Benefits dad-of-22 claims: 'I can't work because I've got a bad back'

[Teh One Who Knocks]

By Jerry Lawton - The Daily Star


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Raymond Hull, 58, claimed he picked up the injury running around after his vast brood.

He said his condition meant he has not had a job for 10 years and had to rely on state handouts to support his family.

Hull, who has 31 previous convictions dating back 40 years, was caught with cannabis worth £350 when police raided his home in Springkell, Cumbria.

He insisted to police the drugs were for his own use to ease his pain. But on his mobile phone officers found a text telling a customer there would be a delay in supplying their drugs due to the birth of another son.

Hull claimed the £1,000 police found in his pocket was from selling a campervan.

But Judge Paul Batty QC dismissed his account as a “cock and bull story”.

He gave Hull an 18-month jail sentence suspended for two years after he admitted possessing drugs with intent to supply at Carlisle Crown Court.

The judge spared him immediate custody so he can help current girlfriend Emma McNeil, 26, look after their seven-month-old baby Barry. Hull was also ordered to obey a curfew for six months and pay £200 costs out of his benefits.

Afterwards Hull insisted his bad back was the price he paid for being a caring dad.

He said: “I’ve got a bad back so I can’t work. It must be from running round after all these kids all these years.

“I’ve only been married once. I’ve got five kids with one woman, three with another, three with another, and three with another.

“I’ve got two kids with one woman and little Barry with Emma. The others were just one each with different women. I was 16 when I had my first child. At first it was a one-off. Then it was a kid every year.

“It’s just my luck that every time I have a one-night stand the girl ends up getting pregnant. I love the kids though and if they want me involved in their lives I’ll get involved.

“I see 14 of my kids who know I’m their dad all the time.

“I see a lot of them in Carlisle. I always pop in to visit them or they come round for a Friday night dinner or Sunday dinner.”

Emma, who works in a bakery, said: “He doesn’t have a lavish lifestyle. He puts everything back into the kids.”

[Teh One Who Knocks]

What sort of country gives £1.2m benefits to an odious family like this? The drug-dealing dad, his 22 children (including an armed robber and a murderer) and state handouts that prove Britain's lost its marbles
The Daily Mail


For the briefest of moments it is almost possible to fall for Raymond Hull’s devoted father act.

The 58-year-old looks the picture of paternal pride, bouncing his gurgling baby boy on his lap, and sits surrounded by all the trappings of an apparently normal family life.

The cluttered, cream-coloured living room of Hull’s home in the Cumbrian village of Aspatria is filled with Winnie the Pooh musical toys, baby blankets and nappies, has dozens of photographs on the wall proudly displaying several generations of the Hull family, and a home-made Christmas card of Raymond clutching seven-month-old baby Barry in his arms. To the outsider, all of this could be so convincing.

Certainly, Hull appears to have won over the judge who spared him from jail last week after he was convicted of drug dealing at Carlisle Crown Court.

Despite Hull being found with a hefty stash of cannabis and incriminating text messages, Judge Paul Batty QC was apparently moved by his argument that he needed to stay at home to look after his baby boy while his 26-year-old partner Emma went back to work at the bakery chain Greggs.

As a result, he was given a suspended 18-month jail sentence.

Given that Raymond Hull is a serial criminal with 32 convictions who has fathered 22 children — aged from 39 to little Barry — with 11 different women over the past four decades, some will find this decision hard to fathom.

For Hull, a former builder’s labourer who hasn’t worked for ten years and has spawned a feckless family dynasty thought to have cost the taxpayer well over £1 million to date, is something of a poster boy for Broken Britain.

‘I just love kids,’ he told the Mail from the comfort of his state-funded home. ‘I’m the best dad in the world. People might have a pop at me, but I love my kids.’

While he may pledge his devotion to his 22 children, Raymond — who has been dubbed Frank Gallagher by his neighbours because of his resemblance to the scrounging, alcoholic lead character in TV’s Shameless — certainly hasn’t set them the best example.

Raymond has multiple convictions — for drug possession, drink- driving, burglary and assaulting a police officer, as well as violently attacking a man with a spanner — and several of his brood have criminal convictions that surpass his own shameful record.

One of his eldest sons is a convicted murderer who has only just been released from prison. Three others have been jailed for robbery, violence, drug dealing or witness intimidation.

One of his daughters, a single mother who openly boasts of promiscuity, drug-taking and alcohol consumption on her social-networking pages, has a history of drunken violence. The young woman’s mother, one of Hull’s many ex-partners and the mother of three of his children, was sent to jail for arson and only released on an electronic tag 18 months ago.

The biggest surprise of all, perhaps, is that a man like Hull, who has been jailed four times, is allowed to be anywhere near children at all.

One neighbour who lives near Hull and Emma McNeil, his young partner, says: ‘He’s a rogue. It’s not right. It’s scandalous. We just keep our distance.’

Although Hull was spared jail on the basis that he needed to perform his fatherly duties, it seems that he is only known to 15 of his children, saying that seven others are unaware that he is their father.

Given his sprawling and dysfunctional family tree, it is hardly surprising that Hull has been dubbed the ‘Casanova of Carlisle’.

