This is a precautionary tale, the moral of which is, MAKE A WILL.

In March 2021 an old man, hereafter S, collapsed of emphysema in his house in Kilmainham, Dublin. He lay in a coma for a couple of days before his neighbours twigged, broke in and got him to hospital where he promptly died.

Thankfully he had the phone number of his sister on him. That would be my wife’s ex mother in law, so my ex mother in law in law (hereafter EMiLiL), who lived in Witney, Oxon. She got the call one day to say he was in hospital, and the next to say he had passed. That was where it started to get interesting.

S was a widower with no children or other siblings, so EMiLiL was his next of kin. They had kept in touch, but they hadn’t seen each other in the flesh since she moved to England 30 years ago. She was also almost sure he was intestate. He had often said he didn’t need a will because everything was going to her anyway. We’ll come back to that; suffice to say, children, this line of logic does not work.

EMiLiL was old and frail, and didn’t travel even when there wasn’t a pandemic going on, and didn’t do Internet. We had lasting power of attorney for her so everything now came down to us. Getting her brother buried, selling his house and handling his estate, all by remote control in another country from a standing start.

First things first. Get S into the ground. That was quite easy. The hospital put us in touch with Flanagan funeral directors and after that it was all mostly seamless. Mostly. EMiLiL said she wanted it kept simple; Flanagan translated this as “get the humanist celebrant”. EMiLiL then sent in some prayers and hymns she would like included. We watched the service online and enjoyed the sight of one of Ireland’s leading (apparently) humanists having to announce “In Christ alone” as a song, and recite not only some traditional church prayers but also a Huron spiritual sent in by the son of one of S’s friends from Canada. And then try to put a decent humanist spin on it all.

I emailed him later to thank him. He admitted it hadn’t been quite what he was used to. The ashes were at least interred by a bona fide priest, in S’s wife’s grave. Tracking that down was just one of our easier challenges.

But then the real fun started. Intestacy is not for the faint hearted. We explained our situation to Dublin friends and they put us in touch with the excellent Liston & Co. solicitors. We began to learn a new vocabulary, with exciting variant definitions of verbs that I had thought I understood perfectly well. Prove. Extract. Draw down. (Which you do respectively to: a will; letters of probate; and funds.)

But at least those terms are common to both English and Irish law. This was also when more subtle differences between the two systems began to emerge. They are mostly congruent, just not entirely. There was a form for EMiLiL to sign, signature to be witnessed. In Ireland you can apparently just rock up at your surgery, pay your €10 or whatever and the doctor will sign whatever you ask. Not over here (something to do with liability, apparently). In the end I WhatsApped the solicitor in Dublin so that she could watch EMiLiL sign it, live in Witney; then I could post her the form and she could sign to say she had witnessed it. Finally, we had legal representation in Ireland. Liston could then begin the necessary searches to confirm that S was indeed intestate and without survivors.

Liston suggested Just Clear as a reputable company that could get the key for the house from the hospital, go in, assess the place, bundle up the contents, look for anything that might be valuable and get it over to us, and so on. They also recorded a video tour of the property. Important documents were located and sent to Liston; valuables were duly sent over to us; everything else was cleared out and the property went on the market.

Without probate, you can still offer a house for sale, agree a price and do everything except complete. A terraced house in a handy area of Dublin, a nice little fixer-upper just screaming to be fixed up – it went pretty quickly. €20k less than the asking price, but EMiLiL just wanted it dealt with. The house had been S’s home his entire life – as a child, as a married man and lastly as a widower. Ownership was joint between him and his father, and despite the formality of his father’s death several decades ago the old man’s name had never been taken off. Something else to handle. Meanwhile Liston now had access to S’s various and quite comfortably padded bank accounts (the solicitor noted with interest that his monthly income slightly exceeded his pension payments; we suspect this might have been something to do with horses or dogs). So we had a pretty large sum with which to present EMiLiL, which was enough to make her go pale and alter her will slightly to account for it. This meant making the acquaintance of her own solicitor in England, which was to come in handy.

Because … just as everything was set up, application for probate about to be sent off to the Irish probate office …

In November 2021, EMiLiL went and died herself. Right, start over.

Thankfully – and never has a single word seemed so inadequate to underscore my feelings of gratitude in the matter – EMiLiL had flown in the face of family tradition and LEFT A WILL. Of which we were the executors. Some very generous provision was made for us but most of it was going to her only living descendant: her grandson and my stepson.

