I READ with concern your article about family members who illicitly tap their elderly parents’ money (The Press, July 24).

Such cases are commoner than we like to think. Although City of York Council is aware of the problem there are limits to their ability to tackle it as many elderly people do not call for council help.

I fear that the problem could become worse and in a particularly nasty way. When I worked for a London borough I came across cases where council tenants had bought houses under right to buy”. They had then given the houses to their children – who tried to evict their parents.

Elderly parents were distressed, sometimes made homeless, and the councils had a resource-consuming task to sort out the mess caused by the children’s greed and callousness.

I understand the charity Shelter is aware of many such cases nationally. Extending right to buy to housing association tenants is likely to worsen the problem.

It’s tempting to say that anyone thinking of giving their property to their children should “see King Lear first” but family circumstances change, divorces and splits happen.

What may seem a good and generous idea can soon become a nightmare. Don’t give away a home – unless you’ve taken good legal advice.

Roger Backhouse, Orchard Road, Upper Poppleton

 

COLUMNIST Emma Clayton was bang on the money with her condemnation of fox hunting and its supporters (The Press, July 21).

These people are wrong to call a bloodthirsty pursuit a sport and plainly lie when they say that it is about pest control.

Not when cubs are to be reared and then released to be hunted at a later date.

Nor when they are introduced to areas like the Isle of Wight, where foxes were never an indigenous species.

I frequently walk the countryside and have done so for many years.

I am told by people that the hunt carries on with impunity and that tenant farmers who shoot a marauding fox are threatened with dismissal by landowners denied the pleasure of seeing it torn to pieces by hounds.

The law against hunting with hounds should be actioned and any attempt at repeal should be binned.

Dave Barker, Fern Close, Huntington, York

 

IN the 1990s, in our fleet of nuclear submarines, one submarine carried I believe 148 missiles and each nuclear missile about 54 torchlets, each one many times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima.

Now they say there are over 15,000 nuclear weapons throughout the world. This is what they call MAD – mutual assured destruction.

In the 1960s, they reckoned it would take two hours to wipe Britain off the face of the earth with two minutes warning.

They say nuclear weapons are a deterrent. A deterrent is a deterrent until it is used.

We are already at one minute to midnight by the Doomsday Clock. If these weapons are used and anybody is left alive, the living would envy the dead.

Robert D Greaves, Alderway, New Earswick, York

 

CONFIRMATION comes via satellite photography that the Arctic sea ice has increased in size by 40 per cent.

When will the climate change zealots realise nature can repair itself perfectly without the interference, mostly very costly to the rest of us, from man.

Remember the black hole in the atmosphere about 30 years ago.

Catastrophic doom was forecast. Since then nature has healed itself without any help from the Friends of the Earth brigade, although Earth has plenty of experience, having been in existence for billions of years.

Peter Rickaby, West Park, Selby

 

I WAS pleased to find the Hunt autograph collection ‘reintroduced’ to York (The Press, July 24).

I first met this fascinating collection in 2012 as a volunteer in the archives at Explore. It caught my imagination and I set out to discover more about the slightly elusive Reginald Hunt and his autographs.

Readers may like to know that the collection was presented to the library by Hunt himself, an event which was central to the official opening of the new wing in 1938.

But what of Reginald Hunt (1894-1941)?

If you have heard of the John J Hunt Ebor Brewery, know where Hunt Court is, seen the list of Governors of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, or driven past the Sir John J Hunt Memorial Homes in Fulford, you have some clues.

Reginald was a member of the Hunt family of brewers, becoming chairman of the brewery on the death of his cousin, Sir John Joseph Hunt, in 1933.

My interest has led me to further research about Reginald Hunt and his autographs.

I should be delighted to hear from any local societies who may know of his part in their history, and from any readers who may have been to an exhibition of the autographs, or perhaps recall others speaking of Reginald Hunt.

I can be contacted by email at mph4439@icloud.com

Dr M Hayward, Woodthorpe, York