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Village raises £175,000 to stop centre for addicts

The Daily Telegraph, Saturday 1 March 1997
By Paul Stokes 

VILLAGERS raised more than £175,000 in three days to prevent a local
nursing home becoming a centre for former drug addicts.

Residents of Burton Leonard, near Ripon, North Yorks, were celebrating
exchanging contracts to buy Crown House last night. Members of the
473-strong community have spent money that they had intended using to pay
off mortgages, buy a car or go on holiday.

They acted after learning that a charity, which bases its rehabilitation
methods on those promoted by the Church of Scientology, had applied for
planning permission to use the building. It was decided at a
hastily-called public meeting to form Burton Leonard Management Ltd and
offer villagers £500 shares in the property.

Around 50 were responsible for pledging the money towards preserving the
building, which overlooks the village green and stands opposite the local
school. Gerlinde Godber, village postmistress, said: "This is a quiet
village and we were concerned for the safety of the children and everyone
else. It was never a case of 'Not in my back yard'. It was just not an
ideal spot for it. This has been the effort of a community united. We
needed to act quickly and we did." The charity Narconon (No Narcotics) had
hoped to turn the property into a centre for 16 addicts, replacing a
similar unit which closed last year in Kent.

It would have been leased to them by Kenneth Eckersley, an ex-council
chairman and magistrate from Bingley, West Yorks, who now lives in Sussex
and is the executive director of Addiction Recovery Training Services. He
had intended exchanging contracts with Rosemary Swann, owner of Crown
House, yesterday.

Mr Eckersley, 69, said he had postponed the transaction so that he could
have the chance to explain to villagers that the proposed centre was "not
the ogre" they thought. The villagers will march through Burton Leonard
tomorrow to celebrate.

They have three months to rehouse the remaining nursing home residents
before re-marketing the property for sale to what they consider to be a
suitable cause. Denis Muldoon, chairman of Burton Leonard Management Ltd,
said: "I'm so relieved. Our village has been threatened by these people.
Although the problem has gone away from us, we feel for any other
community that is threatened in this way." Mr Eckersley said he had been
willing to pull out of his transaction providing the village met the cost
of up to Ł4,500 which he had incurred.

He said: "As a charity we are not in the business of frightening old
ladies or worrying young mothers. I'm not going to go into a village full
of hate. It's not my business to make people fearful of where they
live."

Planning permission had been submitted to use Crown House for up to 16
former drug addicts or "students", as the charity refers to them. Among
the opponents was David Mellor, a retired deputy chief constable, who has
two children and lives in the village. His wife Bridget said: "Our
children can walk to school or to the shops to buy sweets and I feel safe
for them to do so. Everyone keeps an eye on everybody else. It is a safe
place to live. I don't know how stable some of the residents of the centre
would have been," she said. Andy Hale, 49, a former bank manager, who
moved to the village from Watford, said: "Our aim is to sell it to a buyer
who will find a more suitable use for it, preferably as a house."

Mr Eckersley denied that there was a direct link between Narconon and the
Church of Scientology. But he admitted that the Narconon system of dealing
with drug addiction was based on principles approved by that
organisation's founder, L Ron Hubbard. Toxins from drugs left in the body
are treated with vegetable oil and vitamins. Once a "student's" system is
purged they are taught how to live within the community.
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