Post Office scandal: Studham sub-postmaster says public support after TV drama has finally given him the confidence to speak up

A former sub-postmaster who says he was forced to close his branch more than 20 years ago says he has finally found the confidence to rejoin village life.

John Hanna says the Horizon IT scandal was the final straw that forced the closure of the Studham branch more than 20 years ago.

And he said that after shutting up shop he received hate mail – and was so ashamed he lived ‘like a hermit’.

John’s family had owned and run the branch since 1837 – and says when he took over in 1984 it was “a great business”. But 10 years later John, 68, says “things started to go wrong”.

The Post Office was hit by two armed raids and business began to tail off as customers went elsewhere for their newspapers and lottery tickets. John explained: “My wife, Vanessa, became ill, but the final straw was when Horizon was introduced in either 1999 or 2000. I’d been balancing manually for 15 years without any problems and suddenly Horizon comes and I'm struggling trying to balance the books.”

Horizon was an accounting and stock-taking system which had falsely shown shortfalls, often in the thousands of pounds.

For years the Post Office demanded more and more of John’s time, until he was manning both the Post Office and shop counters, only having Christmas Day off – all while trying to provide for his wife and three daughters.

Thankfully, John’s Horizon system showed only hundreds of pounds of errors, but he paid the difference out of his own pocket.

John said: “I dreaded Wednesday nights. God knows what hour in the morning I’d be trying to balance the books. You could have seen me at the back of the Post Office at two o'clock in the morning trying to find these elusive balances and invariably you didn't.”

By 2001, it had become too much. He said: “I shut the Post Office down owing £20,000. I worked as a postman in Luton for two years. I work double shifts. I was 46 years old when I started. I paid off all my shop debts without going bankrupt but I could so easily have.

“It was a massive decision. Two days after we announced that we were closing up shop, our window was smashed. I got hate mail from people.”

While John doesn’t blame the Horizon system for him closing, he did call it “the straw that broke the camel’s back”. Between 1999 and 2015, 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses were prosecuted by the Post Office based on information from Horizon. Like many of those wrongly convicted, John is now ridding himself of the shame that shrouded him for decades.

Only now, over 20 years on, has John found the confidence to venture back into his community. After seeing Mr Bates vs The Post Office, a four-part series about the scandal, John took to Facebook to share this story with the Studham community. He explained: “I've had so many well wishes. The feedback has been overwhelmingly kind.

“We lived reclusively, like hermits for 20 years and were very ashamed of closing the shop. To have people in the village that I've not spoken to for years come to me and say, ‘You know, we didn't understand.’ It's been cathartic.”

He added: “I've become a villager again. It's given me the confidence to start doing things in the village again. It's like a new life for me.”