Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1020
- 1039)
WEDNESDAY 1 DECEMBER 2004 (MORNING)
MRS LYNN
FARR, MRS
JANETTE MATTIN,
MS JUNE
SHARPLES, MRS
CLAUDIA BECKLEY-LINES
AND MR
JUSTIN HUGHESTON-ROBERTS
Q1020 Mr Roy: This website is obviously
very important. For anyone who is watching today's proceedings,
what is the website address?
Mrs Farr: My own?
Q1021 Mr Roy: Yes.
Mrs Farr: I have put a shortcut
because it was too long. It is http://embark.to/DANIEL and there
are links on there to other websites: one to Paul Cochrane and
there are various others on there.
Q1022 Mr Jones: Lynn, could you let
us have the list of those people you have actually had complain
to you. If you do not want to give names, fine, but if you could
give the incidences after today, it would be useful.
Mrs Farr: Can I send them because
I do not have them with me?
Mr Jones: Send them to us.
Chairman: Perhaps you should ask your
legal adviser as to what you can pass on because it might have
been passed on very confidentially.[2]
Q1023 Mr Cran: Still on the subject
of bullying and harassment, the problem with bullying and harassment
is that it can be very subtle at the one end and it can be very
overt at the other. We have received a certain amount of evidence,
particularly from the Surrey Police, which says that there is
really a culture in the Army that just puts up with bullying,
it tolerates it and, on the other hand, also discourages recruits
or in fact anybody else from reporting it. Given your pretty vast
amount of contact with this sort of subject and the people you
have talked to in similar circumstances to yours, is this something
that resonates with you? Claudia, you are nodding your head.
Mrs Beckley-Lines: When the News
of the World did that article for me and the soldiers contacted
the News of the World, the man passed them on to me and
my daughter told me, "Mummy, get a pen and put down their
names because some of them might tell lies." So, we put their
names down, we took their phone numbers, their addresses and what
they said. I did not know how to record on the phone, so I did
everything manually and I have a copy of all of them. Every single
one of them said, "Don't say my name, they will not only
kill me but they will kill my family." Even the man, a civilian
who took my son to the hospital, said that the officer said, "Go
and take off those soiled clothes and put a clean uniform on him"
and he said, "Sir, can I take him to the hospital now?"
because he told me that my son was disappearing into unconsciousness
and coming back, and he said, "I will tell you when I am
ready" and then he said, "Take him" and they took
my son, washed him and put on a clean uniform. I said, "If
they needed to save his life, how could they do all that?"
and he said, "They didn't want to save his life" and
then he said that after they had done all that and put on the
new uniform, two soldiers put him into the man's car, this is
a civilian's car. The man said that my son was still speaking.
He said that he must be strong because he survived it all. He
was still speaking; he was speaking to them and telling them that
he needed air to breathe or something and they put him into this
man's car, and this man took him to the hospital. He phoned me
and said to me, "My job is on the line." Do you know
what I said to him? I said, "If I were you, I wouldn't want
to work in a place like that. Why do you want to work in a place
like that when all you do is take half-dead soldiers to the hospital
after they have been beaten or something?" Then he said,
"Please, please, I love my job, I don't want to lose my job,
I sometimes help out in the Army." He is a civilian and he
gave me his name, his phone number and everything and he was begging
for his job. Nobody wants their name out there but they do not
like what is going on in there.
Q1024 Mr Cran: So, you believe strongly
that there is this sort of culture in relation to bullying?
Mrs Beckley-Lines: Yes, that is
why I have told you all this.
Q1025 Mr Cran: Do you ever sense—and
it is important for us to know this because we have to come to
a decision about it—that anything has changed? It is clearly
the case that, in your personal experience, that is how it was
and I am not arguing with that, but do you have a sense of whether
it has changed from then to now?
Mrs Beckley-Lines: If it has changed,
why are the deaths . . .? These people started dying in 1995.
Twenty-seven of them have died. Why are there so many dying if
it has changed? When my son died, it was 19. Now it is 27. My
son died in 1998, five years ago. I was thinking that maybe they
would stop dying now. No, they are still dying. What are they
doing that is wrong?
Q1026 Mr Cran: That is indeed what
we are investigating. Do any of the rest of you resonate with
what Claudia has said? Do you disagree or do you agree?
Ms Sharples: I do not know if
Allan was bullied or not. All I know is that Allan became engaged
a month before he died and all his friends from the Army came
to the engagement. Once he died, no one would speak to me. Yet,
only four weeks before that, we got on fine.
Q1027 Mr Cran: Did Allan, in conversation
with you, ever mention bullying that related to other people?
Ms Sharples: He did not, no.
Q1028 Mr Cran: In other words, was
this something in his mind?
