Crowther v Crowther

This is an appeal brought by the husband in very long-running matrimonial

proceedings relating to one single issue. The issue focussed on the future of the former matrimonial home, a house, which, it was accepted, was bought entirely from the inheritance that the wife had received following the death of her parents. The house is mortgage-free and was valued after a rough drive-by valuation at the time of the hearing as being worth in the region of £200,000. The house is a four-bedroomed property. It is occupied by the wife and her now adult daughter from a previous relationship and that daughter’s partner. The wife’s case was that the house should not be sold and that the husband should have no part of the value of it. The husband’s case was that the house needed to be sold in order to liberate the capital in the property and that should be split equally between the parties, providing roughly £100,000 each, and that was sufficient for each of them to rehouse themselves.

Whilst the issue in the case can be shortly stated, as I have attempted to do in the course of one paragraph, the complicating factors in the proceedings are more detailed and presented the judge, HHJ Tolson QC, with what was on any view a difficult forensic process to oversee, manage and then determine the outcome of. The complications can be listed as follows. Both parties, as the judge found, were vulnerable in terms of their psychological and mental health. The wife had been acting in person throughout the proceedings, as I think is the case, and at a number of early directions hearings her presentation to the court was such as to cause concern as to whether she had capacity to conduct the litigation herself. A deal of time was, therefore, taken up in attempting to engage the Official Solicitor to act on her behalf and to achieve an expert assessment of her capacity. Secondly, attempts were made to obtain legal aid so that she could be represented. It is not necessary for the determination of this appeal to go into the whys and wherefores of that process. The result of it was to leave the wife and the court in exactly the same position as they were at the start, namely a lady who did not lack capacity to conduct the litigation herself but who was acting as a litigant in person.

The second complicating factor was the wife’s account of her past and the role that the husband had had in it, but also as being the victim of unwelcome experiences from other sources, has seemingly left her i