WILLS, &c. (PUBLICATION) BILL (Hansard, 2 March 1956)

§ Mr. Nigel Fisher (Surbiton)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
I am sorry to disturb the harmony of the House by introducing a somewhat more controversial note into our discussions.
I am indebted to my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Mr. Mott-Radclyffe) for his work in drafting the original Bill which he produced last year. The present Bill is the result of his effort and initiative and of my good fortune in the Ballot. I have made only one alteration of substance to it. My hon. Friend has authorised me to say that he fully supports the Bill and is only not in his place today for purely private reasons. As some hon. Members may be aware, my hon. Friend suffered a bereavement some time ago and, as he felt that it might be thought that he had a personal interest, he preferred to be away on this occasion.
The Bill proposes that it shall be unlawful to publish particulars of a will, with certain exceptions. It will still be lawful to publish the names of the executors, particulars of any charitable bequests and particulars of any bequests to the Government or to public or local authorities. Particulars may still be published, provided that the testator or executor authorises publication or, in order to provide for wills of historical value or importance, if thirty years have elapsed since the death of the testator, or if the will is the subject of court proceedings. The Bill would not interfere in any way with the right of anyone to inspect a will at Somerset House.
The object of the Bill is very simple. It is to spare beneficiaries and relatives the very considerable distress and embarrassment which many people do now suffer as the result of the publication of the details of wills in the Press. The effect of the Bill would be to protect them and to respect their privacy. That is all it seeks to do.

§ Mr. G. R. Mitchison (Kettering)
I understand the Bill to prohibit, with 1652 certain exceptions, the publication of any particulars of the will of a deceased person, the amount of the estate of the deceased person or of any duty payable in respect of such estate. I may not have followed all that the hon. Gentleman has said, but I did not hear him mention the latter matter.

§ Mr. Fisher
The hon. and learned Member for Kettering (Mr. Mitchison) is quite correct. That point is included, with the object of preventing a newspaper from trying to assess the total amount by making a calculation from the publication of the details of the Estate Duty, which it is possible to do. It is often done inaccurately, and, therefore, it was thought wise to insert that provision.

§ Mr. Mitchison
The hon. Gentleman has not quite met the point. What I understand must not be published is the amount of the estate of the deceased person. We know that newspapers frequently publish that amount and that they often put, "Duty payable, so and so." I should like to hear the reasons for not publishing the amount of the estate of the deceased person.

§ Mr. Fisher
I thought that the hon. and learned Gentleman was referring to the Estate Duty. The omission of the amount of the estate itself is fundamental to the Bill. I will enlarge upon that when I come to that particular point.
I have been surprised, as I think my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor was surprised last year, by the very large number of letters which I have received supporting and welcoming the Bill. Many of the letters are from country solicitors who have to handle such matters in the course of their professional duties and who are often blamed, quite wrongly, for allowing publication in the local Press, which they cannot prevent. There are letters from beneficiaries, relations, and even from journalists, who dislike the work that they are asked to do by their newspapers in disclosing the details of wills. I have had more than sixty letters on the subject.
I have read only one letter in opposition to the Bill; it came from a firm that specialises in supplying the details of wills to the Press. The writer says: I am senior member of this firm. The firm has been supplying reports of wills and 1653 estates to the National, Provincial & Trade Press for upwards of fifty years. This is the sole business upon which the firm is engaged. The bill introduced by him will close this firm and withdraw employment from my colleagues and myself. If I am fortunate enough to secure a Second Reading for the Bill I hope that in these days of full employment the members of that firm will be able to find more productive and more useful employment in some other sphere.

§ Mr. Charles Ian Orr-Ewing (Hendon, North)
I have a similar firm in my constituency which is affected in the same way and who are wondering whether it may be possible to re-orientate the business and pick up other ways of getting business. I notice that Clause 3 (1) proposes that the Bill should come into effect on 1st January, 1957. That does not give the firm much chance of changing its manner of gaining an income. Perhaps my hon. Friend would consider changing that provision to 1958 or 1959, in order to help such companies.

§ Mr. Fisher
That is a serious point which I will look at in Committee, if the Bill gets so far.
I saw a letter in the Evening Standard a few days ago which asked what evidence I had of any public demand whatever for the Bill. The truth is that I have so much evidence of the demand that I could perfectly well leave others who have written to me to make my Second Reading speech. I will read extracts from some of the letters that I have received because they illustrate well the need for a Bill of this kind and the very widespread demand for it.

§ Sir Leslie Plummer (Deptford)
Has the hon. Member read the leading article in The Times yesterday?

§ Mr. Speaker
We shall get on better if we adhere to the proper custom of this House and have consecutive speeches. There have been several interruptions.