Ms Sharples: I do not know. He
never said anything about that to me but, whether he would or
not, I do not know.
Mrs Farr: I do not think Daniel
would tell us if he was being bullied.
Q1029 Mr Cran: That is the problem,
is it not? That is one of the big problems we are facing.
Mrs Farr: He was that type of
lad. However, he did have the marks around his body. At the time
of his death, you do not think it is unusual but, on the day that
he died, his sergeant and corporal were outside his room in uniform
the whole time and, once they knew that he had died, they just
went. They were there for 10 hours in uniform outside the door
of his room.
Q1030 Mr Cran: Janet, do you have
anything to say?
Mrs Mattin: I have nothing to
add, really. I did not know that Mark was being bullied and he
certainly did not tell me of anyone else that he knew of who was
being bullied. He had become so introverted that I do not think
he would have told me.
Mrs Farr: I think there is a fear
that you know what parents are like and, if you tell your Mum,
then your Mum will get on the phone and then the matter will get
worse.
Mrs Mattin: Which we would have
done.
Q1031 Mr Cran: You have really got
to the root of the conundrum that we have in front of us which
is that this propensity for some recruits, maybe quite a lot of
them, simply not acknowledging bullying and so on and so forth
and, because there seems to be a culture in particularly the infantry
of not complaining, then all the array of improvements that the
Army say they have put in place, in those circumstances, would
not work.
Mrs Farr: No, they would not.
Mr Cran: That would seem to be the conclusion
that I am beginning to reach on this.
Q1032 Chairman: But it is not so
much about not complaining, it is to internalise your problems
and not show weakness and not reveal pain.
Mrs Mattin: It is the intimidation.
Chairman: Because that is not what proper
soldiers do. So, I think it is not just a question of complaining,
it is part of a broader process and you were the first perhaps
to see these changed characters because now they were soldiers
and they do not go complaining to their mothers about problems.
I think that is almost an inevitable consequence of a training
regime with its strength and its weaknesses, I am afraid.
Q1033 Mr Hancock: June, you raised
a very interesting point and I think it is an issue which we need
to try and get to and that is that you are one Mum who knew her
son's Army friends because they came to his engagement party and
you obviously knew them.
Ms Sharples: Yes.
Q1034 Mr Hancock: Did you try to
find out why there was this distancing from you?
Ms Sharples: Not at the time,
no, because you are too vulnerable anyway to think like that.
Q1035 Mr Hancock: Have you tried
since?
Ms Sharples: I have tried contacting
them and nobody gets back to me at all. Nobody seems to want to
speak to me.
Mrs Farr: On the day of Daniel's
funeral, the Army was there and, at the time, I did not think
there was anything untoward but I was told afterwards that the
second in command of all Catterick was at Daniel's funeral and
the veterans were there and they said they had never seen as many
high-ranking officers at a junior soldier's funeral. On the day
of his funeral, I was told that the majority of the platoon that
Daniel was in was being dispersed on the Monday and sent to different
places. So, you lose that contact because you do not know where
to contact these young people. That is what happens in a death
because they sort of scatter them.
Q1036 Mr Hancock: We had evidence
given to us that those soldiers who had been given permission
to attend a funeral were ushered away very quickly after the event.
These were not the guard detachment, these were the friends of
the soldier who had died. We were given to believe that, as soon
as the funeral was over, they were virtually ordered away/pulled
away from the funeral by superior officers. Did things like that
happen in any of your situations where they did not want your
son's friends who were at the funeral to actually be close to
you on this occasion?
Ms Sharples: I found that.
Mrs Mattin: They did not talk
to me. It was just the one junior officer when he had been drinking.
None of the actual squaddies spoke to me.
Q1037 Mr Hancock: Funerals are difficult
and, for a Mum losing her son, nothing can be worse. Did you sense
that there was more than that, that there was a general reluctance?
Mrs Mattin: Yes, definitely.
Q1038 Mr Hancock: Do you think they
were afraid of the questions you might ask?
Mrs Mattin: Yes. There was no
real eye contact; they were just very erect and kept away from
me.
Q1039 Mr Crausby: The Army now tell
us that they provide key welfare information. Certainly when we
go around training establishments, we see lots of WRVS, the Salvation
Army and what look like some quite good welfare facilities. Do
you think that has changed? Lynn, I take very much on board what
you say about how, when we go to these establishments, it will
be like that. I think it is almost impossible for us to do otherwise
and we are very much aware of that, but we really cannot get in
there as a fly on the wall and I think we depend on other people
to give perhaps a different view of all of this. When we talk
to WRVS people, they seem very good and caring people. Was that
available for your sons in any way? Were they able to talk to
anybody?
Mrs Mattin: I have no idea. I
have never ever been into Catterick.
2 Not printed. Back
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