St John’s college is to be forced to pay out an estimated £250,000 worth of legal fees after it lost a long-running battle with a Warwickshire landowner over a hedge. The court case reached its end on 22nd September when Recorder Andrew Willetts ruled against the College.
The dispute began in 2013 when retired architect Anthony Bethell, 75, decided to restore the 180-yard hedge separating his £2.2m Warwickshire home from the Wasperton Estate, owned by St John’s since 1755. Mr Bethell’s one-acre property is bordered on two sides by the college’s tenanted farmland, which totals 1,200 acres. Mr Bethell allegedly approached representatives from St John’s on eight oc- casions over two years in order to clarify the exact location of the boundary between the College’s land and his own.
The dispute over the position of the hedge and whether Mr Bethell was allowed to restore it eventually reached Coventry Crown Court. In his judgment last month, Recorder Andrew Willetts ruled that Mr Bethell is entitled to carry out maintenance work on the hedge and to access College-owned land in order to do so. He ordered St John’s to pay nearly all of Mr Bethell’s legal costs, totalling around £250,000.
Willetts said that it was “perplexing and bizarre” that the College had failed to respond to Mr Bethell’s approaches over how to proceed. In August 2014, Mr Bethell’s legal team was told in correspondence from lawyers representing St John’s that Andrew Parker, Principal Bursar of the College, “Has no desire to speak to [Mr Bethell] and no amount of correspondence will alter that.”
A judge at an earlier pre-trial hearing reportedly told the parties involved that the bushes “were becoming the most expensive hedge in Warwickshire” and that both sides would be better off “piling up £30,000 each in a field and lighting a huge bonfire.”
Professor Parker said in a statement to Cherwell, “St John’s College greatly regrets the tactics employed by Mr Bethell, including bringing this matter into court by issuing a claim against the College and its tenant. The College regards Mr Bethell as the aggressor in this matter and notes that many opportuni- ties to settle this matter amicably have been passed over by him. Indeed, until proceedings were issued, the College believed that it had reached an agreement with him.
“The College was disappointed by some of the Court’s findings but welcomes the clarity that the decision brings, and the rejection of Mr Bethell’s claim for an additional strip of the College land. The College hopes that this decision will remove the need for Mr Bethell to attempt further manoeuvres that appear to the College to be fundamentally tactical in nature.”
After the latest judgment, Mr Bethell told Cherwell, “It seemed to me that from the very beginning they thought that because they were an Oxford college they couldn’t pos- sibly be wrong. They were incredibly uncooperative and wouldn’t negotiate. I kept asking them to come to the table but they refused. All I wanted to do was restore an ancient hedgerow entirely at my expense but they decided to be awkward and wouldn’t agree to me restoring the hedge or entering the land to carry out work.”
“To this day I have no idea why…the College it- self is a charity and should never have got itself into a situation of wasting these resources.”
