Marine’s dream home demolished... while he was away on duty
Now officer launches court battle for compensation
IT was his dream home – a former pub that still had its own pool table, piano and dartboard in the empty bar below his flat.
But when soldier Ross Hunt returned from duty overseas expecting to have only a loose roof tile to fix, he was stunned to find the £150,000 property had been demolished.
Now the Royal Marine has gone to court to seek damages.
Warrant Officer Hunt, who returned to Scotland to take up a new job as bandmaster with the Royal Marines Scotland Band, revealed how he wept when he learned that the fully-furnished flat had been destroyed.
The former Quayside Inn, in Inverkeithing, Fife, was closed but the accompanying flat was in good order.
But before he had the chance to move in, he had a call from a friend saying it had been demolished along with the derelict Inverkeithing paper mill next door.
‘He asked why I had knocked it down,’ WO Hunt told Dunfermline Sheriff Court,
‘I thought it was just a sick joke’
where he is suing the receivers of Inveresk, the company that owned the former paper mill.
‘He’s a bit of a joker and so I thought it was just a sick joke. But he told me that he’d walked past the property that day and it was a pile of rubble.
‘Once I’d established it had happened, I went through a number of emotions – prolonged disbelief that it would be possible for my home to be knocked down, for my home to be gone without me knowing about it.
‘I don’t mind saying I broke down. I was beset by disbelief, horror and sadness that it was gone. When I saw items like the cream sofa, VHS tapes and other things poking through the rubble, it brought it home what I had lost.’
The Marine had bought the pub and his upstairs flat in 2004 and it was demolished in September 2012, but he still has to pay £500 a month on the mortgage.
WO Hunt, who is originally from Devon and served in the Iraq war helping to look after casualties, added that he was upset and angry, and few days later received photos of ‘what was left of it’.
He told the court the property had not been insured since 2008 when his insurance firm had withdrawn cover as the building would be unoccupied.
The court action is against Andrew Davidson, Colin Dempster and Chris Marsden, all of receivers Ernst & Young. They are contesting the claim.
WO Hunt is seeking damages for the loss of his property, its contents and for the cost of alternative living arrangements following the demolition.
When he returned to Fife a few months after the demolition, he had to live in naval accommodation at HMS Caledonia in Rosyth. He then served on board the medical support ship RFA Argus, off the coast of Sierra Leone, during the Ebola crisis between October 2014 and January 2015.
The Quayside Inn, at Harbour Place, was previously known as Ye Olde Foresters Arms and had been a pub since 1873.
While the property was empty it was boarded up after youths had broken into the bar several times.
The officer’s mother, Theresa Hunt, 63, from Paignton, Devon, told the court how she and her husband had helped decorate and furnish the flat in 2007.
She said: ‘It was a lovely property. There was a new cooker and new table and chairs.’
In August 2012, WO Hunt visited Scotland ahead of his planned return to work at Rosyth at the start of 2013. He did not go into the boarded-up property but was ‘content’ with the way it looked.
Mrs Hunt and a friend, whom she was visiting in Edinburgh, parked outside the property.
She said: ‘It looked exactly as when I’d seen it before, other than it being boarded up. The boards would have been taken off when Ross went back to live there.’
The case was adjourned until September.