The fight for justice for Post Office victims started in Fenny Compton (Picture: ITV/Shutterstock)
Fenny Compton is a sleepy village in the middle of the Warwickshire countryside – but it played a major role in one of the biggest scandals the UK has seen in recent years.
In 2009, Fenny Compton was the location of the first meeting of ex sub-postmasters and mistresses affected by the Post Office Horizon scandal, as seen in the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
More than 900 people were wrongly prosecuted. Some went to prison, and others were left financially ruined.
Others attempted suicide and one man, Martin Griffiths, took his own life.
The meetings held in the village helped paved the way to justice for the victims.
The meeting members led a High Court case that ruled that the Horizon IT system was at fault. They’ve also secured compensation schemes for victims.
However, the fight for justice is still ongoing.
Only 95 convictions have been overturned so far and the current inquiry into the scandal could take months to reach a conclusion.
Here’s why Fenny Compton had such an important role to play.
Where is Fenny Compton?
Fenny Compton is a village in Warwickshire, eight miles north of Banbury. It’s home to around 800 people.
Fenny Compton is about 38 miles south of Birmingham(Picture: Joseph Walshe / SWNS)
Its name comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘Fennig Cumbtun’, which means ‘marshy farmstead in a valley’.
Aside from its links with the Post Office scandal, the village is also famous for being the home of Andrew and Kathleen Booth, who built a prototype computer called the All-Purpose Electronic Computer.
What’s the connection between Fenny Compton and the Post Office Horizon scandal?
The first meeting of the Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance (JFSA) campaign group took place in the village hall in Fenny Compton.
It’s not clear why the Warwickshire village was chosen as a meeting point.
The village hall in Fenny Compton was the meeting place for the Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance(Picture: Joseph Walshe / SWNS)
In the TV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, Alan Bates is seen choosing the village at random when he points to it on a map.
Between 30 and 40 ex sub-postmasters and mistresses attended the first meetings.
What happened in the Post Office Horizon scandal?
The Post Office introduced a new IT system called Horizon in 1999.
However, the system was faulty. It incorrectly displayed cash shortfalls where they did not exist, making it appear that thousands of pounds were missing.
As a result, hundreds of subpostmasters were wrongfully accused of stealing the ‘missing’ money.
More than 700 subpostmasters faced charges related to the Horizon system, including false accounting, fraud and theft.
The scandal was dramatised for an ITV television series called Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
The campaign group put pressure on the government to investigate the issue, six members of the group, including Bates, took the Post Office to the High Court.
In 2019, after ten years of campaigning, the group’s work started to pay off.
In the landmark case, the judge ruled that the Horizon computer system was at fault and the Post Office paid £58 million to the 555 ex-subpostmasters and mistresses involved.
The real Alan Bates has not given up his fight for justice – this week, he gave evidence at the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry (Picture: PRU / AFP)
The government has vowed that those wrongly convicted will be cleared, and Bates is continuing to campaign for a wider compensation scheme for victims.
The village hall, formerly known as Oddfellows Hall, is today used as a meeting place for the Scouts club and the Women’s Institute, and as a cinema once a month.
The village is in Warwickshire in the Midlands
Kate Carless, the village hall’s current treasurer, told the BBC that the hall played its ‘own little part in history’.
‘We’ve had people driving past the village hall quite slowly taking photos,’ she said.
One Google review of the village hall said it ‘needs a blue plaque’ because of how it helped the ex-postmasters and mistresses.
Was Mr Bates vs The Post Office filmed in Fenny Compton?
Although the village played an important role in the fight for Horizon justice, the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office wasn’t actually filmed in Fenny Compton.
The sleepy town missed out on being used as a filming location in Mr Bates vs The Post Office (Picture: Joseph Walshe / SWNS)
The scenes set there were filmed in Pratts Bottom in Kent.
The TV series was also filmed in Llandudno in north Wales and Tatsfield in Kent.
Other Kent locations included Sevenoaks and Pilgrims Way in Westerham.
It’s not clear why Fenny Compton was snubbed as a filming location, but the show’s director James Strong said that a lot of the scenes were shot in Kent because lots of its villages were ‘really were perfect for our kind of small, quintessentially English country towns, where a lot of these subpostmasters were based.’
How has the village responded to the Post Office scandal?
Many Fenny Compton locals are proud of the role that their village played in helping the ex sub-postmasters and mistresses get justice.
Dozens of sub-postmasters wrongly accused of stealing money in the Post Office scandal returned to Fenny Compton village hall on Monday for a BBC Breakfast special (Picture: Nick Robinson Photography / Avalon)
‘It’s great that Fenny has played such a big role in getting those poor sub-postmasters and mistresses the justice and money they deserve,’ former villager Peter White wrote on Facebook.
The village is filled with chocolate-box cottages (Picture: Joseph Walshe / SWNS)
‘Quite surreal seeing our house on the news but more importantly listening to these peoples stories is absolutely heartbreaking, I really do hope this all helps towards their justice and for those who sadly lost their lives,’ Alezandra Eborall added.
Mr White has launched a campaign to get Alan Bates to return to the Fenny Compton for a Q&A event at the village hall.