I assumed that once we had probate for her in England, we as her executors could apply for probate for S’s estate in Ireland. Not quite. We had to create a nominal estate for her in Ireland first, which could then apply for probate for S. So, three grants of probate to apply for, two in Ireland. In England, the probate office is merely slow. In Ireland, apparently (our Irish solicitor told us) the probate office is so slow it is verging on a national emergency and questions were being asked at Cabinet level. There was also a massive cyber attack on the Irish civil service that took months to recover from, and lockdown didn’t help. Anyway.

Getting probate for EMiLiL in England was no more arduous than it ought to be. Just slow and tedious, but we got there. Selling her flat took longer. She lived in a retirement flat and at first we tried to market it through a firm that said it specialised in retirement flats. Who did absolutely nothing we could discern to try and sell it. This would have had EMiLiL spitting blood, because she had already been furious at the number of empty and overpriced flats in her complex. Eventually we pulled out and switched to Andrews estate agents, who were much better. The lady there pointed out that a specialist company like our first choice is essentially competing against itself. You go to them and ask if they have any retirement flats, and they can only say, “Yes, plenty, and they’re all just as good!” Whereas you go to your local Andrews and say, “Do you have any retirement flats in this town?” and they say, “Well, it’s funny you should ask because we do have this one that should be right up your street …”

Anyway. It sold. It probably helped that we undercut every other flat on sale in the building.

EMiLiL died in November 2021; English probate was granted in May 2022. 14 months after S died, we could finally set about getting probate for his estate.

This was when we became aware of the aforesaid Irish probate situation … Long story short. EMiLiL’s Irish probate was granted in May 2023. Now we could apply for probate for S.

The buyers for S’s house were hanging on, but also getting itchy. They had arranged a loan and needed to start drawing on the funds, or else reapply. They started to make noises like, would we entertain the idea of a caretaker agreement, whereby they could at least get hold of the key and perform running maintenance and maybe make a few improvements but not, you know, actually live there? Or even just move in as tenants until the sale could complete? All of which Liston advised against, because the granting of probate was still well over six months away, and six months is the magic number (in Ireland, anyway) that gives tenants certain inalienable rights that could well and truly bugger up a sale if things went sour. Then at one stage we had another tranche of documents to get signed and witnessed, which disappeared somewhere between England and Ireland; they were tracked, but neither Royal Mail nor An Post would fess up to having them. (They finally crept back home after a couple of months, during which time we had re-signed and re-witnessed a duplicate set, communicating by DHL.) The contract of sale was renegotiated with the buyers. The Irish probate office – uniquely, in the solicitor’s experience – wrote back to the solicitor to ask why an estate was asking for probate of an estate, and had to have it explained in words of one syllable. The contract of sale was re-renegotiated.

Long story short, again. S died in March 2021. EMiLiL’s Irish probate was granted in May 2023. The sale completed in December of that year. But the probate for S … aha! I started writing this in January 2024, when it seemed surely a done deal.

It was not. It took a further 14 months. Part of this was the solicitor wanting the accountant to send off the accounts to the relevant authorities to confirm that every cent was paid, every t crossed, every lower case j dotted; with a case as complex as this, the last thing we wanted was to discover that after all that there were still unpaid taxes to deal with.

And part of that was the accountant taking three months to do this.

As a bit of added entertainment, in October 2024 I received a pair of letters from the Revenue Commissioners, telling me I was on their records as administrator of an estate for someone I have never heard of, and making final demands for a four-figure tax sum. The advantage of having a high-powered solicitor on your side; she fired them a broadside and within a very short time they admitted to a data breach at their end (“a clerical error on their behalf when two files were being worked on in sequential order”) and that that no enforcement or further demands would be made of me, and meanwhile please could I return the letters or destroy them?

Well, that was a laugh.

I think someone at the Revenue Commissioners had a bet on how long they could spin this out for, because while the major GDPR breach was being sorted out, they decided to do a deep dive and discover an unresolved PAYE issue from 2007/2008. A further 1400 euros owed. We had reached the stage where we could authorise a payment like that with just a tired handwave.

And then, on 27th January this year, an email: “We finally have white smoke! General Clearance for the Estate has now been granted by the Revenue Commissioners. I have asked the accountants to let me have their final Invoice for the work done in obtaining General Clearance and once I have that Invoice, I can finalise the figures and serve the 30 day notice on the Revenue Commissioners that we intend to distribute to non-resident beneficiaries.”

