MANY kind hearts were touched by the case of 63-year-old spinster Freda Fentriss-Ellerby, who, weeping uncontrollably as she was parted from her beloved animals, was evicted by a posse of police, court staff and bailiffs from the tumbledown farm which had belonged to her family for 500 years and which, until last week, she had never left even for a day.

For angered and touched by her plight - she is the victim of her brother's will which left his half-share of the farm high on the North Yorkshire moors to outsiders - people all over the country have inundated an appeal fund for Miss Fentriss-Ellerby with cash gifts.

So there may be a happy ending after all.

But consider that somewhere at the tail end of this legal wrangle over that will there are people who, no doubt, would say all they want is their entitlement - in other words, the money - and were content to see a lonely old woman parted from her home and animals in order that they should get it.

Consider, too, that there are people who, no doubt, would say that they are only doing their job, whose work is to further just such a sentiment and to profit from it.

I just hope that they, too, are impressed by the huge public response to this sorry story. For no matter how much they tell themselves that the law upholds what they do, when they look at themselves in the mirror, a great tide of moral outrage tells them what rotters they are.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.