This account is a warning for heritage railways in particular, and the not-for-profit sector in general, of what can happen when unsuitable people end up in charge.

It was the West Somerset Railway on which I first volunteered in 1979 and alongside which I now live. In 2018 one Jonathan Jones-Pratt came to be appointed as chairman of the company that runs that railway and from the off demonstrated his unsuitability for that post. I am going to set out in this account the events from 2018 to date which show that.

• Manipulation of (poor) organisational structure or appointments to obtain or maintain control by a single individual.

• Failure to quality assure or perform due diligence with respect to appointments.

• The use, or misuse (or refusal to use) discipline and grievance procedures turning them into instruments of oppression.

• Application of sham disciplinary proceedings, and a sham mediation, run by an amoral firm of external consultants (at great expense).

• The destruction of internal WSR projects, and relationships with other bodies such as the Somerset & Dorset Trust and the Hinkley Fund

• Vile treatment of individuals.

• The creation of an environment where a person running public relations for the WSR plc felt able to have the following e-mail exchange (among others) set out below with colleagues:

  IJ: ‘Palace revolutions usually result in firing squads. How about firing a red hot poker up her so-called fa**y!’

  DW (first response): ‘Quite so, but even the poker might flinch at that prospect! D’

  DW (second response) : ‘Fancy turning up to meet her with a pick-axe handle and balaclavas one night? And not for sticking up her arse either.’

In dismissing DW for gross misconduct, the South Devon Railway concluded that DW had used his South Devon Railway e-mail facilities to run: ‘an unacceptable hate campaign against a small group of WSR volunteers with the focus falling on one particular individual who is continually singled out for ridicule by reference to their protected characteristics defined within the Equality Act 2010, in an entirely inappropriate manner.’

And where a director of the WSR plc felt able to say to DW:

‘What we need is a few spurious press releases to put about their activities and get them slipped out around the railway. Regards B’

And later, in discussing the creation of the ‘Nazi’ hit piece on myself and others the same Director said:

‘Restoration of cattle wagons accelerated for meeting resettlement demands etc.’

And where a Trustee of the West Somerset Railway Heritage Trust felt able to share the Nazi hit piece which calls me ‘Elle Duce’, makes Nazi references to myself and others and refers to me being hung from a lamppost.

Our ‘crime’ was to suggest that the railway would do better with a different structure and to stand for election to attempt to achieve that.

On all these matters I have tried to engage fully with WSR plc internal process, or process out of the public eye, including via the trade body, the Heritage Railways’ Association. These attempts have been fruitless and so only ‘the court of public opinion’ remains.

I was issued with internal WSR disciplinary process on 1 February 2021. The incompetent and partisan process run by consultants ‘MyHR’ ended in a farcical outcome in July 2021. Farcical, because the letter ending my 40 years of volunteering contains no finding about anything I did. The appeal process was equally farcical. The appeal was decided on a wholly different basis never put to me and ended in the autumn of 2021.

I then had to bring High Court proceedings to enforce a data subject access request against the poor South Devon Railway who had ended up as ‘piggy in the middle’ and to whom no blame attaches – they did dismiss the WSR volunteer, their employee, embroiled in bullet point 5 above. That came to a hearing at the Royal Courts of Justice in July 2022 as a result of which I was provided with over 1,000 pages of documents full of vile comments about myself and others and the DW dismissal papers.

Hoping to avoid putting these matters in the public domain, in the autumn of 2022 I turned to the Heritage Railway Association, who ‘talk a good job’ about governance at their events but have declined to take any step to look into this matter, leaving me only the ‘court of public opinion’.

Please do not think I do this for personal gain or aggrandizement. In the autumn of 2022, I discovered that I was severely ill and although, through the skills of the NHS at Bart’s hospital in London, I am enjoying a period of respite, the future for me is all too certain and I will not be offering myself for additional responsibilities for the foreseeable future. My object is to provide the facts for others to act upon or learn from. The regime that JJP has created will inevitably ensure the WSR’s failure (as I shall explain) and it is no answer for other, such as the present WSR General Manager, when obvious wrongful acts are put to her, to say ‘its above my pay grade’.