WEDNESDAY 1 DECEMBER 2004 (AFTERNOON)

MR DES JAMES, MRS DOREEN JAMES, MR JAMES COLLINSON, MRS YVONNE COLLINSON, MR GEOFF GRAY AND MRS DIANE GRAY

  Q1120  Mr Cran: So that my colleagues can then pick up the questioning after me, one other question. In the case of you, Mr and Mrs Collinson, and you, Mr and Mrs Gray, when did the change take place?

  Mr Gray: Phase 2 training.

  Mrs Collinson: Phase 2 training, when they went to Deepcut.

  Mr Gray: Can I pick up on one point to what Des said? Des mentioned about Cheryl's letters. We were told by Surrey Police that the Army had destroyed all of Geoff's personal letters. It then came to light that Geoff's personal letters were in Army Personnel Centre in Glasgow. Again, we requested to have these personal letters and asked why we were not given them in the first place, only to be told by the Army that it was thought that it might be too upsetting for us as a family to have personal letters sent back to us. I said that this is a ridiculous situation and I should have been given that option to have these letters. I always remember this, the lady in the Army Personnel Centre said, "What you have to realise, Mr Gray, is most people are satisfied with the way that we treat Army deaths." Well, you can imagine my response to that. It was just saying that personal effects are kept by the Army and not sent back, which is drawing on what we said this morning as well.

  Q1121  Chairman: It seems to me that in the transition it is not just important that the young soldiers are helped in the transitional phase but the parents as well, because I bet in some ways it was a more traumatic experience for you, losing your kids to the Army at 16, 17, and 18 years of age, as it would be, than them marching off into a new career really very, very happy. So perhaps the Army should consider being a little more concerned about the problems relating to the family. And bearing in mind this morning, as you heard, it seems that the witnesses this morning saw a change in their kids and a change in behavioural patterns, which I think they saw rather negatively, quite early on. But in your three cases it came later in Phase 2?

  Mr Gray: Yes.

  Q1122  Mr Roy: Geoff, could I just clarify, did you eventually get back the personal effects? This has been brought up to me by a constituent who suffered in the same way as you, and they had to fight to get them back and actually they did come back but they came back in a cardboard box at the door, which must have been horrific. So did you get them back?

  Mr Gray: We got the majority of Geoff's personal effects back. There were items like cigarette lighters, watches. There was a pair of shoes came back that were not Geoff's, so stuff had been swapped or stolen or whatever. We did not get everything back; where I expected everything to come back it did not come back. The letters were another matter altogether.

  Mrs James: Cheryl kept a diary religiously since she was about 11, 12 years old and never failed to write in it one day. I know she took it with her to Pirbright, but that is something that we have never, ever seen again.

  Mr Collinson: With James, it was 12 o'clock we got a knock at the door, and it was the same chap who informed me that James had died. There were two cardboard boxes dumped in my hall and the chap just left after about a minute and a half. We opened the boxes. There was no inventory to tell us what was in the boxes. We were just absolutely shocked when we opened the boxes because it looked like somebody had just taken all of James's belongings and threw them in the box. There was a CD player thrown into the box, all of his pockets had been turned inside out in all of his clothes, his watches were thrown in the box, they were not wrapped. His mother had just done his laundry the day that he died and it looked like somebody had actually used James's towels to clean the floor before they were sent back to us. You could actually see the boot mark on the towel.

  Q1123  Mr Roy: I know this is very difficult, and you know that I also have a constituent I have been dealing with for many years on the same thing. At that point, when those boxes were delivered, would it—and this is an obvious question—have been of help if that person had stayed there with you when the boxes were opened, if you had wanted them to be there, so that you would have been able to put some of the points to the person there and then, instead of dumping the box in the hall? Because that is exactly what happened to the McKenna family, and then they walked away. Should a lesson be learned from that?

  Mr Collinson: I think they have to devise a better way of returning the personal belongings. As I said, there was no inventory of what was in these boxes. That was all that we had left.

  Q1124  Mr Roy: Yes, that is right.

  Mrs James: The same thing happened to us. Ours were delivered by courier who had broken down the night before, and he phoned us and said, "I'm stuck in a lay-by, I will have to drop your stuff off tomorrow," and that is what happened. We had to wait another day.

  Mr Collinson: May I just add as well to that that with James's belongings they took it upon themselves, it was their decision to destroy his toothbrush, his aftershave, his shaving kit.

  Q1125  Mr Roy: Which was not their decision, Jim.

  Mr Collinson: It was not their decision to do. James had just passed his driving test and he was very proud of that, and as parents we never even got the chance to see his full driving licence, they took it upon themselves to destroy it. The same as his iron was missing, his radio was missing; a lot of his belongings were not there.

  Mrs Collinson: I think it would be fair to make the point though that some weeks after that we made a bit of a noise about the condition of James's things when they came back, and so we got a letter from Colonel Laden, who was the Commanding Officer at Deepcut at the time, assuring us that the same thing would never happen again; that the Army were going to make changes and that they would be much more considerate in the way that they returned the belongings of the deceased.

  Q1126  Mr Roy: Do you know what they do now, Yvonne, if they made this promise to change this?

