I enclose a letter received from the BBC, which states that renunciation clauses have been in common use in their contracts for many years in cases where contributors to their programmes have waived their rights to fees, preferring them to be donated elsewhere, and that in all cases the renunciation has been accepted without question as absolving the signatories from any liability to tax on such fees. I am sending copies of this letter to all the parties you have involved in your enquiries, and I trust that its terms will resolve your doubts as to the validity of such clauses.
I am still awaiting an explanation of the reason why you have demanded tax at 40p on the whole of my royalties for 1987/8 after Mr Lawson had promised me the basic rate of 25p. There has clearly been a considerable overcharge and overpayment and I hereby apply for a refund of the amount overpaid with interest at the rate charged by the Inland Revenue on overdue demands, and shall expect a corrected demand for the second instalment falling due in July.
Please reply in writing.
AWainwright
LETTER 316: TO INLAND REVENUE, 11 MAY 1989
38 Kendal Green, Kendal, 11th May 1989
Dear Sir,
The salient facts for 1982/3 and 1983/4 are as follows: I have paid all the tax due from me.
Your records show that I have paid all the tax due from me.
Your office has written to me agreeing my computations.
You have demanded a further 65,000 by additional assessments. You admit that there is no substance in these assessments and still do not explain how you arrived at your estimates.
You have proved that, contrary to popular belief, fiction can be stranger than the truth. You should kill the additional assessments stone dead, not give them a lingering death by appeal or postponement. Or, if you prefer, try to prove to the Court that I owe and refuse to pay 65,000. Either way you get egg on your face and it is self-inflicted.
I am told by Michael Joseph that you have now changed tack and are not questioning the renunciation clause but instead seeking evidence that I nullified the discretion given to them by instructing them, in writing or verbally, to whom the renounced royalties should be distributed. You have again landed yourself in a dead end. I have never given such an instruction, in writing, or verbally, nor sought to do so. In any case you are out of date: it has been permissible for some years for the signatory to a renunciation clause to state the name of the Charity he wishes to benefit.
I too have gone on a different tack. I told you at our meeting that although I had been writing books for publication for almost 40 years I had never claimed my full business expenses. This benefaction to the Inland Revenue has now ceased. Take notice that in my current tax return for 1989/90 I have included 1,000 for office accommodation and 10,000 for secretarial and chauffeuring services.
You mentioned in one of your letters that I had never declared the royalties I had renounced. Of course I did not. The tax return requires to know all income received, not income that might have been received if circumstances had been different.
I note that you agree I have been overcharged on my royalties for 1988/9 but cannot understand why the overpayment cannot be adjusted for many months. I intend to withhold payment of the second instalment until I receive a corrected assessment.
I applaud your intention to get a ruling on renunciations from the Board of Inland Revenue. If you had done this in the first place such wasted time might have been saved.
At our interview you gave me certain assurances that I would now like to see in writing:
Are you satisfied that I have in every year paid tax on all royalties actually received by me?
Do you confirm that in all the years under review your office has written to me confirming their agreement with my computations?
You have been provided with the audited accounts of the Charities that have received donations from publishers equivalent to the renounced royalties. Are you satisfied that all such donations have been fully accounted for? In this connection you made a snide remark that, even so, I could have appropriated some of the money for personal use, a suggestion I found extremely offensive and ask you to withdraw; if you had studied the accounts intelligently you would know that this has not happened. On the contrary I have contributed generously to Animal Rescue out of taxed income.
You were insensitive enough to send me a leaflet on income tax fraud default or neglect. Am I suspected of fraud? Or default? Or neglect?
Please let me have your answers in full, as statements of fact and not merely as a Yes or No. I am compiling a dossier on the antics of the Kendal Tax Office, including our correspondence, and have a publisher eager to give it national coverage by a press release. I intend to call it A Black Comedy but doubt whether you would find it amusing.
In May 1989, AW sent a postcard to Mr Ibbs, Tax Inspector, from Wester Ross, where he and Betty were on holiday.
LETTER 317: TO INLAND REVENUE, 23 MAY 1989
Dear Mr Ibbs,
Even on holiday
In faraway Scotland
I am thinking of you.
Wish you were here.
In June, 1989 at long last, the Inland Revenue agreed that AW had not been guilty of income tax evasion.
LETTER 318: TO INLAND REVENUE, 21 JUNE 1989
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
21st June 1989
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your letter of the 15th informing me that the Board of Inland Revenue had confirmed that the renunciation clauses in my contracts with publishers were valid and absolved me from any tax liability on the royalties thereby renounced.
The outcome was as I expected and never really in doubt. It is nice of you to express pleasure at the decision when you must have felt some disappointment at drawing a blank after spending a year of your life barking up the wrong trees and exploring blind alleys that led nowhere. You will surely realise now that it would have been far better to have obtained the Board’s opinion before starting an exercise that wasted so much of your time and the time of others. For my part I must say I found it galling to reflect that I was contributing to your salary while you were seeking to prove or disprove that I was a villain.
