Roopie Gill’s family call it her ‘Peggy Mitchell moment’, a reference to the iconic EastEnders scene when the formidable landlady of the Queen Vic faced down interlopers and told them: ‘Get outta my pub.’
Roopie, 57, is no brash Peggy Mitchell (by demeanour she is the polar opposite) and this is a respectable post office not a pub, but still.
She tells me of the afternoon, a little over a year ago, when she walked to the back of the Birmingham convenience store her father opened 50 years ago, to the post office counter which has been at the heart of the place, physically and emotionally, for five decades.
She still couldn’t set foot behind the counter – barred after being wrongly convicted of theft – but she politely asked for a meeting with those who had taken her position.
None of this was their fault, but she had to address it, she explains. ‘I sat them down, I opened my laptop and I showed them footage from the Post Office enquiry – footage that proved I was innocent,’ she recalls.
‘I said that, firstly, if anyone ever called me a thief again, or warned customers to check their change, I would sue for slander. Oh and that, secondly, I would be taking the post office back over.’
Jaws dropped, by all accounts. There is nothing triumphalist about the retelling of this pivotal moment, but Roopie admits it was ‘the best moment I’d had for a long time’.
There have been so many tragic stories to emerge from the Post Office scandal, but Roopie’s is among the most shocking.
Not only did this proud sub-postmistress attempt to take her own life when she was accused (erroneously) of stealing £38,000, she lost her home, her husband (Raju, also implicated, died in terrible circumstances during the process) and her good name.
Rooprit Gill (known as Roopie), who runs the Post Office in Handsworth, Birmingham, returned to work last year
Pictured: Roppie’s parents Balbir Kaur Kailey (left) and Nirmal Singh Kailey (right)
ITV turned the plight of the Post Office victims into an award-winning drama, starring Toby Jones as Sir Alan Bates – a former subpostmaster and a leading campaigner for victims of the British Post Office scandal
Her ordeal lasted for 15 years, and it’s only when you are standing in the family shop, in the suburb of Handsworth, that you can appreciate how that must have felt. The geography of this place means that there was never any escape from the shame and humiliation.
‘I continued to work there, trying to keep the place going, able to hear the customers whispering about ‘thieves’.
‘And every day I’d look straight at that post office counter, knowing I couldn’t even step inside. Also I lived here. After my husband and I lost our house – there were bailiffs, repossession orders, all that – I had nowhere else to go.’
That her father died in 2017, after his family had been publicly shamed but before anyone was aware that they had all been the victims of one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in British history, is a tragedy that can never be rectified.
‘It’s my biggest regret that Dad died thinking our family name had been tarnished,’ she says.
Last year, exonerated, her conviction quashed, Roopie took the unprecedented step of asking for her sub-postmistress position back – becoming the first (and only, she believes) Post Office victim to return to work in this way.
Some, even within the family thought she was ‘mad’, after everything the Post Office had done. ‘But I needed to do it for my dad. This place was his baby. This is his legacy.’
This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of Nirmal Singh Kailey and his family opening Wattville Road convenience store and post office, and the bunting is up in the shop window to mark the celebration. It is very much a community event.
Even the post box outside has been freshly painted, the Queen’s cypher picked out in gold (‘It’s not standard, but we wanted it to be special,’ says Roopie).
Actually, the post box is celebrating a birthday, too. Roopie remembers it being installed just before the shop opened in 1976. She was seven, only just able to reach up to post a letter.
What a piece of social history this now-cavernous shop represents. Nirmal Kailey was a highly educated man when he came over from India in 1956.
He was working in the sorting office when a colleague told him that he was wasted there, and should be running his own post office.
‘We think he was the first Asian man outside London to run a post office. It wasn’t done at the time – it was seen as an Asian man doing a white man’s job,’ says Roopie.
‘As the postmaster, he was at the heart of everything. In those days a lot of people in the community couldn’t speak English so Dad would translate letters for them.’
Former Post Office sub-postmasters are seen here celebrating outside London’s High Court after 42 of the victims of the IT scandal were cleared in April 2021
The plight of the sub-postmasters was widely brought to the attention of the British public following the release of ITV’s Mr Bates Vs. The Post Office
Roopie had worked in the shop as a child, helping to stack shelves, but it wasn’t until 2005, when her father wanted to step down as sub-postmaster, that she stepped up.
Her husband Raju – father of her children, who are now 33 and 30 – was already working in the shop, and they made a good team running the post office.
Until, several years later, circa 2008, things started to go awry. The books, she started to notice, weren’t quite right. ‘It started small. We’d be £200 down, then £300. I couldn’t understand it.’
All over the country, we now know, other sub-postmasters were running into problems with the fancy Horizon IT system which was designed to make things so much easier than ledgers or basic spreadsheets.
‘One of those affected was the next post office over to us,’ Roopie says today. ‘But we had no idea.’
Frustrated and embarrassed, she kept the bookkeeping issues from her dad, thinking ‘things would work themselves out’.
When the figures started to climb and panic set in, she called the special helpline the Post Office had in place for sub-postmasters.
‘And they didn’t want to know. They said, ‘It’s up to you to sort this out, make it right.”
By the time the books were showing a shortfall running into the thousands, Roopie and her husband were dipping into their savings to ‘plug the gap’, then using money earmarked for the mortgage.
Faced with mounting losses, they were also blaming each other. ‘I knew it wasn’t me taking the money, but we started wondering if the other one could be doing it.
