I
have previously mentioned the case of Mary Wynch. Mary made legal
history by being the first person to sue for being wrongly detained
under the Mental Health Act –Dr Dafydd Alun Jones was one of those whom
she sued. Mary’s case received widespread media attention in the London
based press when she won the case – such was the aggro that she received
in north Wales that by then she had gone into hiding in Eastbourne. I
contacted her via the ‘Guardian’ and met up with her. I think that Mary
has probably died by now, so there are a number of outstanding questions
that cannot be answered. I have been trying to research Mary’s case for
some while but have had great trouble retrieving information. It’s
almost as if there has been an attempt to airbrush this case from
history. However my co-researcher has now managed to access some
information, including a transcript from the appeal – Mary had to
initially appeal to the Master of the Rolls Lord Donaldson for leave to
sue Jones et al.
I first read about Mary’s case after it was
reported in the broadsheets in 1985, after Lord Donaldson allowed her
appeal. I had just had my first taste of bad behaviour on the part of
the north Wales mental health services but had no idea of just how
corrupt that they were at that point. Over the following few years I
received very serious grief from them, so when I read at some point in
the late 80s that Mary had won her case against Dafydd Alun Jones et
al I was keen to speak to her.
Mary told me an even worse story
than had appeared in the press. Despite the allegations of ‘madness’
that those we know and love threw at Mary she was actually very level
headed and was acutely aware that she couldn’t make statements in press
interviews that she did not have evidence for, so she never spoke in
public about some very worrying matters. I will summarise what she told
me here.
Mary had lived in Caernarfon, worked as a secretary in the
agriculture dept at Bangor University (known in those days as UCNW) and
for a long while looked after her elderly mother. Mary had a sister whom
she did not get on with. Mary told me that at one point her mother was
in a care home owned by Jones. Mary was worried about the standard of
care there – when her mother subsequently died, Mary was deeply
concerned at the circumstances of her mother’s death. Mary’s worst fear
was that her mother had died of an overdose that had been unlawfully
administered. The story that Mary related to me was that when she saw
her mother’s body, it was covered in blisters. Mary was later told that
this could have been the sign of a barbiturate overdose. She talked at
length of her deep frustration at never being able to prove this,
although she was pretty sure that was what had happened. In the wake of
her mother’s death there was a dispute between Mary and her sister over
her mother’s estate. Mary described her sister as ‘evil’ and believed
that her sister was in cahoots with both Dafydd Alun Jones and the
solicitors whom Mary alleged had mishandled her mother’s estate. It
seemed that Mary had encountered difficulties with a number of different
local solicitors firms and she alleged that these solicitors were so
closely linked that they effectively formed a ring. As a result of the
dispute Mary was ordered to hand over certain documents but refused, as
she believed that the law had been broken and corruption was at work.
She was imprisoned for contempt of court and sent to the notoriously
grim Risley Remand Centre. She was then declared to be suffering from
‘paranoia’ and was detained in the North Wales Hospital for a year. When
Mary finally got out she started the tortuous process of suing Jones,
Clwyd Health Authority, Dr Paul Bishop (a GP) and Dr Paul Hayward (the
medical officer at Risley Remand Centre) and the Home Office. By the
time that I met her, negligence had been admitted and press reports had
stated that Mary had been awarded £27,5000 damages – but she told me
that everyone involved was quibbling over actually paying the damages
and that it looked as though she was going to have to go to Court again
to enforce payment. Intriguingly, no more information about Mary’s case
or indeed Mary appeared in the media, despite the huge media interest
that there had been. I never saw Mary again and I never knew whether she
did receive her damages or what the results of her outstanding legal
cases against other parties involved with the mishandling of her case
were. The lack of further media coverage was quite inexplicable. When I
met Mary, as well as telling me about her suspicions and fears regarding
her mother’s death, she told me that conditions in Denbigh were
dreadful. Interestingly enough although Jones had been prescribing huge
quantities of anti-psychotics for her, as with me the nurses did not
suggest that she take it. Mary told me that her greatest challenge in
Denbigh was not showing any emotion – she realised that these people
were a law unto themselves and would leap on any excuse to demonstrate
further ‘insanity’ and who knows what would happen to her. She also told
me another interesting anecdote. That the ‘young people’s ward’ was
visible from the ward where she was imprisoned. Every evening the staff
from Mary’s ward would gather around the window and watch the activities
in the young people’s ward – Mary explained that the staff told her
that Jones encouraged the young people to have sex with each other and
that the staff treated the action in the young people’s ward as a live
sex show.