Your difficulty was in failing to interpret correctly the word ‘renounce’. The word has no hidden or double meaning: It is exact, absolute and conclusive. When King Edward VIII renounced the throne there was no investigation into his intention, no doubt about his meaning. To renounce a thing is to give up all rights and entitlement to it.
Of course I appreciate that you were doing your duty as you saw it. In two respects, however, you exceeded your authority. You had no right to enquire how the publishers had distributed the renounced royalties, their discretion in this matter being absolute, and it was no business of yours to ascertain how the charities benefiting had spent the money they received.
You must now call off your Cumbernauld dogs, who are pursuing me with the ferocity of Rottweilers and threatening distraint or Court proceedings if I do not pay promptly the sums raised by your additional assessment. I have warned the Collector that unless he desists he will face a Court hearing for unlawfully demanding money with threats. I will spare you the discomfiture of replying to my letter of 11th May.
Nor will I embarrass you further by sending a presentation copy of the dossier I am compiling to the Board of Inland Revenue as I intended and will content myself by circulating it only amongst the people you have involved by your enquiries.
Now that this sorry saga has come to an abortive end I believe I can claim compensation for the disruption caused to my life over the past twelve months by your investigations, for the distress to my wife, for the harassment resulting from your Collector’s unlawful demands and threats, and for the costs incurred by the solicitor in carrying out your instructions. I am prepared to settle this claim for a modest single payment of 5,000. Please make your cheque payable to Animal Rescue, Cumbria.
AW
AW never got his compensation, and probably did
n’t expect it, but he had won. He then carefully bundled up all the correspondence, having kept exact carbon copies of all his letters, and those from the Inland Revenue, plus copies of documents from the BBC and Michael Joseph which he had been obliged to seek. He tied the bundle with a pink ribbon, in best legal style, and wrote a covering note on the front which he entitled ‘A Dossier of the Antics of the Tax Office – a Black Comedy.’
As a postscript, as he waited for any reply from the Inland Revenue to his last letter, he added: ‘No replies have been received from the Inspector or the Collector to my letters of 20 and 21 June, nor have these gentlemen been heard of since. It is perhaps premature to assume they have fled the country. They may, of course, simply be hiding under their desks.’
AW had expended a great deal of energy on the correspondence, but there was clearly part of him which enjoyed it, knowing he was in the right, and also knowing from his own long experience in local government the bureaucratic mentality and how to play them at their own game.
While this Inland Revenue battle was going on, AW got taken round Kendal’s new shopping centre and heard of the Council plans to erect, oh horrors, a statue in his honour. His letter to the Council Leisure Department is another example of his mastery of the bureaucratic prose and argument, when the need ever arose.
LETTER 319: TO MR GOODALL, KENDAL COUNCIL LEISURE DEPARTMENT, 19 JANUARY 1989
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
19 January 1989
Dear Mr Goodall,
Thank you for your letter of the 14th December and for showing me around the new shopping centre and the site of the proposed exhibition centre last Tuesday.
I found the whole development rather more pleasing than I had been led to expect, apart from the Market Hall, which is a disgrace and a sad misuse of a fine old building. The area has been cleverly planned and the links with the car parks and the Market Hall quite ingenious. My great regret, shared by many other people, is that the design and layout is entirely alien to the old traditions and characteristics of the town and yet another example of the disregard of its unique features shown over the past fifty years by planners, architects and administrators, many of them offcomers who have no feeling for the old town and apparently no knowledge of its ancient history. During the past five decades I have witnessed the draining away of Kendal’s former charm and the erosion of its character. The heart has been torn out of the old town and many of its distinctive features destroyed. Most of the quaint buildings and yards have been sacrificed to make way for car parks and modern structures that are totally lacking in visual appeal. It was once a pleasure to walk around the town, but that pleasure has gone.
Bringing Kendal into the twentieth century has been a painful process and inflicted unnecessary wounds. Kendal was a town unlike any other and it has been made ordinary.