§ Mr. Fisher
I have read the leading article which appeared in The Times, and I have no doubt that hon. Members who are interested in the subject have done so as well. If the hon. Member for Deptford (Sir L. Plummer) thinks they have not, he is perfectly at liberty to quote it in his own speech. I do not see why I should present an argument in opposition to the case that I am putting.
1654 I should say that it is the small wills of humble people which I have particularly in mind in bringing forward this Bill. Although I realise that large estates may be a matter of public interest, particularly in these days when they are comparatively few and far between, I cannot think that the estates of quite small people can be a matter of very general public interest, and their publication can only result in ill-informed local gossip and comment when details are printed in local newspapers.
I have here some letters from solicitors, none of them known to me. The first of them, which comes from Kidderminster, says: I can only tell you that out of ten working class wills or intestacies that I handle, about seven of them ask me to try and take steps to stop the will being published in the paper. There is a very widespread feeling among the saving working class that the publication of the amounts of wills and other details (but particularly amounts) is an improper infringement of the right that everyone has to secrecy in his own affairs. Another solicitor, writing on the same point, says: There is no single request that I have received more from widows and families in connection with probate work than this one. He makes the point that bereaved people suffer great mental anxiety from having details of what are sometimes quite small estates laid bare in the local Press. He refers to estates of £100 to £200. Later in his letter he says: What…is allowed as a privilege to the Royal Family should be held as the right of every one of the Queen's subjects… which is, of course, to privacy in such matters. He assures me that very large numbers of his humbler clients completely support this Bill.
Another solicitor, with a country practice, writes from Loughborough: I know from a long personal experience the suffering and annoyance caused, particularly to people of small means, when their affairs are given wide publicity… Another solicitor says: As a country practitioner of many years standing, I know something of the pain caused to humble people who have been provident, when their husband's or wife's estate…is published in the local Press. It is just what the neighbours have been waiting for. That point occurs again and again through all these letters.
1655 Another solicitor, writing from Bath, says that people implore him to take steps to try to prevent the publication of their wills in the Press. He goes on to say: The Press necessarily seize on what they consider to be gossipy and possibly scandalous tit-bits likely to satisfy the curiosity of the public. He adds that he has …long felt that no useful purpose is served by broadcasting such details. Those are just a few samples of the many letters I have had on this aspect of the subject, but they are evidence of the views of country solicitors and of the smaller clients whom they represent. If, by chance, an estate is a larger one, I am told that the legatee, if he happens to be a bachelor, is simply bombarded with proposals of marriage—and not only in a Leap Year such as this is. I may add that I have never, myself, been at the receiving end of these propositions. Alternatively, if he is not a bachelor, he is simply inundated with begging letters and appeals from charitable organisations.
There is another aspect. If a man does not mention his wife in his will I am told that there is immediate speculation as to whether she has, perhaps, erred and strayed—although, in fact, he may well have provided for her during his own lifetime. But even if he has not done so, what concern is that of ours? He may have had very good reasons for not doing so, of which we are quite unaware and can never be aware. I have here an example of a widow with two daughters who left her entire estate to one of them. It was not generally known but, in fact, she had provided for the other daughter during her lifetime—yet there was immediate speculation as to the reason for the apparent disinheritance of the second daughter.
Again, if it is really considered to be so much in the public interest that people should know what a man leaves when he dies and to whom he leaves it, why is it not equally in the public interest to publish the names of those who win large sums of money in football pools and to state the amounts that they have won? Those details are not published in the Press. There is, I believe, some sort of agreement to that effect, and if there were an agreement in the case of wills, one 1656 would not have to bring in legislation to deal with this abuse.
A will seems to me to be a very personal document indeed—it is, I suppose, the most personal of all legal documents—and the way in which a man leaves his money and property is, I should have thought, a particularly personal matter. After all, no one knows how much money a man has when he is alive—with the possible exception, I suppose, of the Inland Revenue—or what his bank balance or bank overdraft may be. I am sure that hon. Members themselves would much resent details of their banking accounts being annually made known to the public through the Press. Yet everyone knows all about it as soon as one dies.
It really seems to be a quite unwarranted intrusion into a man's private affairs. And I would ask hon. Members to note that it comes at the very moment when a man's widow and children are already suffering the pain and loss of a bereavement and are, therefore, particularly upset by Press publicity and local comment. A gentleman writes from Eastbourne to say: When a man or woman is alive, their accountant, solicitor, banker and doctor are sworn to secrecy as regards their affairs. Immediately the person is deceased, the whole of their personal and private affairs become public property. A county councillor, writing from Malvern, Worcestershire, says: I hope…you will draw attention to the morbid interest…people take in finding out 'how much he left'…to the very great embarrassment of the bereaved…While an Englishman's home is his castle his banking account is apparently everybody's business once he is dead. I was much encouraged to receive a letter from the Hampshire Federation of Women's Institutes to say that they had passed a resolution by an overwhelming majority at a council meeting of the Federation when delegates from 234 institutes were present. The letter then quotes the resolution, which reads as follows: This meeting considers that it is undesirable to publish wills in newspapers without the consent of those concerned… Lest it be thought—and I am sure it would be quite wrong to think—that Women's Institutes have in any way a Conservative bias, I should say that I now 1657 hold in my hand a letter from a gentleman who says: I am a strong member of the Labour party and I wish you every success with your Measure. In truth, of course, this is not in any way a party matter. The only section of the community that objects to the Bill is the Press, which, if I may say so, has a vested interest in publication. Newspapers claim that the Bill interferes with their freedom, but even the Press is not absolutely unanimous on this. A local newspaper, the Scarborough Evening News—hon. Members may laugh but it is quite an important publication in Scarborough—wrote last year to my hon. Friend: You may be interested to know that there are some on the newspaper side who are in complete agreement with the objectives of your Bill. To its credit, that newspaper has observed the spirit of the Bill for some years and has not published the details of wills except in special circumstances. In a leading article this paper says: We have taken the view that a man's will is as much his private affair as his bank balance, and that there is, in the ordinary way, no more justification for publishing the one than the other. I was also glad to see an article in the Yorkshire Post two weeks ago, referring to my Bill, and saying that I have been attacked …by a section of the Press which purports to see in it a restriction on the liberty of the Press. This, of course, depends upon what you mean by Press freedom. Some newspapers think it means that they should have unlimited licence to intrude into people's private affairs and keep their circulations by publishing choice morsels about their intimate life. I suppose most of us have some curiosity about how much some people leave in their wills and I can understand why it is regarded as having a news value. Nevertheless, it is a private matter, and I see no reason why Mr. Fisher should be attacked for wanting to keep it private.

§ Mr. F. P. Bishop (Harrow, Central)
Is my hon. Friend aware that there was a leading article in the Yorkshire Post yesterday strongly attacking that view?