One thing that I remembered from the press reports was a
statement that Mary had been a voluntary outpatient of Jones’s after
her mother’s death. This claim also appears in the transcript from the
appeal. Yet I got the distinct impression from Mary that she only
encountered Jones when she was banged up in Denbigh. Now Jones lies, he
lies under all circumstances and one thing that he lied about in my case
was that he assessed me before ordering the police to take me to
Denbigh. He did NOT see me beforehand and did not carry out any sort of
‘assessment’. I cannot now clarify anything with Mary, but I strongly
suspect that Jones did not treat her as a voluntary outpatient. She
believed that her sister, whom she did not get on with and suspecting of
swindling her, was in cahoots with Jones, so I think it very unlikely
that she was returning to see him as a voluntary outpatient. She spoke
of how unpleasant he was when she met me, but she certainly didn’t speak
about Jones in any way that suggested that she knew him as ‘her doctor’
– she barely remembered his name and referred to him as ‘the doctor at
Denbigh’.
As far as Mary was concerned, Jones was just one of many
professional people who had done various things that they shouldn’t
have. I note that the claim that Mary had been treated by Jones as a
voluntary outpatient was central to the claim of him and his cronies
that she was mentally ill – ie. that she had been ‘deeply affected’ by
her mother’s death and had it was alleged that she had been referred to
Dafydd by her GP. Even if the GP had made the referral this does not
mean that Dafydd actually saw Mary. Dafydd cannot be believed and Mary
is not here to ask, so this is one of the many unanswered questions
about Mary’s case.
As well as appearing in the broadsheets and the
Spectator, Mary’s case was also featured in the BBC Two series ‘Taking
Liberties’ in an episode called ‘Who Will Listen To Mary Winch’ which
was screened on March 5 1991. Readers will notice that in the title of
this programme, Mary’s surname was spelt ‘Winch’, as it was in the other
media reports and indeed on the Court papers. Yet in north Wales,
Mary’s name was always spelt ‘Wynch’ and I seem to remember that this is
how she signed her name on the letter to me when she agreed to meet me.
This is yet another very odd thing about this case – although I knew
from personal experience that Court documents are full of errors,
including basic ones and serious ones.
After the BBC programme I
never heard another thing about Mary either in the London based or north
Wales media. Interest in her case disappeared overnight and I was been
unable to gain any further information about it until my co-researcher
came up with some gems a few days ago. He has dug out a brief potted
history of Mary’s case that appeared in the Spectator and has also
acquired a transcript of Mary’s appeal, which was heard on 9 July 1985
at the Royal Courts of Justice in London before Sir John Donaldson
(Master of the Rolls), Lord Justice Parker and Lord Justice Balcombe.
The case is listed as Mary Agnes Winch v Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, Clwyd
Health Authority, representatives of the estate of Paul Eardley Hayward,
Paul Manley Bishop, Home Office. John MacDonald and Colin Braham were
instructed by B.M. Birnberg and Co for Mary and Jon Williams was
instructed by dear old Hempsons (who else – the lawyers who act for the
Medical Defence Union who have featured on this blog previously) on
behalf of Dafydd Alun Jones and Paul Bishop and Christopher Symons was
instructed by the Treasury Solicitor on behalf of the personal
representatives of the estate of Paul Hayward and the Home Office. Mary
appealed to the High Court for leave for two actions alleging negligence
against 1. Dafydd Alun Jones and his employers Clwyd Health Authority
2. Against the late Paul Hayward and his employers the Home Office and
Paul Bishop. Because all three of the doctors were purporting to be
acting under the 1959 Mental Health Act, Mary had to apply for leave to
bring actions against them. It is mentioned in the transcript that Mary
had been previously refused leave by Justice Otten (elsewhere his name
is spelt Otton).
