Thread 26 : To feel disappointed - and disgusted and vindicated now too - after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL

Please see the OP of Thread 25 for all the links to The Observer's reporting and podcast series, our threads one to 24 and so on.

After 25,000 posts there are still new things to discuss:
BBC Sounds - Secrets of the Salt Path - Available Episodes
If you are posting about a podcast, please start your post with the episode number you are commenting on, for clarity and to help others avoid spoilers if they wish to do so.

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse are welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer exposé items before posting. The Observer's excellent podcast series The Walkers (link in Thread 25) covers most things.
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, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea: please do not engage with drive-by scolders who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. For over 8 months we have done amazingly well together for 25 very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

As ever, as we embark on our 26th thread riding the community charabanc, keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider.

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5485730-thread-25-to-feel-disappointed-and-disgusted-and-vindicated-now-too-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

My blood pressure is only slowly coming down.... Every time this is mentioned I have to go and stand outside for half an hour and wallow in nature, like a cut price Raynor Winn...

The CB prize didn't explicitly say that self published books counted as 'previously published' when TSP was entered, which was, I suspect, the loophole that Sal relied on. If I had previously self published a book then I would have got in touch with the organising committee to double check that my traditionally published book was eligible, just to be sure. Because self published is published.

I will take any bets that neither Sal nor PRH ever asked the CB committee about eligibility and planned to just say "oh well, it doesn't SAY..." if challenged. And I would assume that it was the number of people contacting them to ask about self published books that made them put in the line about self published books counting as being previously published for the subsequent years.

Now to stare at a daisy until my face goes back to its usual colour....

She completely disowned the first book and had no intention of ever telling anybody that she’d ever written anything since she was at school. She, along with Moth and her kids rigorously and very emphatically denied that she could and did write. Her agent and Penguin had no idea of its existence and she had no intention of telling them when she signed any of her contracts or was made aware of being entered for the CB prize.
On the previous thread, somebody said what on earth was she thinking (when her photo was in magazines and news articles etc)? How could she think that their past wouldn’t catch up them? Agreed. She became so high profile, did that buffer her in some way or did she think she could rely on money and lawyers to buy people’s silence? Whatever the reason, she is very arrogant. Yes, I’m very glad too that she has been thoroughly “outed” by the quotes she’s made in the past that can now be seen as lies.

I am very grateful to everyone who has managed to catalogue the financials and keep track of the criminal activity - even down to the invoices for the van engine! Well done for spotting that! (I’m sorry, I don’t know who it was as I didn’t quote from the post!)

I remember reading the article mentioned on page one, before I’d read her books.

Just following on from previous thread, re: renting out the barn. I don't think they ever had a holiday let business. What we do know is that they had family stay on holiday as told in the documentary, and they also rehomed Tim's parents after stealing their money. Also, in the barn plasterwork was an inscription "Tim heart Sal" dated to 2007. That suggests the barn plastering was only completed in 2007 and thus quite likely could only take guests from this point on. By 2008 Sal's game was up with the Hemmings and all thefts began to unravel. So not much of a time window for a viable holiday-let business.

Another observation re: the £50,000 French property purchase in 2007. We know from the confession letter that Sal claimed this entire decade was spent with Tim becoming increasingly depressed and trying to get back the money he lost from the alleged Cooper "property investment". If that were true, why the heck did he invest more money in a French property amid his unemployed despair and why did Sal not mention this French property in her confession letter? It seems highly unlikely any of it is true and seems to me, as i once posited, that the French thing was the "bad investment" with the brother (lifewong fwiend) and Sal reimagined a narrative that conflated this with the Cooper debt story.

Yes, the 2019 form i saw and posted a few threads ago required the agent to apply.

Yes to all this. I think the ‘holiday let business’ was essentially a fiction to retrofit in TSP lots of inconvenient questions the reader might have had, like ‘Ok, it’s sad you lost your house, but presumably one or both of you have jobs and you can rent somewhere?’ So the jobs had to be part of the repossessed home.

And in case an enquiring reader thought ‘Hmm, but is renting out one holiday let apartment a job for two people, especially when their children are young adults who have left home?’ TW has to have been too ill to work for years.

And in case the reader wonders why SW, in perfect health, didn’t have a job, she has to say she’s been too busy representing them in the court case.

(Though that never explains why the obvious solution would be that TW handles the court case and SW works to bring in an income…)

Of course, the holiday let business, and the pretence that they actually had a farm, rather than a single acre they kept a few sheep and hens on, are needed to handwave over why SW is unemployable locally because of her record of theft, and possibly TW too, by association.

The embezzlement will of course have been known about before Martin Hemmings signed the NDA.

To follow up the two previous posts, I notice Tim gives his official Occupation as None. I would have thought for a flourishing let it would have been worth registering as Self-Employed:

GANGANI PUBLISHING LTD. filing history - Find and update company information - GOV.UK

Under the Statement of Capital

I need to remind myself of the chronology but musing on this again, it's struck me why SW turned to stealing from family. Stealing from Martin Hemmings effectively closed off any opportunities for embezzlement from other employers in a small rural community. So she had to look closer to home.

Have finished listening to the Observer podcast. Truly shocking. Thanks to all for patience in the face of my previous uninformed questions about their accommodation options.

