LANDLADY Sue St Hillaire has revealed how her pub was sent poison pen letters about Chinnor's TV weatherman Bill Giles.>

Nasty notes about TV Bill sent to pub

Picture shows Bill Giles with his OBE in 1995

LANDLADY Sue St Hillaire has revealed how her pub was sent poison pen letters about Chinnor's TV weatherman Bill Giles.

Mrs St Hillaire, 41, told this week how letters from Bill Giles' niece were posted to The Black Boy, in Station Road, Chinnor.

The news follows the prosecution on Friday of 37-year-old Joanna Toner, on separate charges relating to a bomb threat she made to Channel 5 in December last year.

Toner - Mr Giles' niece by marriage to his first wife Eileen - sent a barrage of nuisance letters to the TV weatherman's Chinnor home, his friends, neighbours and colleagues between 1991 and her arrest earlier this year.

Mr Giles said the letters falsely accused him of being her true father and made wildly untrue allegations about his private life. Toner admitted writing "countless times".

Licensee Mrs St Hillaire told the Bucks Free Press this week: "I received the first of these letters about 18 months ago.

"It said something like: 'We know Bill Giles drinks in your pub - get him to come and visit his daughter. If you do not, there will be trouble'."

Mrs St Hillaire gave the letter to the police. She passed on another unopened letter three months later.

She said: "Whoever wrote the letters obviously didn't know that Bill Giles has never been in the pub. They were clearly from someone who wasn't in full possession of the facts."

Mr Giles, 58, said: "I've had hundreds and hundreds of letters - really horrible stuff - scrawled on postcards or on the back of envelopes.

"This woman is telling the most disgusting lies and spreading vile rumours."

Mr Giles, who was awarded the OBE in 1995, added: "They are fabrications of her devious and twisted mind, but people who don't know me may think some of the things are true."

Toner pleaded guilty to making a bomb hoax and phone message which caused annoyance and anxiety, when she appeared before Tiverton magistrates, in Devon, last Friday. The case was ad- journed till June 5 and Toner was given conditional bail.

A BBC spokesman said Mr Giles denies any accusations made by Toner, but accepts she is the niece of his first wife.

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