The transcript states that Mary’s mother died in
1972 and that the Public Trustee administered her estate and
subsequently brought an action against Mary and possibly also her
sister. Mary was ordered to hand over certain documents and refused
(Mary was alleging corruption and law breaking and also maintained that
she had not been given the opportunity to attend a crucial court
hearing.) Mary was sent to Risley Remand Centre for contempt of court by
His Honour Vice-Chancellor Blackett-Ord. The committal was in October
1977 but Mary went into hiding so wasn’t actually arrested until July
1978. It is stated that in October 1978 Mary was discharged from Risley
by order of Blackett-Ord to the North Wales Hospital Denbigh to the care
of Dafydd Alun Jones, on Section 26 of the Mental Health Act 1959,
which allowed her to be detained for up to 12 months. This was done on
the recommendation of Hayward and Bishop, Hayward being the medical
officer at Risley, Bishop being a GP.
For 12 months Mary was subjected
to section 26 ‘either in the North Wales Hospital or on leave’ (at no
point did anyone or Mary ever suggest that she had been ‘on leave’ – it
was stated at all times that she was banged up for 12 months). Mary’s
case was that Hayward and Bishop failed to exercise ‘reasonable care in
diagnosing her with paranoia’ and that Dafydd Alun Jones failed to
exercise ‘reasonable care’ in considering her earlier release from the
North Wales Hospital (I remember that a press report at the time stated
that during the year in which she was in Denbigh, Jones did not visit
Mary or review her case once).
The transcript also mentions that Mary
had consulted several solicitors and was now suing two of them for
negligence. Her view was that all the solicitors that she consulted were
conspiring to stifle her complaints. This was the first occasion that
the Court had to consider an appeal regarding the Mental Health Act. The
transcript stated that at the previous appeal Justice Otton had
considered that Mary’s applications were not frivolous, vexatious nor an
abuse of the process of the Court but that Mary hadn’t satisfied the
Court regarding a prima facie case of negligence against each of the
doctors. At Mary’s appeal to Lord Donaldson, Justice Parker stated that
the case against Dafydd Alun Jones was ‘fit to be tried’, although this
was ‘not so clear’ with regard to Hayward and Bishop.
There is a Dr Fry
mentioned in the transcript who seems to have provided an opinion on
Mary at an earlier stage of her journey through the Courts. The
transcript also makes reference to someone at some point providing
evidence stating that ‘she has no insight into her condition and will
break into the property she formerly owned and squat in it. She would
not remain in hospital of her own accord’. Yet during the appeal it was
noted that there is no evidence Miss Winch had ever broken into the
property or squatted in it or had ever threatened to do so’. (So Mary
had been the subject of ludicrous allegations and speculations for which
there was no evidence and these allegations and speculations somehow
had found their way into Court documents – this happened to me after I
made complaint about the north Wales mental health services.) Justice
Balcombe agreed that the appeal should be allowed. The transcript states
that the case against Hayward and Bishop was based on Dr Fry’s
evidence. John Macdonald submitted that Hayward and Bishop should have
made enquiries of Jones and the Official Solicitor and that they did
this.
Mary’s appeal was allowed with costs.
My co-researcher
has dug up a few details of the ‘Taking Liberties’ programme screened
by BBC Two on 5 March 1991. The producer was Rhonda Evans and the series
producer was Elizabeth Clough, who until very recently was the wife of
Jeremy Paxman. My co-researcher then discovered an Early Day Motion
tabled on 19 March 1991, sponsored by David Bellotti, the LibDem MP for
Eastbourne – ‘This House urges an immediate review by the Home Secretary
of the gross injustices suffered by Miss Mary Winch, now resident in
Eastbourne, and recorded in the BBC Two programme ‘Taking Liberties’ on
Tuesday 5 March’. Six MPs signed this Motion: Alan Beith (Liberal
Democrat, Berwick-Upon-Tweed), Malcolm Bruce (Liberal Democrat, Gordon),
Ronnie Fearn (Liberal Democrat, Southport), Geraint Howells (Liberal
Democrat, Ceredigion and Pembroke North), Matthew Taylor (Liberal
Democrat, Truro and St Austell) and Dafydd Wigley (Plaid Cymru,
Caernarfon).
