Friend evicting elderly tenant

[AppalachianWoman]

Would it change the way you felt about your friend if he evicted an elderly (70+) tenant so he could move into the house instead? The rent was paid upfront through a lifetime of agricultural labor from late childhood but the friend who recently inherited the estate feels they are owed cash payments and the property. The tenant cannot read or write and was widowed a year or two ago, has no children of his own but some step children from his marriage. The friend currently occupies another, smaller, property on the estate and was expected to move into the largest house which is very grand indeed but requires extensive renovation. He is daunted by the work and expense and has instead become fixated on the property the elderly farmhand lives in.

It feels emotionally immature of me to drop a friend over a difference in values but I am shocked that he would even consider this course of action. I don’t want to be friends with someone who acts this way, how can I exit gracefully or should I try to support him as he has supported me emotionally through decades of friendship?

I believe the OP is genuine

i believe she has got completely the wrong end of the stick!

It happens round here from time to time, I mean... decades between times.. but thats how long community memory goes on for..

Landowners who do this tend to find mysteriously, everything they need to buy, goods or services from local suppliers, tends to cost significantly more than others appear to pay (not that anyone else tells them what a ton of hay or a tipper of logs costs, or hedging or fencing or whatever)...

No one buys them a pint in the local pub, in any case their favourite beer just went off.., arranging work to be done by outside contractors who are all local, takes longer, falls through more often, is a pigging pain in the arse... etc etc.

You don't shit on your own doorstep. You just don't.

I can believe this. I grew up in a fsrming community and my dad is a tenant farmer on a life time tenancy.

Over the years different landlords have bougjt his farm and house and attempted to intimidate him in to leaving.

The kind of arrangement with the elsetly worker was more common in rural communities years ago, particualry for people with little or no education. Sadly they can be terribly exploited. My dad employed a labourer once and realised that his previous employer had been cheating him out of wages for years as the guy was functionally illiterate and did not understand his payslips.

My dh left school unofficially at around 13. Just went to work instead. He’s 40. As did a lot of his friends who are tradesman.
hes had apprentices now (slightly older at 15) do the same with the schools blessing.

Older aunts and uncles in my family read and write very poorly because they left school at 14 to help raise younger sibs, and work on the farm.
They can fix or build anything, cars, equipment, houses. bringing that generation and not being educated the way we are now isn’t unusual. Rural life often meant missing a lot of school - harvest, lambing season, prep for winter and everything in between
The difference is we owned the land and business.
Your friend is awful.

Both my birth parents left school age 14, dad in ‘63, mum in ‘64.

I read this comment and thought, how did that happen then? So I googled it and it looks like you could actually leave at the start of the summer term of the school year you turn 15, so anyone born between June and end of August could leave age 14.

(dropping out of school has always been a thing anyway. Plus, it was easy for postwar baby boomer kids to fall off the grid - no one even bothered to register my dad’s 1949 birth, he only found out when he tried to marry my mum age 18!)

‘He's 72 so how was he working as an older child?’

my DDad is 65 and left school at 14 to do a trade apprenticeship. He was working a year later, learning on the job.

Perhaps contact one of the benevolent societies - this certainly isn’t the first time something like this has happened. They will have experience and probably some specialist advice which might assist the tenant.

rabi.org.uk
perennial.org.uk

@Henuinequest yep. My dad is 76 and left school at 15 with not qualifications. He can read and write very well and has a huge amount of practical skills, but he did not get on with school (i suspect some level of neuro diversity) and was asked to leave before exams.

As he is from a farming community it was not seen as an issue, my grandad just employed him for a few years and then helped him arrange his own farm tenancy when he was 21.

@Ginmonkeyagain - do you mind explaining how your father's life time tenancy as a farmer will work? If he wants to retire, what then happens with the farm to keep it functioning? If a new farmer takes over, surely they would want the farm house to live in?
I'm sorry to digress from the main point of the thread and I hope you don't mind my asking. I'm curious and all I know about farming is gleaned from the Archers and Aldridges of Ambridge, who are probably not that typical.

Not at all! It s a bit of a bone of contention in my family at the moment.

So there are broadly two ways (although contracts and laws vary depending on what was signed and when):

1. Like a council tenancy there may be rights of succession, so an adult child can take over and the parent stays on in the house or may retires to a small cottage owned by the same landlord (or sometimes the council)- this is what happened when my grandfather retired and my dad took over my grandad's farm. My grandparents lived in a cottage on the farm.
2. There may be no rights of succession and the farmer may negotiate with the landlord to give up the lifetime tenancy on the farm for the right to live in a cottage rent free or at very low rent.

We have three issues in my family at the moment:

1. My dad's landlord has sold off the cottages on the farm/in the village that my dad would have traditionally been offered in retirement. Similarly all the council owned bungalows in his village have been sold off.
2. Neither my brother or I wish to take over the farm and have not only moved out of the house but have left the area.
3. My dad is a stubborn old sod who wishes to keep farming til he dies.

My brother is currently negotiating with our dad's landlord to give up my dad's lifetime interest and our succession interest in the tenancy in exchange for a significant lump sum to enable our dad to retire and buy/rent small property.

The landlord tried to pull a fast one and offered a derisory sum, but is slowly coming to realise that he is not dealing with a little old county bumpkin with no education (as I mentioned my dad has no formal qualifications but it very canny), but his children - a land agent and a policy professional with significant experience in consumer and economic regulation and also our uncle (a retired high court judge).

Not everyone is as lucky and older tenant farmers and farm works frequently get taken advantage of. Which is why I believe the OP's story.

Captain the age thing was a reply to someone else about when people left school. This is a completely credible story as we know people in similar situations. The reason we have a long summer holiday is that it was needed for the harvest - in August everyone, including children, helped.
Normally these farm workers retire much later because their whole life has revolved around the farm. And at retirement age have to start paying bills etc for the first time. They may have poor standards of literacy but know more about livestock, crops, the environment than most university educated people.

Is your dad able to manage the farm still? Selling off everything - council houses doesn't do us any good. Hopefully you can find a solution that pleases everyone but I understand your dad not wanting to retire and stop doing everything he's always done. Some people never want to retire :)

I would 100% tell a friend that i think they are morally repugnant for considering doing such a thing! If that ended the friendship than so be it, if they went through with it, my view of them would be ruined forever anyway!

Ha ha sort of. He is a tough old bird but he does need to slow down. He had a heart scare earlier this year but has bounced back.

@ZandathePanda. Sorry. I was agreeing with you and expanding on it I should have quoted the poster whose words you had highlighted.

Help the old guy as much as you can from the US, or even give UK adult services a call and involve them. Then fuck this guy off - after telling him what a vile POS he is

Captain ahh got wrong end of the stick!
This generation are the end of an era I think. Shame someone doesn’t do a programme about them. But then again, someone might watch it and think of ways to exploit them!

Why does this ‘friend’ make me think of the Jacob Rees-Mogg type and his ilk. Ummmm

Just remembered a classic: a headteacher who said ‘why can’t this farmer take his children on holiday in the summer holidays. He’s got the whole of August?’ That’s when I pointed out to him why everyone has a ‘holiday’ for harvest in August. He still didn’t ‘allow’ it - it was one long weekend, the first in years, when the farmer could manage for the farm to run without him.

I think op doesn’t have enough info so everyone on this thread is speculating.

Most of all the OP herself

But at the this time there would have been ZERO implications for this father just taking them out for the day.

indeed even now…. For me or two days…. No implications at all!

Can your DH read and write?