New Year Honours: Oldest Post Office victim dedicates OBE to those whose lives were ruined

Betty Brown, 92, from Consett, County Durham, was recognised in the New Year Honours List for her tireless campaigning for justice for sub-postmasters caught in the Horizon scandal

A woman believed to be the oldest victim of the Post Office scandal has said her OBE is recognition for all postmasters whose lives were destroyed.

Betty Brown, 92, from Consett, County Durham, was recognised in the New Year Honours List for her tireless campaigning for justice. More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongfully prosecuted after faulty Horizon IT software made it look as though they had stolen money from branch accounts.

The public inquiry into the scandal found 59 victims contemplated suicide, with 10 attempting to take their own lives. Chairman Sir Wyn Williams said there was a “real possibility” 13 people ended their lives due to the suffering they endured.

Ms Brown was one of the original victims, who took part in the group legal action led by Sir Alan Bates against the Post Office. She ran the Annfield Plain Post Office near Stanley with her late husband Oswall from 1985 to 2003 and estimates they lost around £100,000 of their own money to cover shortfalls that didn’t exist.

This Christmas was the first in 26 years that Ms Brown said she could relax with “no worries” after finally getting compensation from one of the Government’s schemes.

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Describing being made an OBE, she said: “I’m honoured… I’m just not able to handle it. I’m just an ordinary, hard-working person… it’s just not something that you ever think about and I think of all the sub-postmasters, all the 900, the 13 that committed suicide.

“It’s on behalf of them and what they have gone through and what I’ve gone through, and I feel everything that they feel. I will wear it in honour of them, I’m very, very honoured but it’s for the subpostmasters… what this really stands for is important.”

D-Day veteran Mervyn Kersh said it is a “wonderful thing” to be awarded a British Empire Medal (BEM) for his school talks on Holocaust remembrance and his wartime service. The 101-year-old previously told the Mirror that nothing could have prepared him for meeting the survivors at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany as a young British Jewish soldier in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps. Ahead of the 80th anniversary of VE Day earlier this year, he told us: “It is important to remember, to make sure we don’t forget, if we don’t remember they will do the same again.”

Other everyday heroes include Ellen Roome, 49, who gets an MBE for campaigning on online safety following the death of her 14-year-old son Jools. Ms Roome believes her son died in 2022 after a social media challenge went wrong and has been fighting to change the law to force social media firms to hand over children’s data to bereaved parents.

She said: “I’ve tried to make Jools’ life public to make it safe for other children that are still alive. This is all about making a difference for the children that are still here and the ones we can still save. I would give this award back in a heartbeat if it brought Jools back.”

Ryan Riley, 32, receives a BEM for his work setting up Life Kitchen, a not-for-profit cookery school to help people who had lost their sense of taste and smell. His late mum Krista lost her ability to taste food while undergoing chemotherapy.

He said: “Being awarded is a wonderful thing and something that I did not think would happen, I’m a boy from a council estate in Sunderland. These things don’t happen to people like me, but I’m really proud and totally honoured.”

Serena Wiebe, 21, from Bristol, is awarded a BEM for her work fighting knife crime and campaigning for young people. It came after her brother Theo took his own life in 2017 and her friend Eddie King Muthemba Kinuthia was stabbed to death in 2023. She told the Mirror: “Me getting this award is great but it’s always good to recognise the people that pushed me to do these things.

“Eddie was someone that wanted people to do better, be better. I feel like if I get something, then he can’t not be mentioned. Same as my brother. I’ve lost a lot of people to get to this point.” Describing her brother, she said: “The work that I do now is definitely in his memory to make sure no other young person goes through the same things he went through. Same for Eddie as well.”

Sandra Igwe, 36, from Sidcup, south-east London, becomes an MBE for her work with the Motherhood Group to improve maternal healthcare for black women. She decided to act after suffering poor treatment when she had her daughters Zoe and Chloe.

“People are listening, we are no longer silent and we are making enough noise for them to take us seriously,” she told the Mirror. “It means so much to me. I’m honestly honoured. It means the work I have done is not in vain, what I experienced was not in vain.”