My co-researcher has also dug up something very
interesting from Hansard. On 31 March 1993, Alex Carlile asked the
Parliamentary Secretary, Lord Chancellor’s Dept, to order a full
investigation into Mary’s case and was asked when there was going to be a
reply to letters concerning Mary’s case dated June 1991, August 1991,
September 1991, October 1991 and May 1992. John M. Taylor replied that
Mary had taken legal action against the Public Trustee which had not yet
concluded and he wouldn’t comment because proceedings were before the
Courts. At this point I thought that the trail had gone cold – despite
so much concern being expressed at what had happened to Mary, there were
no more mentions of her again in the media. But late last night I
received another e mail from my co-researcher who had found something in
Hansard, 27 April 1995. It is recorded that Alex Carlile asked the
Parliamentary Secretary Lord Chancellor’s Department if he would make a
statement on the actions of the Public Trustee in relation to legal
proceedings brought by Miss Phoebe Winch (once more Mary Agnes Wynch’s
name was misrecorded).
John M. Taylor replied that he was unable to
comment on individual cases where legal proceedings have been brought
against the Public Trustee, who was also Chief Exec of the Public Trust
Office. Taylor commented that she was also ‘an independent statutory
office holder’ and ‘decisions that she takes in exercise of her
statutory functions are those of her office and are not taken on behalf
of Government’. Taylor adds that as the question concerns a specific
case, he had asked the Chief Exec to reply direct. There follows the
text of a letter from Julia Lomas to Alex Carlile, 25 April 1995. The
mistake with Mary’s name is acknowledged and corrected and Lomas goes on
to state that in 1982 Mary brought proceedings against the Public
Trustee in relation to the administration of the estate of her dead
mother, Violet Wynch. The proceedings were defended. The case was
‘complicated’ and the hearing was ‘anticipated to be lengthy and
expensive’ and therefore in 1994 a payment of £15,000 into Court to
settle the matter was authorised. Mary accepted this payment, which was
made with no admission of liability on the point of the Public Trustee.
‘The Public Trustee has always been confident that had the case been
fought the Public Trustee would have won, albeit at a disproportionate
cost to public funds. The payment into Court was and remains regarded by
me payment to save public funds rather than any admission as to the
merits of Miss Winch’s case’.
And that was the end of the
matter – a respectable innocent woman had been ruined, swindled out of
her inheritance by a bunch of small town crooked solicitors, illegally
imprisoned and then banged up, again illegally, in a notoriously grim,
lawless mental hospital for a year. And people occupying the highest
offices of the British state colluded with all of it.
Followers of
my blog know that in previous posts, I have compared the chronology of
some of the things that happened in my own case – being arrested at the
behest of the north Wales mental health services, being denounced as
‘dangerous’, being served with High Court Injunctions on the basis of
affidavits sworn by people who were lying about me and who had sometimes
not even met me – with the chronology of the actions of Alison Taylor
and others drawing attention to the paedophile ring that was operating
in the children’s homes in north Wales. The injunctions and arrests
correlate nearly perfectly with the breaking of stories about the north
Wales paedophile ring, the ring which we now know was being facilitated
and concealed by a number of people employed and associated with the
mental health services in north Wales. The shit raining down upon my
head was particularly bad in 1991 – when all that media and
Parliamentary attention was focused on what had happened to Mary. It was
at this time that the north Wales mental health services, along with St
Georges Hospital and Springfield Hospital, were using some of the most
biggest names in UK forensic psychiatry to denounce me as so dangerous
that I was a candidate for the likes of Broadmoor – although there was
documentary evidence that the psychiatrists in London knew that patients
in north Wales were being sexually exploited by psychiatrists and that
they also knew there was no evidence at all for the very serious charges
that I was facing which were eventually dropped. Springfield documented
that I had become suicidal as a result of the stress that I was under
as a result of the constant arrests and court cases – yet failed to
support me at all and discharged me with no aftercare after three weeks.