‘I honestly couldn’t see how it could be my husband. There was no sign, no flash car. I couldn’t see that he was sending money back to his parents in India.’
She is appalled now that she was actively looking for evidence of her poor husband’s guilt.
‘You think, “Is there another woman?” You do all of that type of thing.’ Of course, he had done nothing wrong either.
The day the auditors from the Post Office turned up, in 2009, was a particular low.
The place was locked down. Roopie sat with her head in her hands, aware that if the missing money could not be found, she could face prison.
‘I remember my dad arriving. He didn’t say much but he was devastated. Utterly devastated. He didn’t believe it of me, but there was money missing . . . no one had answers.’
Desperate measures were taken to meet the shortfall. Her parents sold a property. Family heirlooms, including jewellery, were pawned. Money from her daughter’s university grant was used to ‘try to get us out of the hole’. The car went. They defaulted on their mortgage, and in time their house would be repossessed.
Her husband – ‘a good man, someone everyone loved’ – buckled under the strain.
‘He’d never been a big drinker but he started drinking. It got to the point where he was drinking from first thing in the morning.’
It was actually Roopie who cracked first, the weekend before a meeting she had been summoned to with Post Office bosses. She recalls deciding the only way out was to take her life. She took an overdose, but woke up, then tried again with more pills.
‘I was in my car. I remember driving and just pulling over. I woke up with the police there. I was so devastated that I’d failed. My mum was utterly distraught.’
Then her husband passed away. ‘I was actually at my mum’s. I’d taken the kids there. The police came round and said he’d been drinking heavily and he’d got outside and fallen, wasn’t able to get up. He died from hypothermia because he’d been outside all night.’ He was 38.
Even at this point, as her world was collapsing in on her, Roopie’s was a private family tragedy. But it was about to become very public. I ask if she can remember where, in the family shop, she was, on the day in 2010, when the police came to arrest her. Of course she can.
‘I was in the crisp and biscuit aisle. I’ll never forget that. There was a uniformed police officer, and someone from the Post Office was there, too. I took them into a stock room and they asked if I had anything sharp on me.
‘Then they marched me out, in front of all the customers. I’m not a crier, so I didn’t cry, but I just remember feeling physically sick. Then they put me in the cell. Take your shoes off. You see it on TV, but you never imagine it will be you.’
ITV turned the plight of the Post Office victims into an award-winning drama,starring Toby Jones as Sir Alan
A single mother by now, Roopie was advised to plead guilty if she wanted to avoid a custodial sentence. ‘I had no choice,’ she says.
‘If I wanted to get home to my children, I had to say I’d done what I knew I had not done.’
Her parents were in court to see Roopie found guilty of theft and false accounting.
She was given a two-year suspended sentence and ordered to do community service.
While her parents never believed her to be guilty, some of her siblings couldn’t be so sure. There have been agonising family fallouts. ‘You have no idea how much pain something like this can cause.’
The years after her conviction are almost too difficult to recall.
‘I tried to hide away. But mum would say, ‘Come in, just stack shelves, sweep the floor.’
‘I’d try to hide even on the shop floor. I didn’t want to see anyone. I couldn’t face customers.’
Even when she was off-duty, she says, ‘the trauma was still there’ because of shared kitchen facilities with the new post office staff.
It sounds like living with the enemy. ‘It was. There was very much a ‘them’ and ‘us’ situation. It got to the point where my dad hated to come in the shop at all if they were there. He hated to see it.’
She points out that none of this was the fault of the new staff.
Roopie’s mum passed away in 2011; her dad six years later. By then, Roopie had become close to Mani, the man who is now her partner. He had known the family for years, and was delivering sandwiches to the store.
As Roopie opened up to him, he could see that ‘none of it made sense’.
‘She’s a very private person, but I could see she was drowning,’ he says.
The business was also in trouble, and Mani offered to help. He put some money into the shop and began working there. He now works as a counter clerk in the post office, too.
It wasn’t until she heard the journalist Nick Wallis on the radio talking about ‘something to do with the Post Office’ that Roopie had the first inkling that it would be possible to rebuild her reputation, as well as her business. She was simply floored to discover that she wasn’t alone.
In time, it would be established that faulty Horizon accounting software had created phantom cash shortfalls, leading to around 3,500 sub-postmasters accused of theft.
More than 900 were prosecuted, 236 were imprisoned. The scandal has been linked to at least 13 suicides.
The big social shift – ‘when customers started to come up to me and say ‘Gosh, we are so sorry’ – was after the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office in 2024.
In December that year came the formal court letter exonerating her of all wrongdoing. ‘She never cries, but she did on that day,’ says Mani. ‘She sobbed and sobbed.’
How quickly did she decide she wanted her position in the post office back? ‘Not immediately, but once the idea took hold, I knew I had to put the wheels in motion,’ she says.
One of the first things she did when she walked back in, with her head held high, was to put her dad’s photograph back on the wall, where it remains.
A happy ending? Well, no. She has not yet received a single penny of compensation for her ordeal. Meanwhile, no one has been punished for the Post Office scandal.
‘I do believe heads should roll,’ says Roopie quietly. ‘And they haven’t.’
She has displayed extraordinary dignity, summed up by the fact that senior Post Office executives from London were invited to the celebrations this weekend. She says this is what ‘community service’ – the version her father believed in – means.
‘You have to build bridges, not smash them down,’ she says. ‘I learned that from my father. I learned everything from him.’
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