In Thomas Hardy's novel, Jude The Obscure, a young boy, Jude, appalled at the failure of the elder Jude and his lover to find lodgings for the family of five, hangs himself and the two babies. His suicide note explains: "Done because we are too menny". I read the novel 23 years ago and still remember with a shudder the gloom into which it plunged me. The only comfort was that Hardy was writing fiction about English society more than a century ago, before the welfare state and even before the Labour party was founded.
Such a terrible tragedy was plainly unthinkable in modern times. Then, last Tuesday I read about Linda Mulvihill of Lancing, West Sussex. She was so terrified of the mounting debt she owed her mortgage lender that she poured petrol over her lounge and set fire to it. When firefighters eventually broke in, they found the bodies of Mrs Mulvihill and her two children, Carly, 11, and Nicholas, nine. They had died from inhaling smoke. Linda Mulvihill had written in letters to her neighbours that she had told her children she had no option but to go to heaven "to see the angels".
Who was owed this tragic debt? From the office of the West Sussex coroner, Roger Stone, I discovered to my amazement that the mortgage lender was never even identified at the inquest. I got the name from Detective Chief Inspector Dave Gaynor of West Sussex police who was in charge of the case, and was obviously greatly distressed by it. He told me the £40,000 mortgage had been provided by Northern Rock, which used to be a building society, but in 1997 was "converted" into a bank. The Mulvihills' mortgage debt had grown to more than £70,000 and was going up all the time because of legal fees; and repossession was imminent. DCI Gaynor also told me that after the tragedy the Northern Rock rescheduled the debt into something the bereaved husband and father, Pat Mulvihill, a building worker, can afford. The chief inspector agreed with me that the rescheduling had come rather late in the day, at a heavy price.
He also told me that Mrs Mulvihill had collected her mail from the Post Office and had kept her husband in the dark about the increasingly strident demands from solicitors acting for Northern Rock. He confirmed that as far as he knew, no effort had been made by Northern Rock to contact the Mulvihills personally or to see if there was any remedy other than repossession.
This aspect of the story was familiar to Ken Appleby, a marketing consultant in Leicestershire.
In 1988, Mr Appleby and his wife had helped their two sons, Timothy and Robin, buy a house in Bingley, West Yorkshire. The parents and their sons were all signatories to the agreement for a £19,000 mortgage from the Bradford & Bingley. Both boys lost their jobs and had difficulty holding on to new ones because of the current fashion for agency employment on short-term contracts.
By the beginning of last year they had fallen behind on their mortgage payments by £1,900. Robin, the younger son, hid the building society's threatening letters. The solicitors for the Bradford & Bingley wrote to the parents at the Bingley address, though the building society knew perfectly well that they had long ago left the area, and had their Leicestershire address on file. The family spent a cheerful Christmas together. Robin kept his grim secret. On January 27 this year, bailiffs from the building society knocked on the door and said they had come to repossess the house. When they finally broke the door down, they found Robin hanging, dead, from the banister.
On his hand he had written:
"Sorry, love to all, but life is just too intense for me these days. I can't cope (never could really). Game over. Love Rob."
A few days later, Ken Appleby wrote an anguished letter to the West Yorkshire coroner, Mr L Scaife. He pointed out that he and his wife, though they were signatories to the mortgage, had had no idea of their sons' mortgage difficulties. No attempt had been made to contact them personally. "The enforcement procedures presumably follow the letter of the law," he wrote. "But how can the Bradford & Bingley take so little care?"
He ended by asking that the building society attend the inquest to answer questions. The West Yorkshire coroner, like the West Sussex coroner last week, didn't think that would be necessary.
Two other facts may be of interest:
1) The members of the Bradford & Bingley building society, prompted by the prospect of a handsome "windfall" (bribe), voted last year to "convert" from being a friendly society to a bank.
2) In 1997, 32,770 houses were "repossessed" by mortgage lenders. In 1998, the first full year of a New Labour government committed to caring for people in need, the figure went up to 33,820.
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