Thread 9: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The Observer The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

2nd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-whats-in-the-book-and-what-the-observer-has-found

3rd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

4th Observer ‘I felt I was being gaslit’ – the landlord who helped Ray...

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Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn

New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting.

To all - Please be extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Please do not engage with visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as this will only encourage them back to the threads.

We have done amazingly well together - in the main that is, not mentioning any names but you know who you are! - for eight threads so far. I can't be on the threads as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion ticking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

No saltiness. Keep to the path. Thank you.

My interest in this is because I like writing and belong to a life story group where there have been conversations about what can be disclosed legally, mainly because some of us experienced child abuse and some perpetrators are still alive and never been prosecuted. The questions are, do we then have to write it as fiction and change details or risk writing as a true story with changed names etc and hope they don't recognise themselves? I had assumed that publishers would be careful to check this stuff.

I don't think it matters that the WalkerWinns may have done the walk as a series of days out in the past or might have invented some characters they met. It does matter about the claim to be unintentionally homeless and the exaggeration about the illness.

She was a saint. Now she is a sinner. Not sure if any of her new books will appeal to the same demographic.

Sally's parents supposedly had a farm in Melton Mowbray. Tim grew up about 40 miles away in Burton upon trent.

I don't think Sally's father grew up on a farm,one of his brothers died in WW2
( there's a memorial.) He was a draper before he was conscripted.
Sally's mom may have been from a farming community but it's hard to tell. She wasn't born in Leicestershire ,I can't find her name on the records.

Agree with the above. I am not a psychiatrist or psychologist but if she is a pathological liar, in sense of this being or forming part of a personality disorder, she’ll struggle to admit any personal dishonesty. She’ll never be able to admit to taking the money. Maybe that doesn’t matter (?) IME pathological liars can’t face the real truth.

Isn't he two years older than her? So that makes him 20 when she first saw him in the sixth-form college canteen. Hmm ...

Psychology correspondent here! Pathological liars lie for a whole bunch of different reasons, which is one of the reasons why it hasn't ever been classified as a full-blown psychological disorder. More often than not they have no idea why they do it, but they can't stop – even when telling the truth would be more beneficial to them. There are various theories about why it happens: sometimes it's induced by stress, sometimes it seems to be associated with an attempt to shift your 'locus of control' from outside of you to being under your own internal control. Given that none of us know RW personally (I think?) we can't really say whether she's a 'pathological liar' or whether she lies selectively, or whether, actually, she lies at all; these are allegations, no matter how compelling.

Having just read to the end of The Salt Path, the fulfilled tortoise prophecy reminds me of the cow on top of a cotton house in the film 'O Brother Where Art Thou?' which was part of the blind man's prophecy. The film being based on The Odyssey.

Thanks to your excellent sleuthing, we know Cooper didn’t have a limited company before 1999. I don’t think it would be surprising if his property business started out as a buy to let property or two run as a sole trader before it grew and became necessary to form a limited company. Few small time landlords run their buy to let properties as a limited company. SalRay now describes the business as a “property portfolio”. It may not have been a limited company.

I am surprised that Cooper’s widow didn’t say anything about the alleged investment in the Observer article and that CH didn’t ask about it.

I'd read that as her probably studying for A levels, but at a FE college where people also study for other kinds of qualification.

Agree, the walk isn't really the nub of the story, it's about how in the face of homelessness and terminal illness, they found a way to get through it. Without one or both of those two things there is no story.

Elsewhere RW says the farm was in Staffordshire, though, which would fit more easily with Moth growing up in Burton and still living locally.

I found an advert on newspaper archives that the tenancy for the Melton farm RW grew up on was available in 1962. So, speculatively that could be when they began living there? At least not before anyway. It's on an estate so unlikely they ever owned it outright. A 1980s ad also has her father T Winn selling Alsatian pups and terriers, with the farm address provided.

Waves at psychology correspondent.

Thanks for this. The nephew has labelled them/her as pathological liars but we can’t know of course, you’re right.

I read of a case about a psychopath, no one saying Ray is, but he was habitually dishonest & known to all as ‘Billy Liar’. His tissue of lies were a grandiose fantasy to hide his banal failure of a life. What struck me as interesting is that there was always a kernel of truth in what he said. To cover up a hole in a timeline etc he’d pick a true event, say he was there etc. Thing was, when checked out, he did indeed attend just months after he said he did. After a while he couldn’t distinguish the truth from his constructed reality.

A friend of mine has published an abuse memoir, and her publisher's legal team gave it a very careful read to see if any of it was actionable, and had her make some changes.

It's less a matter of people recognising themselves than them being able to make a legal case that they were recognisable to other people, and hence their names and reputation were brought into disrepute.

And there's not really that issue in TSP, as the ostensible bad guy, 'Cooper', is not identifiable -- and of course as sleuthing on here has suggested, he is in fact a fiction invented to cover up the fact that the Walkers lost their home when they couldn't repay a loan from a relative that they took out against their house to repay money Sally Walker stole from her employer.

The only thing that would have seemed obvious to me for PRH's legal team to do was, as part of their legal read, to ask for verifiable details of the real court case, to check that 'Cooper' wasn't identifiable. I suppose it's possible the Walkers did provide those, but that there would have been no way of knowing why two people with no connection to the Walkers were bent on evicting them from their house, or that the loan was to cover up a theft.

@OhEsme & others can we really not prove anything they’ve said is a lie? Most are compelling allegations, good description, I’d agree.

Not sure if this article has been shared before, but it includes a photo of SW and TW on the Isle of Skye in 1986, the day after their marriage

Raynor Winn and her terminally ill husband on the joy of wild walking

Yes ,I distinctly remember her saying that too. She said Toad/ Moth grew up in an industrial town in the Midlands. I think she might have said near Birmingham but Burton is nowhere near Birmingham

Correction farm is not near Melton, it's just under 50 miles away (sorry my geography of the Midlands isn't great). It's very close to Burton-on-Trent in a place called Dunstall, DE13.

That's an FE college rather than a sixth-form one though? In which case, wouldn't she just have said 'at college'? Minor quibble, I know. Ignore me 🙃

That's sound reasoning but it still contradicts what Salray wrote in TSP which suggests the company that failed was the company they invested in (but maybe written, at a push, with artistic licence):

"Trusting enough that when an opportunity arose to make an investment in one of his companies we took it, putting in a substantial sum. The company with which the investment was made eventually failed, leaving a number of unpaid debts."

[ETA] yes curious no mention of investment. My best guess is CH and her editor didn't have enough to confidently publish anything on it. I'd be very surprised if CH had failed to ask about it.

Moth sounds very seriously ill at time of this article, he has to especially focus on eating, moving & breathing. That’s really alarming & some serious memory issues.

Her account of losing the money makes no sense in the real world

He might have been retaking A’levels?

No, she says her father was a tenant farmer, so the land was never theirs.

There's a passage in The Wild Silence where she describes bringing bluebells home as a child to comfort her mother who is crying after her father got angry and threw an envelope across the table. She finds the envelope years later when she's 12 (and it's still in the same place when her mother is dying).

It's a reply to her father's enquiry about a procedure so the farm tenancy can be inherited -- the reply is that it can't, that the estate will be sold when the current owner dies, and all the farms and tied houses with it, the tenancies to be renewed or not by the new owner. Her parents are both upset about this, but it's less clear that her father had expected to pass the tenancy onto his children. There's just Sally and a sister who is never mentioned, right? Would a daughter inheriting a tenant farm have been that usual?

When did he run the marathon?