This preamble leads to a suggested compromise about the proposed Centre. Had I known of the Council’s plans when they were first mooted I would have given them the thumbs down, although of course, deeply aware of and grateful for the honour they were extending to me. I have never sought the limelight, and much of the publicity I have suffered recently has been thrust upon me and is not to my liking. Friends who know me best have expressed to me the opinion that a display such as your Council has in mind would destroy my image, not preserve it. I am therefore not enthusiastic about the proposal, but am aware that a great deal of advance planning has obviously been given to it, which I would not like to be entirely abortive, and after much thought would like to make a suggestion for your consideration to redeem the situation. My suggestion is that the Centre should be made into a true Heritage Centre by staging a permanent exhibition of Bygone Kendal, the main gallery being adapted for this purpose with me coming in round the corner merely as an incident. There is, in any case, far too much space for any memorabilia of mine. I can visualise the entrance gallery used for a descriptive display of Kendal from the earliest times, with a blown-up running commentary by John Marsh illustrated by old prints and maps, with particular reference to the development of Kirkland around the Saxon Church, the Castle, and of course the growth of the woollen industry (for which the Museum has an abundance of artefacts and would doubtless be glad to release some). Then, coming to the 19th century there is ample material for display. Percy Duff has in his keeping the O’Connor collection of photographs taken around 1870–1880 and many he has himself collected: some of these could be blown up to cover the walls: I am thinking particularly of the old Pump Inn and the stage coach in Stricklangate. The drawings and maps in my ‘Kendal in the Nineteeth Century’ could also be used. Then, around the corner, and leading up to me, the Westmorland Gazette could be let loose to make up a display of the old printing press first used for the Pictorial Guides with the wooden blocks first used, and, under cover, a selection of the original pages of the books they have published, including my original maps of Westmorland and the Antiquities of Cumbria. Then, at the end of the room, there could be a bust of me (not a statue) with photographs of the cottage where I lived, the Town Hall and school and of the dark satanic mills of Blackburn and of the Rovers’ ground, together with the few mementos of fellwalking I still have. Upstairs the video room could remain as planned.
The sale of books on the premises would probably be opposed by the local booksellers, but if this is to be permitted the London publishers, Michael Joseph Ltd. Have made it known to me that they would like a small section for their own display of the cut-out cardboard models and photos they have used in advertising their Wainwright publications.
These are my thoughts on 19th January 1989.
Yours sincerely,
AW
Despite all his fame, nationally and locally, AW received a rather hurtful personal blow in January 1990 from his old publishers, the Westmorland Gazette. He wrote them a furious letter, telling them just what he thought of them.
LETTER 320: TO MR ORR, 18 FEBRUARY 1990
38 Kendal Green, Kendal, 18th February 1990
Dear Sir,
I understand that you have decided not to proceed further with the publication of the book LIMESTONE COUNTRY although the outlay has been approved by your Head Office.
The work of compiling the text of the book, which is now completed, has occupied my time for the past six months, and the photographer you commissioned to supply the illustrations has been engaged on the work for an even longer period and has additionally incurred considerable expenses on films, processing and transport. I am appalled by your callous disregard of our arrangement in abandoning the project without explanation or apology, especially as it follows so closely upon your betrayal of our long-standing agreement that the guidebooks should always be printed in Kendal.
I am sorry to end my long association with the Gazette on a sour note but cannot possibly continue to have a relationship with a firm whose word cannot be trusted.
I must ask you to confirm your decision in writing and immediately, and state, also in writing, your proposals for compensating the photographer, Mr Geldard, and myself for the work we have done for you and which you have now declared abortive.
A copy of this letter has been sent to Mr Stevenson at Westminster Press.
Yours faithfully,
AWainwright
The book Wainwright in the Limestone Dales, with photographs by Ed Geldard, was published by Michael Joseph in March 1991, two months after AW had died.
Part 24
Last Letters to Old Friends and Old Correspondents, 1985–90
AW kept corresponding to the end, always replying to old friends from the past, even if he had not seen them for decades, and some he could hardly remember, and to his regular writers, fans who had grown into pen friends.
He didn’t write a lot to Doris Snape, but then since he had left Blackburn, he usually saw her twice a season, when he went to watch Blackburn Rovers and stayed with her. Her husband Tom Snape, who ran a radio shop in Blackburn, had been one of AW’s oldest friends, and togethe
r they had begun the Rovers Supporters’ Club, but he had died young, in his forties. Even before that, AW often suggested that he and Doris were more than good friends, that she fancied him. Doris, when her husband was still alive, kept a diary and referred to her meetings with AW in code. What happened later, when she was a widow and AW stayed with her? It is hard to tell, though Ruth, AW’s wife, was always jealous. Did he think of marrying her when his marriage to Ruth had collapsed – and before Betty came along? Doris’s family believe he did suggest it, but there is no evidence. Betty was sensible and mature about his friendship with Doris and never felt threatened. She encouraged him to see Doris, and keep up their friendship which had lasted for so many decades.
LETTER 321: TO DORIS SNAPE, 19 MAY 1985
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
19 May 1985
Dear Doris,
First of all, thank you for having me last month, it was a welcome change for me, and greatly enjoyed.
The day after my return was the day fixed for the ascent of Penyghent with the BBC team, and fortunately we were favoured with a brilliantly sunny day. I managed to get to the top, very slowly, in spite of a strong and cold east wind and I think everything went off all right. The BBC team, eight of them, are all very young, in their teens and twenties, even the producer being only in his mid thirties. I get on well with all of them and Betty enjoys their company.
The Wainwright Letters Page 43