Parents battle ‘Cinderella’ £1.3m farm payout ruling
A£1.3m “golden egg” is at the centre of a renewed court battle between a couple and their estranged daughter – dubbed the “Cowshed Cinderella”.
Eirian Davies, 46, was repeatedly assured by her parents, Tegwyn and Mary Davies, that she would ultimately step into their shoes and take over the family’s thriving Henllan Farm in Whitland, Dyfed, and its herd of pedigree Holstein cows.
In May 2014 three Court of Appeal judges ruled that a stake in the thriving 182-acre farm was due to her for the years of lowpaid toil she put in.
Ms Davies has told how she missed out on going to Young Farmers’ Club dances with her two sisters as a teenager because she had to “stay at home with a muck fork”.
She worked on the family farm for more than 25 years, although with sporadic breaks over time.
“They always told me that the farm would be left to me,” Ms Davies told an earlier court hearing. “Even on my birthday, when the other girls were having things, they would say – ‘you will have the damn lot one day, it will all be yours’,” she said.
Her father would regularly warn her “not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg” if she complained about her meagre wages, she added.
Until she reached the age of 21 Ms Davies was paid nothing at all for her work on the farm, and after that, there was a period when she was paid just £15 a day for milking the cows, although sometimes she received more.
She claimed she could have “made a better life elsewhere”, but her 75-year-old father, and mother, 76, insisted she had earned a fair income during her stints working on the farm.
Describing her as “a selfemployed herdswoman”, they argued she would have done no better financially had she worked away from the farm.
In 2009 Ms Davies was shown her parents’ draft will, in which the lion’s share of the farm was left to her.
However, the couple made changes to their bequests and proposed placing the farm in trust for all three sisters equally.
Ms Davies had a “passionate interest in pedigree milking cows”, and by 1989, when she turned 21, she was the only sister left at the farm.
When she left the farm to work elsewhere for a while her father begged her to return.
The legal dispute was finally sparked in August 2012 following an “altercation” in the milking parlour – after which Ms Davies’ parents launched an unsuccessful bid to evict their daughter.
Judge Milwyn Jarman, QC, ruled Ms Davies was entitled to a beneficial interest in the family’s lucrative farming business, prompting her parents to challenge that ruling in the Court of Appeal.
But in May 2014 Lord Justice Floyd dismissed the couple’s appeal, ruling that Ms Davies had received “less than full recompense” for her contribution to the farm. After the parents’ appeal was rejected the case was sent back to Judge Jarman to put a figure on the amount of compensation due to Ms Davies.
He awarded her £1.3m for her share of the family farming business in February 2015 at the High Court in Cardiff, triggering her parents to mount a fresh appeal.
The case returned to the Appeal Court yesterday as Mr and Mrs Davies’ legal team launched their attack on the judge’s findings.
The couple’s QC, Simon Fancourt, claimed the £1.3m payout would be “hugely disproportionate to any detriment Eirian incurred in reliance on representations that were made”.
The “representations and assurances” given by her parents were “general and non-specific” in the early days, said the barrister.
Lord Justice Patten, Lord Justice Underhill and Lord Justice Lewison are expected to reserve their judgment to a later date.