London - A dairy farmer’s son who ‘hated cows and made them nervous’ has lost a High Court battle to inherit his parents’ £1million (around R18 million) farm.
Clive Shaw, 56, claimed his parents Walt and Gill went back on promises they made to him when they wrote him out of their wills last year.
He said he had worked from a young age on their Lincolnshire farm, having been told that it would be his eventually.
But the couple said he did not deserve it because he did not work hard enough and could not even be trusted to get up in time for work. And they insisted they had never given up the right to change their minds about their wills.
Mr Shaw’s sister, Cheryl Hughes, 43, told the court that he would often call the cows ‘stinking, horrible, rotten creatures’.
Her brother admitted he ‘didn’t like’ the cows, but denied hating them. But Judge John Linwood said: ‘I accept the evidence of Cheryl that he hated the herd and they were nervous of him.
‘[His other sister] Teresa also says Clive hated the herd and had “no empathy with animals”.’
After the High Court hearing, Judge Linwood said Mr Shaw was more interested in trucks and had not done enough to deserve the valuable land.
The ruling means Mr Shaw now has to pay a £100,000 legal bill. In addition, the judge gave him and his partner, Lesley Hollis, only six weeks to pack up their stuff and leave Whaley Farm in New York, near Boston.
The judge said: ‘Clive was promised the farm would be his inheritance from about 1978 onwards, but those assurances were conditional upon Clive working properly on the farm in the manner of a dedicated, long-term farmer.
‘However, Clive was not sufficiently interested and his lifestyle choices were such that he did not want to take on the farm and dedicate himself to it, as his interests were elsewhere, in driving and engineering. Clive ... was never going to be the farmer Walt thought and hoped he would be.’
The court heard that Walt and Gill Shaw, both 78, wrote their son out of their wills after a falling-out at Christmas 2016. Despite that, Mr Shaw and Miss Hollis continued living in a caravan on the farm, yards from his parents’ farmhouse.
Mr Shaw went to the High Court to try to force them to adhere to the promises he said they made to him. He insisted he had worked long and hard enough during the years when he was at the farm full-time and returned to help out whenever free afterwards.
He eventually stopped working on the farm and now splits his time between a show-truck business which he runs from the land, and engineering work abroad.