§ Mr. Fisher
Then there is not even unanimity in the same newspaper.
I am sorry to weary the House with all these quotations, but of particular significance is a letter from two working journalists, who say: We wonder whether you are…aware of the lengths to which most popular newspapers 1658 go to 'follow up' every day the wills, copies of which come into their office via an agency. This is what they say happens: Widows and children of deceased are telephoned or visited by anything up to a dozen or more newspapers if the 'story' is considered good enough. Photographs are sought and if necessary, snatched. When reporters fail with relatives, servants, neighbours or almost anyone are interrogated If there is the slightest suspicion in a will that, for example, a man has left a considerable sum to somebody who is not his wife or relative, most newspapers leave no stone unturned to discover all possible details and to get photographs…If very young children are beneficiaries, their school teachers are importuned and even the children themselves are questioned…all this we would like to emphasise, is a daily occurrence…We give this brief picture as two working journalists who, in the course of our jobs, are obliged to make inquiries on wills… I hope, in that context, that hon. Members will not attach too much importance to Press objections to the Bill. The Bill, so far as I can see, does no harm to anyone, and its only objective is to protect these otherwise defenceless people from intrusion into what is, after all, a very personal and private matter.

§ Mr. Speaker
Does any hon. Member rise to second the Motion? It is not necessary.

§ Mr. Ronald Russell (Wembley, South)
I beg to second the Motion.
My hon. Friend the Member for Surbiton (Mr. Fisher) has made out an excellent case for this Bill. I speak as one who has been a working journalist. Incidentally, I am not sure that I like the term "working journalist", because all journalists work in some way or another. I also speak as a member of the Institute of Journalists.
Looking at this matter from a journalists' point of view, my attitude is that what a man does with his money after the Treasury has taken its share, which is often very large, is nobody's concern except that of his family. Yet. as my hon. Friend has explained, the Bill leaves untouched the right of members of the public to go to Somerset House and inspect wills. That fact has been taken, in a leading article in, I believe, the Evening Standard a few days ago, as a reason for condemning the Bill. It said that it was an attack on the Press because it left the public free to go and inspect wills although the Press could not publish them. That is perfectly true, but it would be very difficult to take 1659 away the right which the public now possesses, because it is necessary to allow anybody who disputes a will to inspect it in that way. That is why that right has to be left untouched. To say that it is unfair to the Press, however, is ridiculous.
In practice, I am sure that if this Bill goes through, and the publication of the details of wills or even of the amount is prohibited, there will not be a great queue of people at Somerset House every day trying to see what they have been denied from seeing in the Press. I am certain that the only people who will want to inspect wills will be those with some particular reason.
We have been told by some of the critics in the Press that the proposal in the Bill is a censorship of the Press and that it curbs the freedom of the Press. If I believed that it was a real threat to the freedom of the Press, or any big step on the road towards such an encroachment, I would not support the Measure, but it is only a very minor point.
If one examines the pages of most newspapers to see what they quote about wills, one finds about a couple of inches every few days giving the name of the testator, the amount of money he has left and the amount of duty paid; that is all. It is only on certain occasions when there is something sensational in a bequest that one may find a half column devoted to the subject in one of the more sensational newspapers. Therefore, any restriction which the Bill places on the Press as a whole is very small because it affects only those who publish this very small number of particulars at certain intervals.
There are much more real threats to the freedom of the Press—which I know are not to be found in this country—quoted in a book called "Government Pressures on the Press", which has recently been published by the International Press Institute at Zurich. This refers to the Press in forty non-totalitarian countries which have been examined by this Institute in the last year or so. It gives examples of the pressure which is applied—dictatorial directives from Governments, bribery, informal "old boy" approach—I do not know how that works in the case of the Press; I am sure it 1660 would not work in this country—withholding of Government advertising, the discriminatory distribution of newsprint, trade union demands, and withholding of Government information services and facilities.
Those are some of the real threats to the freedom of the Press which are apparently in existence in other parts of the world like Latin-America, the Middle East and even some of our own Commonwealth countries like India, Pakistan, Australia and South Africa and certain foreign countries. That is what I call a real threat to the freedom of the Press and real censorship compared to which any threat contained in my hon. Friend's Measure is quite trifling.
The Press Council which, as hon. Members know, was set up two years ago with the idea of trying to do what it could to prevent instrusions into the privacy of families such as was mentioned by my hon. Friend a few moments ago, recently issued its second Annual Report. To be quite honest, it opposed the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Mr. Mott-Radclyffe) last year. It makes this point in its Annual Report: Sometimes the publication of their full details"— that is to say, the details of wills— may cause pain to relatives, but a request to the Press for sympathetic restraint will usually be carefully considered. That might be all right for, say, the relatives of a prominent local citizen—for instance, someone in my own Borough of Wembley, where the interest in the will would be limited to local newspapers which would, no doubt, readily oblige if a case was made out on the grounds of pain caused to relatives. But I am sure that that is quite different from the position of the family of a great public figure whose will would be published not only in local newspapers but in the national Press as well. It would not be at all easy for his family to contact every national newspaper in the country, in London as well as in the Provinces, to try to prevent publication; and whereas some newspapers might agree, others might not. That rather proves that the hope expressed by the Press Council, is obviously sympathetic to the desires and rights of relatives in this matter, might not be easily fulfilled in a case like that.
1661 Another point which my hon. Friend mentioned was that a false impression may be created by newspaper reports of the amount of money that a man is said to have left. As my hon. Friend explained, in order to avoid high Estate Duty, some people quite legally make over their money to a relative or a dependant before they die, and therefore, what is shown in the will on the day it is published may give no idea whatever of the amount of money which the man has left.
I understand that there is a voluntary agreement among some newspapers not to publish the names of winners of football pools, because the winners would be upset by begging letters and requests of all kinds if the names were published. At any rate, I certainly do not remember having seen the names of winners of football pools—I am sure that there are some every week—published in the Press recently. I am open to correction on that by hon. Members.

