On 21 March 1988 AW got a letter from the Inland Revenue saying that his affairs were being investigated. He was by now a well known TV presenter and author, his latest handsomely illustrated book from Michael Joseph always on the bestseller list. In all, going back to his early guides first produced by the Westmorland Gazette, and still selling well, almost 2 million copies of his books had been sold. Some tax official had clearly been puzzled by the fact that in his tax returns, his income appeared so relatively low. Was some sort of fiddle going on?
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
27th April 1988
Dear Sir,
I have your letter of the 25th inst.
In reply to your enquiry, I submitted my tax return of income for 1987/8 to your office at Bootle, whence it originated, a week ago. This return included the following statement of my income from royalties received in that year:
Royalties received from Westmorland Gazette: 19, 173 Royalties received from Michael Joseph, Ltd: 8, 427 An amount of 576 was also included from Public Lending Rights.
My payments to charities out of this income amounted to 577 and is included under the heading of Covenants.
I would remind you that I have signed the Declaration that the above statements are correct, and frankly I resent the continuing inference that I am evading or avoiding tax. On the contrary I would point out that in more than thirty years of writing for various publishers I have never submitted any claim for legitimate expenses such as postages, films and film processing, stationary, travelling expenses and so on, all necessary in the compilation of my books and which must over the period amount to around 10,000.
Please let me hear from you soon that you have completed your enquiries to your satisfaction and that the matter is closed.
Yours faithfully,
AWainwright
The matter was not closed, and more letters and requests arrived from the Inland Revenue. What had made AW furious was the inference that he was avoiding payments in some way, which he knew he was not, so he was determined to fight back – even though he had so much proper work to do, in the way of books and films, and at the age of eighty-one, his physical health, if not his mental health, was declining.
A year later, in March 1989, he finally had a face to face meeting with the Inspector – and AW wrote a letter to himself, describing what happened.
On March 14 1989 the Inspector wrote suggesting a meeting, and this duly took place at 38 Kendal Green, Kendal, on 20th March.
I had formed an image of him as a little bald-headed man with pince-nez but he turned out to be a strapping young fellow with a beard and a friendly disposition. He introduced himself as Mr Ibbs and said he was an Investigations Officer based in the Kendal Office.
First I asked him what had prompted this investigation, which I felt to be entirely without justification as I had always declared my income fully and paid all tax due; further, I had letters from his office every year agreeing my computations of the tax due. So why this investigation? Well, he said, it was known to the Inland Revenue that some of my books had appeared in best-selling lists and were very widely distributed: it seemed to them that possibly I was not declaring all my earnings from royalties.
He agreed that I had paid tax over the years on all royalties I had actually received. This was not the point at issue. His concern was that I had renounced some of my royalties in my contracts with publishers by signing a clause in the following terms:
‘I hereby renounce all legal rights to the royalties from this book and leave their distribution to the discretion of the publishers’.
He had serious doubts about the wording of the clause. He admitted he was not an expert on contracts but felt that such a clause may not be considered to be legally effective. If such was the case I would be required to pay tax on all the royalties I had renounced (involving arrears of probably over 100,000); in other words if the clause was proved not be watertight my liability to tax would be the same as if not renunciations of royalties had taken place.
This was the main object of his investigation. I disagreed, pointing out that income tax was a tax on income received and could never be a tax on no income against which he argued that the renounced royalties were nevertheless earned by me and therefore my income which I had diverted elsewhere.
My Ibbs said that in the event of his doubts about the validity of the renunciation clauses being confirmed when his investigations were completed and I was held responsible for tax on the renounced royalties, it would now be necessary for him to make ‘protective assessments to keep my file open and subject to review over the six years allowed by law for the recovery of debts. He would therefore be sending additional assessments going back to 1982/3.
The meeting ended without Mr Ibbs being offered a cup of tea.
- - -
The protective assessments arrived a few days later, requiring me to pay 20,000 for 1982/3 and 45,000 for 1983/4.
By imposing these assessments the Inspector made his greatest blunder. It was clear that he had not done his homework properly and had assumed that in both years there had been renounced royalties. But in neither year had I signed contracts with renunciation clauses. The renouncing of royalties did not commence until 1984/5. For the two years 82/3 and 83/4 I had declared and paid tax on all royalties received and no further tax could possibly be due. From then on the Inspector was on the defensive. His mistake was made clear to him but he never admitted it, nor did he countermand his instruction to the Collector to demand payment in accordance with his assessments. This was the start of an uncomfortable time for Mr Ibbs. I had him on the run, as the ensuing correspondence shows.
AW might have thought he had the Inspector on the run, but the letters and demands continued. One thing which had made them suspicious was their discovery that the Treasurer of Animal Rescue, to which so many of his royalties were going, was a Mrs Betty Wainwright.
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
29th March 1989
Dear Sir,
I return herewith your additional assessments for 1982/3 and 1983/4 for cancellation. They should not have been sent to me.
I already have your assurance, both in writing and verbally, that you are satisfied that I have paid tax on all taxable income received in those years, and your researches will have proved that I had no contracts carrying a renunciation clause in either year.
I must say that my hackles are rising at this continuing and unwarranted harassment, and although I know from experience that it is not the practice of the Inland Revenue to say sorry for their mistakes I do feel that a profound apology is called for in this instance.
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
6th April 1989
Dear Sir,
My wife has told me of your telephone call of two days ago.
You are demanding from me an additional payment of 65,000 in tax for the years 1982/3 and 1983/4 over and above the tax paid for those years, and agreed between us. You must now justify the additional assessment, if you can, by stating the dates and amounts of royalties alleged by you to have been received by me in those two years. If you cannot give substance to the additional assessments they should be cancelled. If, as you have suggested, the 65,000 is merely a fiction designed to keep my tax affairs open for those years you should not put me to the trouble of taking part in a paper chase of your own making by requiring me to complete more forms to let you off the hook.
I find it incredible that your tactics require you to make a charge and investigate later, when surely common sense dictates that you should first make your investigations and then charge only if necessary. Professor Parkinson must be writhing in his grave.
You say that you are acting in accordance with income tax law. Quote me chapter and verse where the law imposes on you a duty to charge tax on income that has not been received and that you know jolly well has not been received.
Please reply in writing and not by telephone or interview.
AW
38 Kendal Green, Kendal
19th April 1989
Dear Sir,
I am not in the least surprised that your letter of the 11th avoids my request for details of the royalties forming the basis of your demand for a further payment of 65,000 for the years 82/3 and 83/4. I am entitled to this information and repeat my request.
It is now almost a year since you started an investigation into my tax affairs and if you had spent a little of this time checking my file for the two years in question you would have found that I declared all my earnings, that your office wrote to me agreeing to my figures, that I had no contracts containing renunciation clauses and that I paid all tax due in full. I do not owe a penny more in tax for these two years and in demanding a further 65,000 you have scored a spectacular own goal.
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
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.
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.
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 didn’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.
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.
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.