When I arrived home after being discharged from Springfield, I found a
letter from my employers, St Georges Hospital Medical School – I had
been working as a research assistant there. This letter stated that I
had spent an ‘excessively long time on sick leave’ and was effectively
telling me that I was sacked. I had been on sick leave for three weeks. I
now have in my possession copies of letters signed by managers of the
north Wales mental health services in which they ask each other if their
friends and contacts at St Georges have found out which dept I was
working in and letters describing how their contacts at St Georges were
accessing mail sent to me at the hospital in order to find out my home
address. I also have a copy of a letter signed by the occupational
health physician at St Georges – who basically harassed me throughout my
time there and constantly told me to stop my complaints about the
mental health services in north Wales – confirming that my ‘behaviour at
work’ ‘was not a problem’.
Just after I left St Georges in
1991, Dr Tony Francis from Ysbyty Gwynedd (who has previously been
referred to on this blog as Dr X) ordered his solicitors – Hempsons – to
take steps to have me committed to prison on the grounds that I was
breaking a High Court Injunction that he’d obtained against me. He had
obtained the injunction by perjuring himself and I have copies of
letters demonstrating that his own legal advisors had advised him very
strongly not to take legal action against me. Francis wanted me
‘committed to prison’ because I was writing letters of complaint stating
that he and Dafydd Alun Jones were abusing patients and breaking the
law. So who was the barrister who represented a man who was breaking the
law – along with his colleagues – and tried to have the woman who was
complaining about this imprisoned? It was one Robert Francis QC, a
barrister who worked for the Medical Defence Union. Robert Francis is
now Sir Robert Francis QC, a member of the Care Quality Commission and
leading light of the Patients Association! He was also famously employed
to Chair the Inquiry into the genocide that took place at Mid-Staffs –
there were numerous allegations that Robert Francis played down the full
horror of what happened at Mid-Staffs. Francis also led the Freedom To
Speak Up review into whistleblowing in the NHS. Whistleblowers maintain
that Francis sold them down the river and that his recommendations did
nothing to protect them. Readers new to this blog can read the whole
shameful saga in previous blog posts such as ‘St George’s Hospital
Medical School 1989/90’, ‘Some Very Eminent Psychiatrists From London…’
and ‘The Sordid Role of Sir Robert Francis QC’.
As for the Early
Day Motion in 1991 urging an investigation into Mary’s case that was
signed by Dafydd Wigley and others – this would appear to have been a
noble action but obviously didn’t get anywhere. Yet only a year later,
Dafydd Wigley signed another Early Day Motion, this time sponsored by
Elfyn Llwyd, opposing the closure of Garth Angharad. Garth Angharad,
which was described as a ‘hospital for mentally abnormal criminals’,
contained people who complained that they’d been molested in children’s
homes in north Wales and was owned and managed by a man who was
mentioned in the Waterhouse Report as someone who also owned children’s
homes and residential schools which had been at the centre of
allegations of physical cruelty and sexual abuse (please see blog posts
‘More On Those Prisons For Folk Who Dared Complain’ and ‘Further
Information On Garth Angharad Hospital’). So why in the course of a year
did Dafydd Wigley move from a position of defending Mary on a
Parliamentary level to working to ensure that the personal prison of
Dafydd and the paedophile gang remained open? In about 1990 I received a
very supportive letter from Dafydd Wigley after I contacted him about
the abuses taking place at the North Wales Hospital. Yet when I wrote to
him again a couple of years later I did not receive a reply. It is part
of north Wales folklore that Dafydd Wigley was eventually shafted by
Plaid for reasons that only members of the inner circle understand and
was replaced as MP for Caernarfon by the fool Hywel Williams, a former
psychiatric social worker who had worked with Dafydd Alun Jones and the
North Wales Hospital Denbigh. Of course as a social worker based in
Gwynedd, Hywel will have been employed by Gwynedd Social Services –
that’s the Gwynedd Social Services that the Waterhouse Report admitted
had a Director, Lucille Hughes, who knew that a paedophile ring was
operating within the Social Services but failed to respond. All Williams
achieved in the years following his election was to reduce Plaid’s
majority in that constituency, which had been huge (recent boundary
changes have bumped up the majority again, giving Hywel a bit of a
breather). Dafydd Wigley was enormously popular locally – but
interestingly enough the one person whom I know who was probably even
more complimentary about Wigley than anyone else was Dr Tony Francis. So
would anyone from Plaid – including Dafydd Wigley himself – like to
explain to the rest of us what went on?
