In memory of a friend who took his own life after years of persecution.

OK, this is a tough one, but the circumstances that caused this tragedy are unfortunately, not uncommon and show the dangers of replacing individual moral courage with box ticking.

The village is an ancient one, people have lived here for at least 3000 years. it’s perched about 800ft above sea level on the north side of the South Tyne Valley above the A69 which connects Newcastle to Carlisle. It’s a dramatically beautiful place, here, overlooking the South Tyne as it meanders its way through the barley and pastures. From up here you can see for miles, the rising slopes of the south side of the valley and the purple moorland reaching away to the south. The Romans sited a watch tower on the summit of the hill behind the village, a tower that marked the northern border of their vast empire. That tower was built long before Hadrian built his wall three miles to the north. The tower was part of an integrated defence network of forts, lookouts and roads and overlooked the nearby fort. Northumberland is a beautiful county, the least densely populated and remote in England with more demographically in common with the folk over the border than the south of England, this part has an added beauty because it is far enough west to pick up the dramatic and variable skies. Sun rises and sunsets are so striking here that they become the norm rather than the exception.

The village itself dates back to the days when the Anglo Scottish border was as dangerous as the Khyber Pass is today. Many of the houses are converted ‘bastles’, fortified farmhouses to protect the farmer’s family and his livestock from marauding bands of Reivers. When Jamie Stuart became King of England as well as King of Scots in 1603, the days of night raids, family feuds and blackmail came to an end and the village expanded as the population settled down, the nineteenth century saw affluence in industry, there’s precious metals in these hills: silver, copper, molybdenum, some of the finest coal in the British Isles can be found here. Some of it spills from seams on the hillside to this day, glistening black in the ruddy brown clay. To this day some villagers dig their own from the hillside. Next to the Roman watch tower is an iron aged settlement of a dozen huts and an enclosing wall, with archaeological evidence of barley fields at an elevation where now only moorland heather grows - the climate being warmer. As I said, it’s an ancient place.

We lived there between 2015 and 2020.

Summer in the village is spectacular, the winters unrelentingly hard here, rural poverty is a problem across Northumberland and the added cost of heating off grid makes springs financially tight. Spring along the Anglo Scottish border is the best season by far, under the gentle light and soft breeze you can literally see life returning, from the snowdrops and daffodils pushing through, a good six weeks later than in the south, to the cry of lambs and the frolicking of cows who have spent the winter in barns. A ten minute springtime walk through the village is enough to restore the soul, to lift even the darkest of moods.

Or it is, at least, for most of us.

Because sometime on the 29th May, or maybe a day before, a friend and former neighbour of ours stood in the garden of his cottage, in the village, stared at the beautiful view, and, on this late Spring day, placed a humane retractable bolt gun to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

He was 59.

He wasn’t an easy man, prickly, defensive and deeply insecure, he had been suffering from mental health problems for many years. Worse, he was isolated and estranged from his ex wife and kids and had been for almost a decade. A talented artist, he had been Head of Art in a Comprehensive School, but all that had been in the past.

We met him when we moved to the village in 2016. He was helpful and practical and shared my interest in trying to fix broken machinery and home mechanics. He was a difficult friend. Over clingy, sensitive, thin skinned, desperate for attention, skittish to the point of annoyance. He lacked confidence, could never say the right thing. Spend five minutes with him and it was obvious that here was a broken man, a man who had experienced a trauma that had undermined his entire character. You’d get glimpses of the man before. He was generous, thoughtful, sensitive, amusing, incredibly talented. But he also had no idea how to respect boundaries, he didn’t understand that just because I was at home didn’t mean I wasn’t working and many a stressful project implementation meeting was interrupted by his knock on the door, asking if he could borrow a tool, but really yearning for attention and deeply hurt at my impatient response.