§ Mr. H. Hynd (Accrington)
They even publish photographs of the winners.

§ Mr. Russell
If it is so that is a very good reason for supporting this Bill.
I want to read another of the letters which my hon. Friend received in support of the Bill; and this is from a constituent of my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary. It says: I am feeling very upset just now about this. A friend rang me up to say she has seen my husband's estate in the paper before I had actually heard finally from my bank executor. The Evening Chronicle— that is, the Newcastle Evening Chronicle— has a very large circulation here, and now everyone knows my private business. She goes on to say that her husband had been seriously ill for a whole year before he died and had been in very poor health for some long time. He had had two operations as a result of which they had great expenses and consequently he was not able to leave a lot of money. In other words, the impression given would be quite contrary to the actual facts of what his position would have been if he had not had to spend a great deal of money on operations in trying to preserve his health. I am sure that is another argument for not publishing what are obviously misleading details of a man's estate after his death.
1662 Therefore, despite the opposition which has been published in some newspapers about this—I have only seen The Times and the Evening Standard in the last week or two—I hope that the Bill will be given a Second Reading. I emphasise that I do not regard it as being in any way likely to be a threat to the freedom of the Press or another kind of censorship. If I thought that were likely I should not be supporting the Bill.

§ Sir Leslie Plummer (Deptford)
In rising to follow the hon. Member for Wembley, South (Mr. Russell), I do so as a newspaper man who has spent about thirty years of his working life on various newspapers in Fleet Street, and who has had the responsibility for the management and control in turn of a London evening paper, a national Sunday paper and a national daily paper.
In the years which I have spent in Fleet Street, I never once experienced an attempt to keep a will out of a newspaper. The hon. Member referred to the "old boy" approach. The "old boy" approach is often used to keep people's names out of reports of divorce cases. It is constantly done. The "old boy" approach is also made to keep people's names out of squalid prosecutions of one sort or another, but never have I experienced any influence being put on a newspaper—and I am not denying that influence is put on newspapers—to keep the details of wills out of their columns. I believe that working journalists throughout the country would support me in what I am saying.

§ Viscount Hinchingbrooke (Dorset, South)
Hence the necessity for legislation.

§ Sir L. Plummer
The noble Lord is not being as clear as he usually is in his interjections. I am saying that there is no attempt to suppress details in the publication of wills and, therefore, there is no need for this Bill.

§ Viscount Hinchingbrooke
I will make the point clear. Because newspaper proprietors do not exert the right moral attitude towards their correspondents in the publication of wills, it is necessary for Parliament to force them to do so.

§ Sir L. Plummer
That is the point of disagreement between us. I believe that there is no need for this legislation, and I will say why I believe that there is no need for legislation, in general, and certainly no need for this particularly ill-conceived Bill.
It is another attempt to encroach on the freedom of the Press. That is important enough, but something much more sinister lies behind it—it is the encroachment on the freedom of every ordinary citizen in this country to know what is going on. The hon. Gentleman who moved this Bill with such good humour and skill prayed in aid that invaluable support of the Tory Party, the widows and orphans. We had a picture of the widows and orphans dissolving into tears at the revelation of the financial good fortune which they had experienced. We have even had the "Skibereen Eagle", in the shape of a Scarborough newspaper, brought into assist the argument.
The real purpose of this Bill, in my view, is to suppress information about wills which leave vast sums of money. I do not believe that it has anything to do, and will have no effect in dealing with, the £200 or £300 which an honest artisan leaves to his bereaved wife. It will deny to ordinary people a knowledge of the social and economic conditions and changes that are being made in this country. Why should the man who buys a motor car not read of the amount of money the motor car manufacturer leaves as a result of selling his cars? Why should we not take note of the general change going on in the economic life of this country—the decline in agriculture and landed fortunes and the rise in industrial fortunes?
Why is this regarded as an encroachment on the private lives of other people. If a "crackpot" like Lucy Huston leaves a lot of money to be spent on the publication of a "crackpot" newspaper, it is important that the people should know about it. I cannot understand why, from the benches opposite, there comes this constant attempt to encroach on the liberty of the newspapers and the liberty of the readers.
Twenty or thirty years ago we had the ridiculous business of limiting the reporting of divorce cases. Why? Because working men were going through the divorce courts? Not at all. It was 1664 because people of substance were going through the divorce courts. We had this ridiculous interference with the right of the reader to know what was going on in the courts of this country and the right of newspapers to publish what might be proper evidence. I suspect that many hon. Members opposite do not like a free Press.

§ Mr. C. I. Orr-Ewing (Hendon, North)
Rubbish.

