SUPREME COURT Woman’s Claim Over De Facto Husband’s Will

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31121, 26 July 1966, Page 7

SUPREME COURT Woman’s Claim Over De Facto Husband’s Will

A woman of 79 sought the £2400 house property of her late de facto husband, instead of a life interest in it, in a contested claim brought before Mr Justice Wilson in the Supreme Court yesterday under the Law Reform (Testamentary Promises) Act, 1949.

The plaintiff. Matilda HaD (Mr M. F. Hall) said that immediately after her de facto husband, Frederick John Hall, a retired Fernside farmer, had consulted his solicitor about his final will, he had given her an unsigned, hand-written note (addressed to the solicitor) saying: “I must leave everything to her, without strings.” Mrs Hall, cross-examined by Mr J. G. Leggat (for the executors of Hall’s estate), said she had never given this note to the solicitor, Mr E. D. R. Smith, of Rangiora, but kept it “to protect herself,” especially after she learnt of Hall's last wilL

This note, the plaintiff claimed, was corroborative of Hall’s earlier promises that if he should predecease her, she was “to have everything”— expressed in three wills before his last will in 1957. Mrs Hall said that she had come to New Zealand in 1914, and lived with Hall from 1916 until his death last year. She

had not divorced her legal husband in England (now dead), said Mrs Hall, because she had given Hall all her money to help him acquire a 75-acre farm at Femside, in 1921. In later years, she had changed her name to Hall by deed poll. In cross-examination, it was put to the plaintiff that Hall, in a 1957 letter to his sister in England (to whom the residue of his estate was left) had described his years with her as “one hell of a life.” Mrs Hall said that she could not believe that Hall had written this of her.

Edward Dallas Ridley Smith, a solicitor called as a defence witness, said that Hall had confided in him about his difficult life with the plaintiff. Smith said he was sure that Hall’s last will expressed his true intention.

Asked whether the handwritten note was Hall’s writing, Smith said he thought so, but would not be certain. Cross - examined, Smith agreed that the note was very difficult to explain, and also agreed that there had been a marked change in Hall's attitude to Mrs Hall after 1956, when they had retired to Christchurch. On the completion of evidence late yesterday afternoon, his Honour adjourned the case to this morning.