  Mrs Collinson: Obviously there have been no more deaths at Deepcut but the last death I heard of at Catterick, the belongings were turned in pretty much the same way as they were to us.

  Q1127  Mr Hancock: Can I ask you some questions about what you said earlier, about Cheryl's letters? Did you ever get to the bottom of why the letters were not returned to you, the letters that Cheryl wrote? Do you know anyone who read those letters?

  Mr James: No.

  Q1128  Mr Hancock: Did the Coroner not ask any questions about those letters?

  Mr James: I think we have to get this in perspective. The SIB officers, who investigated her death, which is perhaps an exaggeration in terms, we never spoke to them so we do not know who they were; they did not speak to us. So one would perhaps suggest, commonsense prevailing, that the investigating officers would come to us and say, "Actually, Mr James, were you aware of these letters? Were you aware that your daughter was not happy at Deepcut?" But of course we were never interviewed by the SIB officers.

  Q1129  Mr Hancock: Doreen, you made a really valued point about Cheryl always having a diary since she was very young and religiously filled it in and she took that with her to the Army?

  Mrs James: Yes.

  Q1130  Mr Hancock: So you have no reason to believe that she did not continue that practice?

  Mrs James: No reason at all.

  Q1131  Mr Hancock: Did at any time anybody mention the diary to you?

  Mrs James: No, it has never been found.

  Q1132  Mr Hancock: Did you specifically ask the question about her diary?

  Mrs James: I asked for her diary and numerous letters.

  Q1133  Mr Hancock: Have any of you been told about—and Geoff I want to come to your letters—or did any of you make inquiries about whether or not there was still property held, which you wanted back, and what has been the response and from whom?

  Mr James: You have to live this to understand the frustrations.

  Q1134  Mr Hancock: I cannot believe how it could be for you, yes.

  Mrs James: I can hand over a trail of correspondence—because I still have it very carefully kept—where I was sent to the Quartermaster's stores and somewhere else and somebody gives me a letter, and we asked what we believed to be reasonable questions—and this is the Army, remember, this is not some sub post office—and surely when somebody dies you at the very least have an itinerary of what has been collected. And commonsense would surely suggest that someone with a little bit of compassion could come to the parents and say, "Could I just walk you through these items and make sure that you are okay?" They do not expect them to send an incomplete number of items in a wooden box by a courier, who thinks he is delivering a fridge, who rings you up and says he has broken down, "I am just going to sleep over in a lay-by and I will drop off your box tomorrow," and then when he comes you sign for your daughter's life on the doorstep, and when you open the box you have absolutely no idea what is missing because no one is talking to you.

  Mr Collinson: Yvonne and I as well, when we got James's belongings back, with the number of things that were missing we actually phoned up Surrey Police and we asked that somebody should be responsible for the belongings that were missing. We found it very hard to actually get Surrey Police to listen to us, and we were so angry that we went to the extent to say that somebody should be charged with theft, the person responsible for putting the stuff in that box. There was no itinerary, we did not know what was in the box, we did not know what belongings James had to have bought when he was down there for the last days and weeks of his life, and yet here it was just dumped on our doorstep. And we could not get the Surrey Police to take our request seriously, that we feel that somebody should be responsible and somebody should be charged over James's belongings being missing.

  Q1135  Mr Hancock: Jim, I do not think a person in the room does not share that view. Des, can I just go back to the issue because your case is one where you knew what your daughter was like and that she was meticulous in this. When you got to the Coroner's Inquest did the Coroner ask any questions about Cheryl's diaries? Did he mention the letters?

  Mr James: No.

  Q1136  Mr Hancock: Did you mention them? Were you given the chance?

  Mrs James: We did not know about them.

  Q1137  Mr Hancock: You knew about her diary though, did you not?

  Mrs James: I knew she had a diary.

  Mr James: But just to get the chronology correct here, so that people understand the perspective. She died on 27 November, and within three weeks what little investigation was carried out was completed. The Inquest was on 21 December, within three weeks of the death, and within another three weeks the Board of Inquiry was convened in secret and completed without our knowledge and it was all done and dusted and filed away. So, as someone said this morning, for those first two or three weeks you are under a blanket; you do not think about diaries and detail, that comes in February and March and months afterwards. You are in the depths of despair, you are not thinking logically at all.

  Q1138  Mr Hancock: But it is part of the role of the Coroner's organisation, is it not, to seek that sort of advice and to try and find out what made people do things and what the circumstances were.

  Mr James: Absolutely.

  Q1139  Mr Hancock: Can I come to your situation, Geoff, about the letters? What is the position? How did you get to know about letters that were held and were the Police given those letters? You said that the Coroner said that they had them or?

  Mr Gray: No, we were not aware of the letters until after the Coroner's Court. We had asked the Surrey Police to ask the Army if we had all of Geoff's belongings. The Police got in touch with the Army and said had they got any correspondence relating to Geoff's letters. The Army told the Police originally that the letters had been destroyed. So then Surrey Police have asked for a paper trail. Somebody must have given an order for these letters to be destroyed. The next thing we hear, they have not been destroyed, they are sitting in Glasgow.