§ Sir L. Plummer
They want a Press which is not going to disturb the equanimity of the system they want. Why is television excluded from the Bill? We are soon to have regional television stations, covering quite small areas of the country which will very largely serve the same purpose as the local newspapers and much the same areas. If this Bill becomes an Act the reporter on a television station or a radio station will be perfectly free to discuss at length and report fully the wills of people who lived in the areas covered by these stations. Why is it right to leave them out of this Bill? Why prohibit the daily, Sunday, weekly or monthly paper from publishing the details of wills and leave television and radio perfectly free to do so?
Is it argued that there is less grief to widows and orphans when they hear details of their fortunes described over the air than when the details are published in cold print in the newspapers? If this Bill were to go through, it would be unfair to the newspapers and would, of course, be a denial of the theory on which it is drafted that it is against the interest of the widows and orphans that there should be any information published about the details of their inheritances.
We know that the record is to remain at Somerset House, where anybody will be free to go find out the contents of a will and repeat them by word of mouth around the village or town. This would result in the kind of distortion which we get when we pass a message down the line. Is that better than allowing the full details of the will to be published factually and frankly?
Why should it be perfectly all right for a man who owns a quarterly magazine, who prints, publishes and retails a quarterly magazine, to publish the details of a will, but wrong for a man 1665 who publishes a monthly magazine to do so? At what stage is it right to do it and at what stage is it wrong? What gradations are there of the seriousness of the offence of publication? What gradations has the hon. Member opposite in his mind? We know that this Bill would not stop wills from being read over the radio and television. We know that the hon. Member for Surbiton does not mind wills being printed on a cyclostyled sheet, like "The Week," which was so popular and successful in this country before the war. Apparently it is perfectly all right to publish the contents of wills over the radio and television, in quarterlies and cyclostyled sheets, but wrong to publish them in the evening, morning, Sunday, weekly or monthly papers.
This Bill is an attempt to hide from the public information which they should have. All people are interested in other peoples' affairs; that is a human failing. I imagine that when a Zulu chief dies everybody counts the cattle he has left to see exactly what his position was. When rich men die in this country it is a matter of social importance that we should know how much money they have left. It is a matter of interest, too. Why should not the readers of the newspapers in this country know that because he is the head of a clan the Duke of Argyll has been left £50,000 by a woman he has never met?

§ Mr. H. Hynd
That is his yarn.

§ Sir L. Plummer
Why is it not perfectly all right to announce that something has been left to the Government and something to charitable institutions? Why should it be made impossible for readers to know of the disposition of a fortune in another way? There is no reason for this Bill and I do not believe that people, particularly rich people who inherit money, are all that worried about others knowing that they have inherited money.

§ Mr. George Thomas (Cardiff, West)
What about the begging letters?

§ Sir L. Plummer
I do not believe that any of my hon. Friends has had a letter from a constituent asking him to support the Bill. I certainly have not. For the reasons that this Bill endangers both the freedom of the Press and the freedom of 1666 the reader—which is much more important than the freedom of the Press—to know what is going on in the world, I hope that the House will reject it.

§ Mr. Charles Ian Orr-Ewing (Hendon, North)
I rise to support the Bill. The hon. Member for Deptford (Sir L. Plummer) seems to have based his attack on the Bill on the fact that it contains a number of anomalies. I have no doubt that it would be possible to correct some of them in Committee. We are after the principle of the Bill at the moment, and I hope it will have the support of the House.
The object of the Bill is to protect the individual. About 750,000 people die every year. The vast majority leave small amounts of money and small bequests to close relatives or friends or people who have stood by them during their lifetime. It seems to me extraordinary that we as a country should respect and almost reverence the privacy of the individual and yet, the moment he dies, should make his affairs open to the public at large. It is not the freedom of the Press which is being challenged, because the best Press today sets an example in this connection and does not look up the sensational details in a will or subscribe to people's suffering. It is the freedom of the individual which we want to protect.
The hon. Member for Deptford suggested that this was a party matter, but I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Surbiton (Mr. Fisher), throughout his introduction, used no party bias at all. He introduced the Bill in the most reasonable terms, and I thought the most convincing part of his argument was the fact that solicitors had written in very large numbers to state that the one request which they were continually receiving from beneficiaries was the request that the private details of wills should not be published. Surely those are the people for whose word we should have some respect; those are the people who every day receive those requests.
I found that argument far more convincing than the canard that the freedom of the Press was being undermined. The best Press already exercises discretion, and it is only a question of raising the standard of the less good Press to that already being adopted by the best.
1667 It has been suggested that this Bill is a surprising one for a Conservative to introduce. I do not think it is surprising.
In the last century Lord Shaftesbury's reforms tried to redress the balance and give some freedom to the individual against the power of the employer by restricting hours of work in mines and factories. That was the first legislation in that direction. There is no reason that we should not legislate by means of a minor Measure to protect the privacy of the individual.
I have seen it stated in some papers that beneficiaries might not learn of benefits which they are to obtain unless the will is published in the newspapers. I am not a legal luminary like some right hon. and hon. Gentlemen opposite, but I understand that the executors are under an obligation to advertise, and I have often seen those advertisements in the Press. It does not seem to me that that difficulty should undermine the principles of the Bill.
The hon. Member for Deptford pointed out that the B.B.C. and I.T.A. would be free to publish these details. Perhaps he would tell me of one case during the last 36 years of the B.B.C.'s existence in which lurid details of a will have been put out over the air or television. In my experience I know of no such case.

§ Sir L. Plummer
I was asked a direct question, and I will answer it. I do not know about the I.T.A., but the fact is that the B.B.C. does not do these things because it knows that the service is provided by the newspapers. The hon. Gentleman misses the point I made. This Bill excludes the B.B.C. and the I.T.A. from its provisions, so the B.B.C. and the I.T.A. would be perfectly free, if they wished to do so, to do something which the Bill seeks to prevent newspapers from doing.

§ Mr. Orr-Ewing
The B.B.C. is free to do it, but in fact it does not do it. That is the point I was making. If the hon. Gentleman feels that the B.B.C. and the I.T.A. should be included, I have no doubt that that could be considered in Committee.

§ Mr. Fisher
indicated assent.