Then, one day, about two months after moving, we were approached by our landlady who expressed displeasure that we were entertaining ‘that man’ in ‘her house’. After reminding her, bluntly, about the terms of our tenancy agreement and that we could associate with whomever we wished as we had the right to ‘enjoy’ the property whilst tenants, she made an extraordinary allegation: ‘so you know about him? You know about his record?’ Not willing to take her word for anything, I did a bit of digging.

You see, in the mid-naughties, our neighbour had been working as that Head of Art as I already mentioned above. A popular and talented teacher, he had a house, a wife and two daughters and a dog. But then one day he apparently issued a detention to a female pupil. She didn’t like this so she made up a story about him, that he had acted inappropriately towards him. ‘Safeguarding’ protocols were immediately implemented and he was suspended while an investigation was carried out. And a couple of weeks later, the investigation cleared him of all wrongdoing.

Only it didn’t end there. ‘Paedo’ whispered in the playground and canteens, parents picked up on this and more complaints came in. After a few months of this the school capitulated and he agreed to leave the school with a settlement agreement. Only, it then became impossible to find a job in the north west. “Oh, you’re not quite right’, ‘thanks for your application but we won’t be taking it any further.” In desperation the family relocated to Northumberland, pulling his then teenage girls out of their schools and social networks, when the rumours followed the family to the village, employment in Northumberland became impossible to secure and they sputtered along on his irregular supply teaching income, but the permanent job always illuded him, his daughters being bullied at school because of the allegations.

We are all the heroes in our own heads. Many of us would picture ourselves as being able to weather such a storm with our immense character. Only, that’s not the reality. When your life is destroyed in this way, when you are the victim of malicious gossip, when you are failed by a society that is meant to guarantee your rights, it takes a toll. And the man he was becoming as a consequence was increasingly withdrawn, defensive, hostile, isolated and eccentric. This all added to the perception that he was a bit ‘odd’. The bookings from the teaching agency dried up as the impact on his personality became more obvious.

By the time the village found out, his career as an art teacher was effectively over. Now these Northumberland communities are pretty close knit. They welcome outsiders, but always at an arms length. It takes a good decade to be accepted as a local. Many of the families in the village have been there for a very long time indeed. The beauty of the location meant that there was a fair amount of incomers from other parts of the country, retirees from Newcastle and Carlisle, exiles from neighbouring areas: Lothian and the Borders like me, County Durham and Cumbria were usually accepted. Londoners and those from further afield would take a bit longer to be accepted.

Like all small communities, everyone knows everyone else' s business. It’s the way of things and has been since the dawn of humanity. And his odd behaviour, the increasing rows with his family, all caused eyebrows to be raised in the village. Calls were made and the rumour arrived. Now most villagers were appalled at the treatment, but a couple decided that there was no smoke without fire and one in particular went out of his way to harras and bully him. A well known and well connected local man he went out of his way to tell everyone in the village, in neighbouring communities and in the local towns of Hexham and Haltwhistle, that there was a nonce in the village.

From what I understand, from conversations with other villagers, about 3 years after they arrived in the village, this all proved too much for his family, who no longer recognised the man this relentless pressure had warped. They returned to the North West. Eventually becoming estranged, when we met him in 2016, it had been a good four years since he had heard from or spoken to his wife and daughters.

He sought sanctuary in his faith, raised a Catholic, the local priesthood stood by him and the congregation gave him a place. Unfortunately, the nearest Catholic Church was in Hexham, a good 12 miles away. He tried to sell his cottage in the village to relocate near the church, but by now the impact on his mental health was undermining his ability to take care of himself and the cottage, not an easy sell at the best of times, never came anywhere close to being fit for the market. I think that had he been able to move into town he would have found solace, but poverty and his slip into vulnerability made the reality of this move remote.

Then Covid hit.

We last saw him just before the first lockdown. There had been a very bad storm in early 2020 which damaged our house so badly that a section of the roof fell in. The landlord couldn’t afford to fix it so we moved house the week after the first lockdown lifted, to another village, 20 miles away. I kept in touch with him on and off but, if I am honest with myself, and, to my shame, I was relieved that he was no longer a constant presence in our lives. He had become extremely intrusive and when I spoke to him about it, he got very emotional and interpreted my setting parameters of the relationship as another rejection.

