that”.’
Thinking about it, there seemed much to recommend the idea. Building a property from scratch on Mr Muir’s land would cost much less than buying an existing one – and they could design it to their needs.
Furthermore, they would be living close to their daughter and granddaughters in a modern home with gorgeous sea views. When an offer came in for their Spanish home, it seemed like a sign. It may have been 10,000 Euros less than they wanted but it was still easily enough to build their bungalow on Barra. By February 2011 they had sold up and moved in with their daughter while their dream home in the garden took shape – with their son-in-law project managing.
Only now did clouds appear on the horizon. ‘The truth be told,’ says Mrs Jones, ‘We didn’t really know our sonin-law well enough, although they’d probably been married nine or ten years at that stage.’
Over the months that followed, all living under the same roof, the atmosphere grew increasingly strained.
Discussions over who would ultimately inherit the bungalow raised tensions. While the Joneses imagined it would be divided equally between their son and daughter, her husband had other ideas. According to Mrs Jones, he initially suggested her son should be entitled to no more than 25 per cent. Then, when the house was around two-thirds complete, Mr Muir told his in-laws what his lawyer had told him: the bungalow was on his land which, technically, made it his.
There was another row about laying a Tarmac drive to serve the existing house and the new one now nearing completion.
MRS JONES claimed her son-in-law wanted her to pay for the driveway by taking out a loan and using the money she received as a carer’s allowance for her husband to pay it off. Tempers flared and Mr Jones accused his son-in-law of bleeding money out of them.
‘That was the end of everything then,’ says Mrs Jones. ‘We were told we were being selfish and in the finish they told us we would have to get out and move into the bungalow, which wasn’t really ready. Our son actually travelled up and moved us in. I had had a hip operation and was still on crutches.’
For three months, the fractured family lived yards apart, but hardly spoke.
‘My daughter came over on Christmas Eve 2011 and brought her father and me a little gift from the children. She wouldn’t even stay for a drink. We were only yards from our daughter’s house and we got a phone call on Christmas morning from our grandchildren thanking us for their presents. They didn’t come over to see us. We weren’t asked over.’
Any hopes of a Hogmanay thaw in the frostiness were dashed. ‘ Two or three days before New Year, when the last ferry was leaving the island, they suddenly all got in the car and disappeared. And I said to my husband, “You know, I reckon they’re
going to catch the ferry across to the mainland for New Year.” And that’s what they did.’
They watched as the boat set off, then received a text message with the explanation. The family was off to Glasgow for New Year.
Knowing almost no one on Barra and facing several medical issues, the couple felt abandoned. The New Year brought even more misery. The grandchildren they had moved to Barra to be close to and watch grow up were now increasingly distant, unreachable figures seen from their window.
Their daughter, says the Joneses, never came near them. By February 2012 they had had enough. They left the island, moving first to Yorkshire and then to Sutton Coldfield in the Midlands.
‘ I think i t would have killed Clifford if we had stayed on Barra,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘He idolised his daughter.’
After moving out, they sued for compensation for the money they had ploughed into the bungalow, claiming their son- i n- l aw had gained from ‘unjustified enrichment’.
A sheriff found in Mr Muir’s favour, ruling the Joneses had moved out of the bungalow of their own free will and stating that they could move back there if they wished. When they did not return, the Muirs leased the property to a tenant, which infuriated the Joneses who say they were not consulted and received none of the rent.
Outraged, they appealed the sheriff ’s decision – and lost again. In his findings, Sheriff Principal Derek Pyle said it was not clear the Muirs had benefited financially from the Joneses’ departure. He added there was an ‘obvious emotional loss’ to the Muirs, particularly Mrs Muir, in being estranged from her parents.
What is clear is both the bungalow and the Muirs’ house next door were both sold last year to separate buyers.
While their own home fetched £220,000, the bungalow the Joneses ploughed their retirement savings into changed hands for £150,000. The Muirs have sold up for a grand total of £370,000 and, having been granted visas last year, shipped out to Australia.
Mrs Jones said: ‘I haven’t seen my grand-daughters since the day we left Barra in February 2012. I was sending them birthday presents and Christmas presents but then an email went to my son from my daughter saying, “You“Y can tell them to stop sending giftsgi and presents for the girls becausebecau they are not given them”.’
The grandmothergrandmothe added: ‘I have cried many, many tears – mainly because we had su such a good relationship with our daughter. She couldn’t do any wrongwr as far as my husband was concerned.conce
‘She had everyt everything she could possibly wish for, farfa more than our son ever did actu actually. She had a horse all the while she was growing up before she went to university, we used to drive her tot gymkhanas all over the place.’
In case she and he her husband never see her grand-daughtersgrand-daug again, she says she is writing them a letter to go in her will.
‘It’s to say why we haven’t been in contact with them and to tell them what happened be because I’m quite sure their mother a and father haven’t told them what’s h happened.’
Certainly the Muirs’Mu view of what has happened is v very different to that of the Joneses.Jonese They said in a statement yesterday:yesterd ‘This action broughtb ht aboutb tb by t the Joneses never had any grounds to proceed and this was borne out by the sheriff and sheriff principal during appeal, finding that we had no case to answer.
‘We made repeated attempts to start dialogue with the Joneses through our solicitors in order to find resolution, all of which were ignored.
‘This bogus case launched by the Joneses destroyed our happy home life so much that we needed to move away for a fresh start. The Joneses continue to portray themselves as victims but in reality they brought this on themselves.
‘They saw a legal opportunity to attain monies from us so they could move back to England but their gamble for all or nothing didn’t work out.
‘All they have left is to attempt to blacken our name as much as possible. The irony is, had they been reasonable people and talked to us, we would certainly have found a middle ground and neither of us would have gone through years of court proceedings and have had the legal bills we ended up with.’
The court cases undoubtedly involved a gamble on the Joneses’ part.
AT ONE stage they were offered an undisclosed sum and their l egal expenses up to that point. They turned the offer down. The upshot is a family fractured apparently beyond repair and a retirement dream shattered. As the Muirs adjust to a new life in Cairns, Queensland, in Bedfordshire Mrs Muir’s older brother Cliff says he is ‘flabbergasted’ by her actions. He says his parents have been left to accept a cruel fate simply through having no money left to fight it.
In Sutton Coldfield, Mrs Jones struggles to comprehend how such well-intentioned retirement plans could end so catastrophically.
She says: ‘ We thought we were going to be living in a bungalow that we had paid for outright.
‘Our last three properties had all been paid for, there was no mortgage on them. Now we are paying £600 a month in rent, which we hadn’t budgeted for.
‘We thought we would be watching our grandchildren grow up. We thought we’d be in the bungalow for the rest of our lives.’
They were there for just three months – a time of heartbreak, tears and bitter recriminations which they paid for with their life savings.