But of course it wasn’t quite so straightforward … 6th March: “the Revenue Commissioners confirming that general clearance had been granted. However, I then almost immediately received correspondence from the Revenue Commissioners advising that not only had they taken the Income Tax liabilities of €1,033.00 for 2019 and €955.00 for 2020 but they had taken the further sum of €1,416.66 in respect of overdue Income Tax for 2007, 2008, 2016, 2017 and 2018!” Plus said Revenue owed us a rebate of €286.99 in respect of overpaid Income Tax for 2021. Fun, fun, fun …

We finally received the money from S’s estate today. 2nd May 2025. The whole saga took four years and two months from beginning to end. And the moral of all that: MAKE A WILL!

Finally, let me just record that the following organisations all did sterling work and we could recommend them to anyone.

• Andrews estate agents, Witney
• Flanagan’s funeral directors, Dublin
• Just Clear house clearance, Dublin
• Katharine House Hospice, Banbury
• Liston & Co solicitors, Dublin
• Rea Fitzgerald Chambers estate agents, Dublin
• Royd Withy King solicitors, Oxford

And let me not forget a tip of the hat to their most exalted inscrutabilities, the Revenue Commissioners of Ireland; the Probate Office of the High Court of Ireland; and HMCTS Probate, High Court of Justice of England and Wales.

Anyone wondering why we are currently down one archbishop could do worse than read BLEEDING FOR JESUS: JOHN SMYTH AND THE CULT OF THE IWERNE CAMPS, by Andrew Graystone.

Back in the 1930s, a clergyman named Eric Nash decided that what the country needed was more evangelisation of the upper classes. They would all give their lives to Christ and come to rule the country, and hence all their goodness would trickle down to the unwashed masses and Britain would be a properly Christian nation, huzzah. He regarded this as being fully in line with scripture: in the New Testament, Paul can write with a straight face that he has evangelised the provinces of X, Y and Z, meaning that he has in fact evangelised the leaders of said provinces, and expects them to pass the message on.

To that end a series of camps were instituted, mostly set in the Dorset village of Iwerne (pronounced “you-urn”) Minster and aimed exclusively at public schoolboys. And not just any public schoolboys, but boys from the heavy hitting public school brigade. Eton, Winchester, that lot. It was all very muscular Christianity, majoring heavily on the utter depravity of humanity and the extreme physical suffering of Jesus to atone for it, so be grateful and believe in him, you ungrateful bastards! Nash was evidently a humourless zealot, though lauded as a saint in certain quarters, and the camps sound pretty ghastly. And in the days before proper safeguarding, they were pretty well a safe haven for people who liked to do things other than evangelise to boys, the worst offender being one John Smyth.

Smyth was a high flying QC, a moral paragon – he acted for Mary Whitehouse in the Gay News blasphemy trial – and he had a taste for beating young men until they bled (hence the title of the book), and somehow making them feel grateful for the privilege. I mean, they kept coming back, of their own volition.

(Which, I suspect, might be one reason – but not the only – that nothing was done. I am no expert on abuse but I can see how the strange notion might arise that what Smyth did was in some way consensual. The thinking would go, if the young men didn’t like it, why didn’t they just leave? There was no degree of physical coercion involved. No, but the psychological hold was clearly strong – though that is not an intuitive answer, especially when you don’t want it to be true in the first place. Whatever the reason, a predator like Smyth has his ways of keeping his prey.)

Justin Welby is an alumnus of these camps; so am I. They were much less ghastly by the time I started going in the mid-80s, though the teaching was still just as muscular and even then I was very soon questioning the exclusively public school (and male) bias. In the fifth form I had started going to a weekly Christian meeting at school, hosted by a couple of masters, because I had had ten years of compulsory, non-fun chapel Christianity at school with always the sneaking suspicion that there had to be more to it – and behold, there was. There was absolutely noting untoward about those meetings and I got a lot out of them. But they were very much satellites of the great Iwerne phenomenon, and the camps were always bigged up as something to do during the summer. Eventually, the summer after leaving school, I crumbled and went.