§ Mr. Orr-Ewing
We are not anxious to exclude anybody and to give them a privileged position. No doubt we shall have the hon. Member's assistance in Committee by trying to make some Amendments in order to put the matter right, but that does not undermine the general principles of the Bill, which seek the protection of the small man.
I, too, have had a number of letters on the subject, and there are two points at which I should like my hon. Friend to look. The first is the date on which the Bill would become law. It seems to me that January, 1957, is rather too early to allow some of these businesses to change their mode of earning an income, and perhaps we should consider a later date for the operation of the Bill. We can consider that in Committee.
The second point which the House might like to consider is whether we should put the emphasis the other way round. The Bill says in Clause 1 (1, b, i): that this Act shall not apply: (i) if publication is authorised by the testator either in his will or otherwise or by the administrator or executor thereof; It might be possible, or even desirable, if there is genuine feeling behind this question to say that a person should be authorised to make his will private if he or she wanted it to remain private, but otherwise it would be published in the Press. It is a question of putting it the other way round.
In the interval since I put my name down in support of this Bill, I have examined my local Press and other local newspapers. I find that a very large measure of discretion and responsibility is shown. Very few wills are published, but there is no doubt from letters I have received from solicitors that grave hardship is caused in instances where publication takes place. This can cause tremendous amount of gossip among the neighbours. Neighbours read the reports to see to whom bequests have gone. They say, "He borrowed half-a-crown off me during his life, yet he left hundreds of pounds in his will," or they say, "He never gave a Christmas box to a tradesman, yet he had all that tucked away in the bank; how hardhearted he was," I do not think that does good to the community at large and it harms the family of the deceased.
1669 I beg the House to give a Second Reading to this Bill to protect the freedom and privacy of individuals after they are dead in the same way as we protect their privacy when they are alive.

§ Mr. George Thomas (Cardiff, West)
I congratulate the hon. Member for Surbiton (Mr. Fisher), who introduced this Measure this morning, on the restraint and friendly tone he adopted. If I were doubtful of a Measure I had to advocate, I should try to emulate the hon. Member in the manner in which he approached this subject today.
It is significant that when an hon. Member is successful in the Ballot and introduces a Private Member's Bill he usually seeks support from hon. Members on both sides of the House. When we look at the back of this Bill we see that the hon. Member has been successful in gaining the support only of hon. Members on his side of the House. It is not without significance that every name on the back of the Bill is of a Member of his own party. He must not be surprised if we feel that hon. Members opposite have a particular interest in the proposals of this Measure. The hon. Member has been in the House for a long time now, and it is clear that he would have made efforts to obtain support from hon. Members on this side of the House. I am quite sure that he is one of our industrious hon. Members and that he would have been as busy as a beaver in seeking support.

§ Mr. C. I. Orr-Ewing
He is a fisher.

§ Mr. Thomas
I can understand hon. Members opposite wanting this secrecy about accounts, for they belong to a party which is remarkably sensitive about publishing its own accounts. The party opposite likes great secrecy about the way it gets its money and the way in which it spends its money. Now, apparently, hon. Members opposite wish to apply the same principle to those who amass considerable fortunes.
I am not concerned about the fact that the newspapers take exception to this Measure. I do not believe we ought to allow a pressure campaign by the newspapers to influence our judgment in this House. They always shout; when you get within a mile of them they shout "liberty." Very often I wonder what 1670 they mean by freedom of the Press and whether it is freedom for the people deciding the policy of the newspaper. That freedom is bound to be limited, because they select what shall go into the newspaper.
I always feel freedom is not exercised wisely if letters of mine are not published when they ought to be published. Freedom is a relative term. Unlike the hon. Member for Hendon, North (Mr. C. I. Orr-Ewing), I would not dream of referring to our daily newspapers as the best, the not so good and, I suppose, the poorer quality newspapers. To me each of the newspapers fulfils a very important public function. The fact that they survive proves that there is a need for them. When the need ceases they will disappear. These newspapers do not persecute people in regard to the publications of wills.
The Welsh people are not known for their restraint in writing to hon. Members of this House. I have as heavy a post, I suppose, as any back bencher. I have a very heavy post, but I have not had a single letter about this Bill. No one has sought to influence my judgment, or to put pressure upon me on this question, as so often happens when there is deep feeling about a matter. After all, what is wrong with this healthy interest in reading the wills of people we have known and who have laboured among us? I hope that it is not a morbid interest to want to know how people who have amassed great fortunes seek to distribute them afterwards.
My hon. Friend the Member for Deptford (Sir L. Plummer), whom I am glad to welcome back to the House in apparent good health—

§ Sir L. Plummer
Apparent?

§ Mr. Thomas
I hope it is as real as it is apparent. My hon. Friend put his finger on a very real difficulty when he referred to the fact that people will be still able to get details of wills if this Measure is passed. The gossipy people who have a really morbid interest will not mind spending 1s. to do so. I think it is 1s., although it may have gone up under this Government. If not, I am sorry that I mentioned it, because that will go up next. Inquisitive people will be able to find out what is in a will. Far more damage will be done by whispers over a cup of tea, or in other places.

§ Mr. C. I. Orr-Ewing
I wonder how many people would travel from Wales to Somerset House for such a purpose and then go back with the information.

§ Mr. Thomas
The hon. Member is revealing one of the grievances of the Welsh people. They are far away, but Londoners can walk to Somerset House and get those details.

§ Mr. Mitchison
Will my hon. Friend agree that there should be a registry in the capital of Wales, which, I understand, is now recognised as Cardiff?

§ Mr. Thomas
My hon. and learned Friend is quite right. People in the provinces should be given the same rights as people here in London.
There is the question of probate of a will being granted, and that being published in the Press. Perhaps the hon. Member for Surbiton can tell me if I have misread the Bill. I would imagine that if newspapers published the fact that probate had been granted to a certain person and gave details, that would be illegal under the terms of this Measure.

§ Mr. Fisher
No.

