Cautionary tales about making wills
Making a straightforward Will should be straightforward. However, things can go wrong, as these true stories from long ago show.
The home made codicil
In the old days, before the computer age, Wills had to be individually typed (no mistakes) on manual or electric typewriters, so codicils (a document varying a Will) were much used to make small alterations, to save the labour of re-typing the whole Will. An old lady (let’s call her Agnes) owned and worked in a shop. She had a large family and periodically fell out with members of it. When this happened she would go to her solicitor and instruct him to prepare a codicil (a document varying a Will) cutting the offending family member out of her Will. When she had made it up with that family member, back she would go to her solicitor to make a new codicil re-admitting them to the Will.
One Christmas Eve she was busy in her shop. She had fallen out with one of her daughters (call her Mary) but had no time to go to her solicitor. However, she had prepared codicils so often that she knew the wording and the signing formalities. Sitting in her office in the back of the shop she wrote the codicil, signed it and had her signature witnessed by a salesman who happened to be there. She knew that two witnesses were required, so called a girl who was working in the shop (Betty) to come into the office. When Betty arrived, she said words to the effect: “Betty, sign your name here” showing her where to sign on the codicil. Betty signed and went back into the shop.
Agnes died between Christmas and New Year and I was instructed to arrange Probate of the Will and numerous codicils. A solicitor acting for Mary rang me and told me Mary was disputing the codicil that cut her out of Agnes's Will. I told him that it looked OK to me, but he said he had interviewed Betty who remembered signing her name at Agnes’s behest a few days before but had not seen Agnes sign the codicil, nor had Agnes shown her her (Agnes’s) signature or told her the piece of paper was a codicil.
The codicil was therefore invalid as the witness to a Will (or codicil – the rules are the same) must see the testator sign or have the testator acknowledge his/her signature, and must know that the document is a Will or codicil.
The contradictory codicils
A lady (Joan) made a Will with her solicitors. Five years later she instructed them to prepare a codicil. The solicitor who had made the Will prepared the codicil which, because of its length, was typed on a separate piece of paper.
Five years after that Joan again instructed the solicitors to prepare a codicil. This time a different solicitor in the firm dealt with her. He had no knowledge of the first codicil, which had become separated from the Will, and Joan must have forgotten about it because a codicil was prepared which substantially contradicted the earlier one. The new codicil was shorter than the earlier one and was endorsed on the Will itself.
Joan died and the solicitors prepared to obtain Probate. At this stage the papers were sorted and the contradictory codicils came to light. The situation was a mess and Chancery Counsel had to be instructed to sort it out.
The morals of the two stories above are, first, don’t use codicils, which are not necessary in this modern age; the original Will should be on disk and can be amended and reprinted and, secondly, keep the files in order so that whoever picks the file up can see what has been done.
Over complicated and vague Wills
An old man came to see me with instructions to prepare a Will. He sat in my office for about three hours giving me instructions that ended up as five closely typed pages. He wanted to leave dozens of specific legacies, but they tended to be: “£5 to Bill the postman”, “£10 to nice Kathleen who stops and talks to me when I am in the garden”; that sort of thing. I protested that it might be very difficult if not impossible to trace Bill and Kathleen and others when he died and this would cause a lot of expense. He refused to take the time to find out the full names and addresses of Bill and Kathleen and the others equally vaguely named, and insisted on his Will being prepared as he had dictated.
When he died, sure enough, I had great difficulty tracking down a lot of the Bills and Kathleens and the rest, but one point had slipped past me when taking down his instructions. He had left “the grandfather clock on the landing” to somebody, which seemed clear enough. What I didn’t know was that his fairly large house had two landings and each one had a grandfather clock on it. Of course, one of them was very valuable and the other, pretty ordinary. So we ended up with an expensive dispute between the named beneficiary of the one clock and the residuary beneficiary who would inherit the other.
Inaccurate addresses
A lady came to see me with instructions for a Will. She wanted to leave sums of money or objects to lots of friends and relations living all over the world. She was pretty clear about their names, but some of the addresses looked a bit odd to me, so I queried them. She insisted that she had them right, but I was still unsure, so asked her when she last heard from them. She said “last Christmas, they all sent me cards”, and she still had the cards and envelopes. I went to her house to look at the cards. About 17 out of the 20 or so addresses she had given me were wrong, and I reckoned that about 10 of them were so wrong that they would not be traceable when she died.
The morals of the two above tales are to be precise about addresses and identities of beneficiaries (especially if they are outside the family) and don’t let people make long Wills with dozens of gifts.
The moral of all these tales is to make sure that the Will is right and accurate. I always insist, for instance, on a jeweller’s technical description of jewellery if there is likely to be any confusion; if a client is leaving three diamond rings to different beneficiaries, they must be clearly identifiable.