Pressures on our own lives took over as is the way with busy jobs and kids to raise, and, as always happens, you lose touch with people.All this was exacerbated for me during Covid as I was working in Healthcare and was responsible for staffing 40 hospitals across the UK. I hardly had time for my family during the lockdowns, let alone friends.

Then, the other day I fond myself wondering what had happened to him. It had been a while since I had seen any social media posts. I found his art website, which was still up and running and the last post had been about an exhibition of his work in a local town in early 2023. Then nothing. I had a feeling of dread, exacerbated perhaps by learning of the deaths of several old friends whom I had not seen since before Covid.The pattern was the same. Social media silence.

I did a bit more digging and then came across a report criticising the local NHS Mental Health Trust for failing to protect him because despite being a priority patient, and a suicide risk, he had slipped through the cracks of institutional indifference. Bought a bolt gun and ended his life. Further searches found the Trust’s excuses: ‘administration error’...’lessons will be learned’ etc. The usual whitewashing guff.

I was shocked but unsurprised and then felt a terrible, clawing guilt. Guilt that not only had I let him down by distancing myself after our move, against my Christian principles no less. But guilty about a society that has allowed this sort of thing to happen. You see, at no point i the official report did it mention WHY he was a risk. It didn’t mention what had happened to him, it didn’t call out individuals that had made his life hell with fifteen years of bullying, innuendo and gossip. It didn’t call out the behaviour of the pupils, the parents, the village and, worst of all, the employers that failed him utterly and cast him aside because it was easier than confronting a mob.

And here’s the thing…. He’s not the only one. I personally know four other middle aged men who have had their careers destroyed due to such innuendo. In all circumstances they were cleared of any wrongdoing, the accusations being malicious, in all of them they were eventually driven out of their careers as educators of healthcare workers by gossip and by an employment culture which turns a blind eye to their plight. Three of the five marriages have ended and two of those have become estranged from their children. Their careers and lives have been wrecked, they have been forced to move away from their communities, rejected by them.

This is 2025, for God’s sake and we are meant to have put an end to mob justice, but apparently not.

Time and time again, in my HR career I see ‘safeguarding’ used as an excuse to avoid difficult confrontations or scenarios, to excuse the removal of employment rights. But rarely, if ever, are those responsible ever confronted with the consequences of their actions. I would be surprised if the Headmaster and HR team responsible know what those consequences were, yet they were the ones who decided it was expedient to hang him out to dry, rather than defend him from malicious gossip.

Do we really want to live in a society like this? When appalling behaviour, like that of the parents, gossips and children is ignored and enabled by cowards in authority who have replaced a commitment to basic human decency and honesty, with performative HR box ticking?

Is this the consequence of a society which sees men as a threat to be managed rather than accepting them as members of the community? The default of many Safeguarding policies I have seen is that men should be treated with suspicion around children. This goes from professional and club interactions with kids to corporate policies. Remember when Boris Johnson was challenged for sitting next to a small girl on a plane - until he pointed out he was her father, they had asked him to move.

As a man, father of two and active member of my community who as coached kids rugby and been a Cadet Adult Volunteer, I find it deeply insulting when the institutional assumption that I am an inherent danger to kids is made.

Incidentally, some safeguarding policies are very good and safeguarding professionals highly trained who strike the balance perfectly. But all too often, stories like this one are the result of ham fisted incompetence, cowardice, malevolence and vicious gossip.

Why would any man put himself into a scenario where such could happen to him? Why would anyone want to become a teacher, a University academic, a sports coach, a scoutmaster, a Cadet Officer when a single rumour can literally destroy your entire life and tragedies like the one above?

We need to take a long, hard look at ourselves as a society.

As for Michael? Requiescat In Pace, my friend, I am so sorry we let you down.

Names have been changed to protect the privacy of the family.