§ Mr. Thomas
In that case, it is not quite so bad as I thought it was. I fear that this Bill will encourage people who seek to dodge their liabilities to the Exchequer, people who, having amassed their fortune, find ways and means of distributing the money without meeting what ought to be an honestly accepted liability to the community and paying their fair share of tax or Estate Duty on it. They will be able to get away with this in an increasing manner if secrecy be adopted over this question.
The hon. Member for Surbiton made a persuasive speech. None of us would want to see pain and suffering caused to a fellow citizen merely to satisfy the curiosity of other people. That is the strongest argument he could advance, but he did not deal adequately with the fact that it is a further step to limit the information which can be made available to the public as a whole.
I do not like unworthy limits put on the Press. There are certain censorships at present. There is, I presume, a voluntary censorship in every editorial boardroom of every newspaper, but if this Measure received the assent of this House and another place, we should 1672 open the way for a new attack to limit the freedom of the Press in this country, and this House ought to consider very deeply indeed before it ventured in that direction. I feel that if we err at all in this matter, we should err on the side of caution. If there is a possibility that the Press will be more limited in its scope, we should decline to give this Measure a Second Reading, and I for one shall have to oppose it.

§ Mr. F. P. Bishop (Harrow, Central)
I am glad to be able at once to remove one anxiety from the mind of the hon. Member for Cardiff, West (Mr. G. Thomas), and to make it clear that this is not a party matter. I am unable to agree with my hon. Friends who have promoted this Bill, and I am in complete agreement with those who have spoken so far from the Opposition benches.
I shared with the hon. Member for Deptford (Sir L. Plummer) many years of common experience in Fleet Street in days gone by. I very rarely share a common opinion with him now, but on this occasion I do. The only point on which I disagree with what he said was in his assumption of some evil motive on the part of my hon. Friends in promoting this Bill. I do not think that that is a necessary assumption at all, and I am perfectly prepared to accept their statement that the object of the Bill is to get rid of pain and suffering that may be caused to individuals through the publication as,—I think, the necessary publication—of particulars that they would wish kept entirely to themselves.
I oppose the Bill, first, because it is a censorship Measure and a censorship of a particularly disagreeable and unpleasant kind because it is discriminatory. It applies only to the newspapers, as has already been pointed out, and only to the newspapers of the United Kingdom. We may all have to become subscribers to the Belfast Telegraph if we are to learn what our friends have "cut up" for. My hon. Friend spoke about local gossip, but the Bill is not a Bill to ban local gossip, and we would all agree that it would be unlikely to be very effective were that its object.
I agree with the hon. Member for Cardiff, West that local gossip will not be prevented by preventing the publication of facts in the Press. It will be made 1673 very much worse and very much more dangerous than it is normally if the full facts cannot be brought out clearly in the light of day.
I object strongly to the Bill, not only because it is a censorship Bill, discriminating against one particular form of publication, the newspapers, but because what it forbids is not publication of facts which may be private or secret in any way, but facts which are already public and accessible to any one prepared to go and seek them out in the place where the law requires them to be available for the inspection of anyone.
My hon. Friend the Member for Surbiton (Mr. Fisher) referred to agencies ferreting out information about wills. There is no question of ferreting out anything. One goes to Somerset House and looks in the register. My hon. Friend spoke about agencies which are performing this work for newspapers as though there were something sinister about it. In fact, there is nothing of the kind. Obviously newspapers do not employ their own staff correspondents, to obtain every kind of information available readily to everyone. Newspapers employ agencies, for example, to send them the scores of football matches, the results of other sporting events and that sort of thing, and, similarly, newspapers employ agencies to watch the register at Somerset House and pass on to them the information that may be of interest. There is no secret about that.
The very distinguished editor of the Yorkshire Post, Sir Linton Andrews, who is also Chairman of the Press Council, drew particular attention to that fact in an article which he wrote on this subject when it was a matter of controversy in 1950. As has already been said, anyone can go and look at the register. Anyone can talk to his friends about it and pass on a whisper which will grow and expand and can be checked only by the accurate publication of the facts. The B.B.C. can put the facts out on its news bulletins, and so can the I.T.A. It is only the newspapers which would be forbidden to do so. To my mind this is censorship in a dangerous form, and the proof of its necessity lies very heavily on those who seek to impose it. Although I admire the spirit of the speeches of my hon. Friends, I feel that they have not discharged the onus that lies on them.
1674 There is nothing new in their proposals. This question came before the House as long ago as 1920, when two successive Attorney-Generals refused to take action to permit legislation in this sense. It was discussed again in a long correspondence in The Times in 1950. The case today is the same as it was then. I do not think it could be put better than in the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Windsor (Mr. Mott-Radclyffe), who moved the same Bill last year. He said, also in a letter to The Times: A will is a personal document, and how an individual disposes of his wordly goods is his own particular private affair. That is the case for this Bill, and it is on that particularly I wish to join issue.
It is true that, primarily, a man's will and the disposal of his property after his death is his own affair. So is his marriage, to take another case, primarily his own affair, and there are many people who resent very strongly the fact that they cannot get married without any one else knowing about it at all. Even if it is primarily his own affair, it is also true that none of us can live to ourselves alone. We are all members of a social group, larger or smaller, and the social group has an interest, a proper and important interest, in those of our actions which may affect other people.
The disposition of a man's estate is one of those matters which affect other people and in which society as a whole has a very proper concern. Society expresses its interest and concern by insisting that in this case, as in the case of birth, marriage and death itself, there should be proper and adequate publicity, that things should be done in the light of day. A will is not a private document. It is a public document, and the law takes proper care to see that there shall be nothing at all secret about it.
What the newspapers do, through the agencies which I have already mentioned, is to keep an eye on the register at Somerset House and to give greater publicity to those items on the register which they seem to think have news value. I know that that is what my hon. Friends object to, and I should be the last to deny that the freedom of the Press to give wider publicity to facts of this kind can be abused, and abused to the distress and pain of individuals. As an old Fleet Street man, I regret that as much as anyone. 1675 However, a principle is involved which overrides the possibility of abuse in particular cases.
I hope the House will not make the mistake of thinking that the opposition to the Bill comes solely, mainly or even at all, so far as I know, from the newspapers which we commonly regard as being reckless and irresponsible in their attitudes to the interests and feelings of private citizens. That is not so.
Reference has already been made to leading articles in The Times, the Yorkshire Post and other newspapers, and some of the other more responsible organs of the Press have taken the same view. That is not all. When the matter arose some years ago Sir Linton Andrews brought it before the Guild of Newspaper Editors, a very responsible and respectable organisation representing the editors of the leading provincial newspapers throughout the country. The record of its proceedings shows that in May, 1950, it passed a resolution on the subject saying: The Guild Council, in view of the recent public discussion on the publication of wills, believes that it would be against the public interest to give up the long-established right of the Press to publish wills and probate news, but it is willing to receive and carefully consider any representations from the Law Society or similar organisations for the more considerate reporting of these items of news. I am not aware whether any such representations have been made, but I was informed by the Secretary of the Guild this week that it had met again to consider the terms of the Bill and had reiterated its opposition to it in principle.
As I have said, a serious principle is involved, but I do not want to make too heavy weather of a Bill which in itself is a very small one and, as I see it, is not really a very serious one at all. If the House will bear with me for a few moments more, and as an ounce of fact is worth a ton of argument, I should like to quote one or two examples of the sort of thing that newspapers publish and that would be made illegal and forbidden by the Bill. My examples are not the result of any research. They are just items that I happen to have picked out of newspapers which I have read during this week.
My first example is from the Star of last Monday. In deference to the views of hon. Members, and having no desire 1676 to give additional publicity, I shall not quote names. There was a news paragraph in the Star which said: £20,000 for a mother of three. A mother of three boys who has been twice widowed has been left about £20,000 under the will, published today, of her cousin. The paragraph goes on to describe that the good fortune had come to her from the will of a cousin with whom, many years ago, she had lived. She was evidently consulted by the reporter, and her comment was: It will be a tremendous help in bringing up the boys. I do not know—hon. Members may think that that might be described as a marginal case—whether the widow was glad or not to have that fact reported. Some people like to see themselves in the Press, and some hate it. However, I suggest that it is a reasonable and legitimate interest of society to know, and be told, when an incident of that sort occurs and such good fortune befalls a neighbour.
My second example is from The Times of last Tuesday. Nobody would suggest that The Times is reckless or irresponsible in its manner of dealing with these matters. The Times regularly, day by day, publishes under the heading "Wills and Bequests" particulars of figures and facts about wills for which probate has been granted. This example is rather interesting. I would point out that The Times does not usually give any details unless they are considered by the editor to be of some public interest. This example relates to the will of a retired inspector of schools. It is a small estate. The gentleman left his large coloured line engraving of John Howard relieving the prisoners in a gaol, to the Governor of Her Majesty's Prison, Winchester, and his mezzotint engraving of John Christian Curwen, an eminent agriculturist, to Hampshire County Council.
That would be all right. Those are bequests to public authorities, and The Times may mention such things. But what about the next? The gentleman left his mezzotint engraving of Lord Porchester in the uniform of the West Somerset Yeomanry to the commanding officer of the Regiment. and made one or two other bequests of that kind.
We are not going to put the editor of The Times in the pillory or lop his ears 1677 off for that, because my hon. Friends, in spite of their seventeenth century, Star Chamber attitude to the Press, are in other respects entirely human and twentieth-century individuals. All they want to do to the editor of The Times, if he tells his readers that someone has left a picture to the commanding officer of a regiment, is to fine him £100, and, if he does it a second time, to put him in prison, without the option, for four months.