As for the final mention
of Mary in Hansard in 1995 – by 1996 the Jillings Report was published, a
result of the first investigation into the north Wales child abuse
scandal (please see previous posts). This was the report that was
so damning that it was famously not published and an order was sent out
by Flintshire Council (which had succeeded Clwyd County Council after
what looks like now a very convenient local authority reorganisation)
that all copies should be pulped. The Jillings Report was commissioned
by Clwyd County Council in 1994, so Jillings and his team will have been
undertaking their investigation in 1995…
The information that my
co-researcher has sent me about Mary’s case has prompted me to find out
more about the judges and lawyers involved in her case – and the
politicians behind the scenes. More posts on this will follow soon.
One
more appeal to readers of the blog. Many years ago, sometime in the
mid-1980s, Radio 4 broadcast a play called ‘Penrhyn Summer’. It had very
obviously been written by someone like me, of my generation as well,
who had studied at Bangor University and made friends with local people
rather than only students. The play’s plot centred around a young woman
who had just graduated and had taken a summer job at Penrhyn Castle and
through this had learnt much of the grimmer history of north Wales and
how local people had suffered at the hands of an economy dominated by
the Anglicised landowners in the region. The North Wales Hospital
featured in this programme and there were references to the dreadful
things alleged to be happening there. One of the central characters in
the play was a local man whom the young woman idolised who framed
himself as a radical political activist – towards the end of the play
this man announced that he’d been selected as a Plaid candidate for
Westminster and dropped his enquiries into the North Wales Hospital…
Most of what I hear about north Wales on Radio 4 is so inaccurate that
it’s not worth listening to. But this play had the social and cultural
landscape of north west Wales in the mid-1980s spot on (only of course
Radio 4 used actors who all had perfect SOUTH Walian accents) and it was
very obviously based on someone’s own experiences. I have tried to find
out who wrote this play, or indeed to gain any more info about it at
all, but have got nowhere. If any readers know anything about it –
especially who the hypocritical Plaid candidate was based upon – I’d
love to know more.
Whilst on the subject of memories of student
life at Bangor in the 80s, one of the biggest and most well-funded of
the student societies was ‘Community Action’. CA (as it was known) had
it’s own minibus and I seem to remember had a full-time paid organiser.
One of their specialities was ‘working with disadvantaged children’ in
the Bangor area. Students are idealistic and probably would never have
imagined that a vicious paedophile ring was operating in the
local Social Services. But someone in authority in CA will have smelt a
rat. And the one thing that students like me who mixed with local people
noticed was how many seriously neglected children there were in Bangor.
Children whose parents had abandoned them or gone to prison or who had
parents who simply couldn’t cope were just left to their own devices,
often left in the care of an older sibling who couldn’t look after them
very well. And people did know that all was not as it should be.
When I
first complained about Gwynne Williams the lobotomist who was working
sessions in the Student Health Centre no less, my first representations –
after I’d been threatened by Dr DGE Wood the GP running the Centre and
told by him that I ‘wasn’t allowed’ to complain about Williams – were
made to the Welfare Officer in the Students Union. This young man
admitted that there were major problems with Gwynne Williams and that
there had been many complaints about him. He later denied saying this to
the staff of the Health Centre. He then told me that if continued to
complain about Williams I would get a ‘bad name’ – did he know that I’d
be slandered, libelled and lied about in Court perhaps? After this
he told me that he couldn’t take my complaint any further. Some five
years ago I discovered that this man had become the Financial Director
of an NHS Trust in the English Midlands (which was interesting because
he graduated with a Third and I was told that he subsequently failed
accountancy exams).
Clearly Duncan Orme has done very well for himself
after failing to challenge a lobotomist whose handling of one student
was so negligent that they tried to kill themselves hours after seeing
him. An ideal start to a glorious career in NHS senior management. But
my God Duncan – the bastards were assisting a paedophile gang as well….
http://www.drsallybaker.com/uncategorized/the-mary-wynch-case-details/