One thing that struck me was the opinion of SW’s niece ‘Anne’, who suggests a sort of codependent relationship, where SW goes to great lengths (e.g. alleged theft) to support (almost serve) TW, e.g. to get back the ‘old Tim’. While TW appears to take little responsibility for, or even interest in, addressing household finances, even pre-diagnosis.

If the brother (Martyn) was in fact Cooper and the bad investment into a "property enterprise" with a lifelong friend who had ridden his trike with Moth as a child, was in fact the French property investment with his brother, then this would be a cruel (Greek tragedy of Sophoclean proportions!) irony indeed:

2004: Moth resigns from NT job at Plas-yn-Rhiw to embark on renovation projects ( Pen-y-maes and France?)

2005: Moth's falls through barn roof at Pen-y-maes while doing renovation work, perhaps to convert barn into holiday lets

2006: Martyn buys Chateau de La Barriere

2007: Moth remortgages Pen-y-maes and buys adjacent property to his brother's pigeonnier in Village de Dropt for 50,000 euros in hope of jointly redeveloping both properties and selling at a decent profit

2007: Sal steals £20k from Moth's parents to part finance French property purchase

2007: Martyn discovers theft from his and Moth's parents and ends contact with his brother, thereby scuppering the renovation project

2008: Martin Hemmings discovers that Sal has stolen £64k from his business over the previous 6 years

2008: Sal takes out £100k loan from relative of Moth's (Browne) to repay Martin Hemmings

2010: Browne's business goes bust and Moth's loan transferred to creditors who pursue the outstanding debt by attempting to repossess Pen-y-maes

1 May 2012: How Not to Dal dy Dir published by Izzy Winn-Thomas

July 2012: Martyn Cooper self publishes a book about a man from Burton on Trent returning to the UK to confront his past, entitled 'Stopcock'......

This version of events isn't quite the one outlined in TSP! Moth and Sal very much authors of their own misfortune!

In case there was any doubt of Tim's involvement in Gangani...a different forum they spun their lies on, signing off as "Tim".

https://www.cottagesmallholder.com/forum/newcomers/hi-from-the-gangani-farmhouse/

Thank you for the helpful chronology @ThompsonTwin. So the theft from TW's parents was concurrent rather than consecutive with the theft from the Hemmings? And the theft from her own mother? Do we know where that fits in?

In Ep. 5, The French Quarter Cecille describes cramming in a phone box and hearing that Sally is missing. The relative in England telling them also then says about the money missing from her grandparents.

I think the confession letter says something about "around this time" (i.e. the police investigation and repayment of stolen money to Hemmings) Sal started taking money from her mother. [Caveat: we only have Sal's word for it]

On the photos and publicity for TSP thing, I honestly think that as she’d essentially managed to get out of jail free (almost literally) by just brazenly fronting it out with family about the family thefts, refusing to talk about it, pretending to be mad and hiding in cupboards etc. that she thought the same thing would work on a larger scale. ‘Raynor Winn’ would just stick to a script and refuse to say any more.

Sorry hat should have read Martyn Walker self publishes Stopcock!

Yes, thanks for timeline @ThompsonTwin So when Sal tells her colleagues that they have just bought a chateau, it is Martyn who has bought a chateau and they have not bought their property yet. This also means that for 2 years the brothers must have been working on the pigeonnier. The place next door is the year after.

Intriguing! I'd forgotten about Stopcock. Has a copy ever been located? Any revealing parallels?

Intriguing that both parties involved in an investment project (gone sour) appear to have published apparently semi-auto-biographical novels at exactly the same time. And the niece also told Chloe she wrote a (unpublished) book.

A copy of this could be quite revealing: ‘love, lust and betrayal’. The ‘lust’ bit could be total fiction to spice it up. Or not.

@ThompsonTwini've missed where the stopcock came into the thread. Is this Tim's brother?

Simultaneously boarding the new thread and musing on the new podcast, having listened to the first 2 eps. How frustrating that they didn’t have a copy of HNTDDD! That analysis to try and assess the likelihood of its authorship would surely have gone so much better if they’d just been able to search for 'headland'……

Interesting psychology. As with all their behaviours.

Possible they thought family wouldn’t expose them, as they’d already been successfully persuaded not to report the alleged thefts. And Martin Hemmings had signed the NDA.

I guess some people convince themselves that if they’re dishonest for, what they perceive to be, the right reasons no one will blame or expose them for it. Perhaps in this case, the self-justification was so they could clear all their debts, including money allegedly owed to family.

Though am I correct I thinking both sets of parents had died before TSP was published?

Yes, Tim’s brother who bought the chateau in France and owned the adjacent property on the Village du Dropt to the one TW and SW subsequently bought. The father of the ‘Cecile’ who spoke on the podcast.

SW’s mother died in January 2015 (and her death originally featured in an earlier draft of TSP, despite this not fitting with its purported timeline — it was later featured in the sequel The Wild Silence.) Her father had died much earlier.

Someone on here will remember when TW’s mother died, but his widowed father only died, I think, in 2018? I know someone posted a death notice for him.

Is he also the father of the naval architect nephew who made the 'pathological liars who leave a trail of destruction' post on LinkedIn a day or two after the story broke?

Yes!