§ Mr. C. I. Orr-Ewing
The bequest mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow, Central (Mr. Bishop) would, presumably, be of interest to past members of the regiment, and a piece of news like that should be published. However, there is nothing to stop the beneficiary from publishing the news that he has been given a portrait or article of wide interest. The Bill in no way prevents that. Under the Bill the information quoted by my hon. Friend could still be published.

§ Mr. Bishop
I want the editor of The Times to have discretion to decide whether that sort of thing is of public interest. I do not want it to be left to the recipient or executor to decide whether or not the public should know about it. I know nothing about the value of the pictures mentioned in that bequest to which I have just referred, but when a collection of pictures is broken up under somebody's will there is genuine public interest in knowing where the pictures go. If that is not known then, it may be that their disposition in later years will be very difficult to trace.
1678 I would make one final quotation. It is from the Daily Mail of last Tuesday. The headline is He remembered the choir. The paragraph records that a gentleman who died last month at the age of 93 had for many years loved to listen to York Minister choir, and that under his will he left a substantial sum for the benefit of the choirmen.

§ Mr. C. I. Orr-Ewing
The publication of that news would be permitted, of course, for that is a charitable bequest.

§ Mr. Bishop
My hon. Friend says that that is a charitable bequest. I do not know why. It does not sound to me as though it is a charitable bequest.
Whether it is or not, my object is merely to indicate the kind of thing that this Bill will make illegal, under pain of fine and imprisonment, for the editors of newspapers. Its effect must be considered, and it must be considered in relation to the desire which everyone would have to prevent the unnecessary publication of details that are of no interest to anybody.

§ Mr. C. I. Orr-Ewing
On a point of order. Is it in order to call a count at just after one o'clock? I thought a count could not be permitted until after two o'clock.

Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Sir Charles Mac-Andrew)
A count cannot be called between 1.15 and 2.15 p.m.