Jeremy's take on the telephones in use/not in use at whf:-
Telephones at White House Farm
There has recently been much discussion over the telephones at White House Farm. This was brought up at the 1986 Trial of Jeremy Bamber. Key witnesses made statements and gave testimony about the phones that were at the farm.
Firstly there were usually three phones at White House Farm; a cream dial phone in the master bedroom; a blue digital dial one in the upstairs office; and a cordless phone which was kept in the kitchen. There was also another phone at the Farm that was a ‘fawn’ colour and it also had a digital key pad and it is unclear where this phone was usually kept although it was found in the kitchen under some magazines.
There had been a thunderstorm which had caused damage to the phone system and an engineer called Mr Pike made a statement that he took away the cordless phone and that he did not leave a replacement. The farm secretary Mrs Wilson had been on holiday and was not entirely sure where the phones were moved to as a result of this storm. Nevertheless Mrs Jean Bouttell testified in court that the phones had gone wrong so many times in the past year that she described it as “musical phones” when asked in court simply because the phones were moved around so frequently by the Bamber Family. She said it was common practice for the cream phone from the bedroom to be moved down into the kitchen.
After the tragedies happened on the 7th of August 1985, Chief Supt Harris used the phone to call Assistant Chief Constable Simpson on that morning before SOCO carried out their search of the house but this was denied at the 2002 appeal, evidence released in 2004 now proves he did make this call using the cream telephone in the kitchen. When the police finished their SOCO investigations and handed the keys to the family, by the weekend of the 10th of August Ann Eaton and Jean Bouttell started cleaning the house. Additionally numbers of people had been in and around the house including, Basil Cock, Barbara Wilson, Robert Boutflour, Pamela Boutflour, Chris Nevill, David Boutflour, Karen Boutflour and Anthony Pargeter.
On the 23rd of August Jeremy had been back to the farm, Barbara Wilson had commenced her duties as farm secretary reporting to Jeremy. Jean Bouttell had also commenced her regular cleaning duties. Jeremy had increased the wages of the farm workers during this time. And he asked Barbara Wilson to clear out many of the papers in the office for him. It was on this date that he asked Jean Bouttell to clear out other belongings in the house. As we all know after a family member has died we have to face the difficult task of removing their belongings from our lives and Jeremy was no different from any other person in facing the emotional and practical difficulties of doing this.
Jean Bouttell testified that Jeremy had asked her to remove the pile of magazines in the kitchen and it was during this clear out that she found the fawn coloured phone. She said that she asked Jeremy what she should do with it and he replied that it was just a spare. When she later checked the phone some three weeks later at the request of the police she found that it was working. Barbara Wilson also states that she checked the phone and found it to be working. Neither of these witnesses stated that Jeremy had told them that the phone was broken. The police asked Jean to check the phone some three weeks later and she found it to be working.
It has been suggested that Jeremy deliberately removed the phone from the bedroom that his father slept in so that he could not call the police when Jeremy allegedly broke into the house to kill the family. Firstly, Jeremy could not be responsible for the storm which had again damaged the telephone equipment and secondly is Jeremy expected to remember where each phone was at each moment when he didn’t even live in the house? Is it reasonable to expect Jeremy to know which phones were supposed to be where at this time? Is it not a reasonable assumption that if the Bamber’s phone was broken that one of them would take a phone from the upstairs bedroom and use it to replace the broken one? Particularly if, amongst the piles of untidy clutter littered throughout the house they didn’t know where the spare phone was.
Considering the number of moves that the telephones had made during the last year which seems to have been at least two or three times up until the 7th of August is it not reasonable that Jeremy wouldn’t have spent his days thinking about where the phone was? Is it not reasonable to wonder at how many people had been in the house ‘looking for evidence’ long after the initial police SOCO search between the 7th of August and the 23rd of August? Is it not reasonable to assume that the ‘spare’ phone could have been moved at any time by anyone to its position under the magazines during Ann Eaton’s clean up of the farm house?
The other area for concern is the amount of rumour which has emerged into the media since the trial of Jeremy Bamber. Barbara Wilson made no less than 14 statements to the police before Jeremy’s trial all dated 16.12.85, 05.10.85, 06.10.85, 11.10.85, 17.09.85, 19.09.85, 22.11.85, another on 05.10.85, and more on 08.11.85, 12.09.85, 16.11.85, 25.10.85, 26.11.85, and 27.09.85. In one statement she even described Jeremy as "a likeable young man". Out of all of these statements she never mentioned at any time that Nevill had told her that Jeremy had intended to kill him or anything which could be interpreted as such, Nevill had no premonition whatsoever that he might die in the near future. Neither did Barbara Wilson mention this at trial. If Nevill Bamber had told an employee such a thing why did this employee not mention this at trial to assist in the conviction of Jeremy Bamber and why did she not go to the police with this ‘story’ on the 7th of August? It is only in the Roger Wilkes book and on various television programmes that this has been suggested and we will leave you to make your own conclusions about why this story has been invented for various forms of media.