I am 99.9% certain I never met Smyth; I think he had been rumbled by the time I began. Though some of the people named in the running of the camps when he was involved were still around when I was there. I will also say that in the two or three camps I attended I learned a great deal to my benefit and they helped me get my head screwed on right as a Christian. Part of that was the ability to sift and filter and, you know, question. But I must also face up to the fact that I have been taught good stuff by people who effectively colluded in bad stuff.

To their credit, once the camp leaders realised what was happening, Smyth was barred. To their discredit, they did nothing so vulgar as tell the police or offer help to his victims, in case the bad publicity damaged the sacred mission of the camps. He was encouraged instead to leave the country, meaning that he just exported his practices to Zimbabwe and South Africa. All this only came to light a few years ago, in an effort spearheaded by Channel 4 and the author of this book.

The book is not without flaws. It could have been much better edited – there is a lot of repetition – and not all the piecing together of facts makes sense, though the author is convinced it does. It makes the classic error of saying “X was taught Y, therefore X believes Y,” when in fact X is perfectly capable of making up their own mind. Justin Welby did (see his most recently expressed views on same-sex marriage), and so did I.

What is more important is that the higher-flying Iwerne alumni – like Welby – effectively formed their own little evangelical mafia at the top of the church, and like all such organisations, omerta became a habit. Would Welby have acted – more quickly, or at all – if Smyth had come out of the more smells and bells, high end of the church? Who knows?

I think I got out of Iwerne at exactly the right time. There was also an annual ‘conference’ for those who has passed through the school mill and were now at university. This was where the scales fell from my eyes. I assumed that now we were all older and bigger, we could sink our teeth into more substantial discussion and argument. But no, debate remained rigidly channelled towards the right conclusion and anyway it was money I didn’t have, so I stopped going.

Ultimately Iwerne was an important stage in my Christian growth – but I got far more out of the Student Christian Movement (a.k.a. Slightly Christian Marxists) once I was at uni.

It is a very different atmosphere now in the Church of England, with much more awareness of abuse and a safeguarding officer in every parish. It would be a lot harder now for someone like Smyth to do what he did – but not impossible. Predators find a way.

I spent a wonderful couple of hours on Wednesday at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, doing my bit for the repatriation of cultural artefacts.

The artefact in question is an ornate feather cloak gifted by the Maori Wairau Pa (tribe) of South Island, NZ to my great great grandfather, Dr George Cleghorn MD. Those present were me, my mother (who is Cleghorn’s great granddaughter) and Dr Lorraine Eade of the Tokomaru Research Centre, Blenheim, NZ, who is the great granddaughter of the woman who crafted the cloak in the first place. I hadn’t realised how moving the occasion would be. Lorraine was on the verge of tears as she opened the proceedings with a karakia – a Maori incantation for blessing.

Cleghorn was an official Good Egg of the British Empire. He helped the Pa in their dealings with the Europeans and gave a lot of medical help and advice, like the importance of boiling water. Ill Maoris were expected to attend a hospital 17 kilometres away, while Europeans could use the local one. If a Maori turned up at the local one, they were turned away. Cleghorn put a stop to this and allowed them to be treated locally, especially during a typhoid epidemic, despite reprimands from his superiors.

The cloak is just one of the many honours the Wairau Pa gave him. The cloak itself was gifted to him on his retirement. What he might not have gathered was that as part of the Maori culture, such gifts are eventually returned. What with moving back to England, illness, remarriage, dying and the outbreak of World War 1, contact was lost. His widow loaned the cloak to the Pitt Rivers.

The first we heard of this was when New Zealand relatives came to visit in the late nineties. “Oh, Ben [or more like, “Ow, Bin”], you live in Oxford, go and find the cloak.” That bit wasn’t too hard: I went to the PRM and there it was in the feathered cloaks section. However, back in 1998 the museum wasn’t having any of this giving it back thing, taking the (not unreasonable) line that even though the tag on the cloak says “lent by Mrs Cleghorn”, an unclaimed loan after 90 years is pretty well a gift in its own right. But the upside was that contact with the Maoris was restored. And now, a generation later, the atmosphere is very different when it comes to cultural artefacts. It’s an exquisite piece of workmanship, so can be used to teach young Maoris a traditional craft as well as their own history, and of course it symbolises co-operation between the European and Maori communities. There are still hurdles to overcome, but a lot of that revolves around making absolutely sure it will go to a better home when, not if, it is repatriated. (Cleghorn, I’m sorry to say, draped it over his piano.) It would have been simpler if it was just a straightforward case of looting.

Watch this space …