One relative, who has asked not to be named, says: ‘It wouldn’t surprise me if there were more kids we don’t know about, given the stories I’ve heard.’

Perhaps the most damning indictment of his parenting skills came just three years ago at the Royal Courts Of Justice in London, when one of the country’s most senior judges spoke of the ‘unstable and dysfunctional environment’ in which one of Hull’s children had been raised.

Mr Justice Tomlinson’s comments came in 2010 during an appeal by Hull’s son Adrian Hull against his life sentence for murder. Now aged 34 and out of prison, Adrian Hull was just 18, with convictions for criminal damage, burglary and attempted arson, when he brutally kicked his 29-year-old former babysitter to death and dumped his body in a stream in the Cumbrian town of Raffles in November 1996.

Most telling of all are the comments the judge made when refusing to grant the appeal for an early release.

He said that the original trial judge had taken into account Hull’s ‘turbulent childhood and parental example’. He added: ‘The trial judge referred specifically to the notoriety of Mr Hull’s family in the estate on which he grew up, together with their involvement in crime and drug dealing. The motive for the offence — “grassing” on the whole family for drug dealing — was regarded by the judge as significant.’

Nearly two decades after that terrible crime, it is hard to imagine why anyone could possibly believe that Hull’s parenting skills have improved.

His son Adrian’s crimes, although the worst of them all, are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the family’s convictions.

Hull’s eldest son, John Michael Hull, 38, has been jailed in the past for witness intimidation and throwing a bottle at a man. He appeared in court in 2008 at the same time that his 15-year-old half-brother Kane was jailed for stabbing a man seven times in an alleyway, slicing open his stomach and cutting his liver.

Then there’s 36-year-old Joseph Hull, found in possession of cannabis in 2006 as well as £3,700 believed to be the proceeds of drug deals, not to mention 23-year-old Leon Hull — jailed for four-and-a-half years in 2009 for a knifepoint robbery.

His sister, Rianna, meanwhile, was 18 when she pleaded guilty to being drunk and disorderly at the Aspatria Carnival in 2010 after attacking another woman at a pub in the village.

Despite all this, Hull insists he is proud of his offspring.

One of eight children born to labourer Leo Hull and his wife Mary, Raymond Hull comes from a long line of general labourers originally from Preston in Lancashire. Back in 1975, when he got married for the first and only time to 17-year-old Patricia Brown, mother of five of his children, he described himself as a builder’s labourer, and yet it has been years since Hull has turned his hand to work of any kind.

This week, he complained of his bad back, saying ‘it must be from running round after all these kids all these years’.

His lawyer, speaking in his defence at Carlisle Crown Court this week, also spoke of a ‘number of medicinal conditions’ including breathing problems and chest infections, which would make time in prison difficult for Hull.

And yet, despite his apparent health problems and lack of employment, those that know Hull say he has been able to fund a surprisingly extravagant lifestyle for himself and those around him.

They speak of BMWs, caravans, even a speedboat, parked on the driveway of Hull’s two-bedroom house. Then there are the foreign holidays. In July last year, a month after his son was born, Hull took off for Albufeira in Portugal, leaving Barry and Emma behind. He proudly posted photographs of himself, stripped to the waist and tucking into a cooked breakfast.

‘Fry up by the sea. Cushty,’ he wrote next to it, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

It is hardly surprising that Hull and his clan are loathed by neighbours in Aspatria, where he is estimated to have fathered at least 2 per cent of the local population.

According to one who spoke out this week: ‘Raymond is a waste of space. He needs to get a life and a job. It’s not fair when you see someone with better cars and a better standard of living and they don’t do any work for it. It’s a scandal. I don’t know how anyone can have had that much time to father 22 children.’

The surprise, too, given his notorious reputation in the Carlisle area, is that any woman would allow him near her.

Hull himself finds his prowess a source of endless pride and amusement: ‘If it’s tidy, you don’t knock it back do you? I’ve never had to chase after women. I’m easy going. They are always chasing me.’

It seems that much of his appeal to local women lies in his ability to provide material comforts, despite apparently surviving on benefits. But, of course, drug dealing can be a highly lucrative business. As well as the £350-worth of cannabis police found at Hull’s home, just yards from where baby Barry was sleeping in his cot, they found £1,000 in cash in his pocket. He claimed it came from the sale of a camper van.

His utter contempt for hard work is mirrored by several of his children. Most outrageous of all are the comments of his daughter Rianna, herself the single mother of an 18-month-old boy. Just days ago, in barely literate terms, she wrote on her open Facebook page: ‘Jst gta announced that I love every working person in Cumbria cz fanx to uze I get to sit on my jeer all day nd help use spend yr wagez! Yaz no hw t spend it wisely ya jenerous f**z.’

Indeed, further reading of her Facebook page would strike fear into the heart of most parents and childcare professionals.

In one post, she writes: ‘Goin to chill in my room nd hav a few j’z [slang for cannabis joints].’ In another, she thanks her father for the new £250 Samsung Galaxy S3 mobile phone he has bought her. In others, she brags of bedding other women’s boyfriends for fun and of giving her cat ‘a dead leg’ for having fleas.

Back at his terrace home in Aspatria, none of this depressing saga is causing Raymond Hull any concern whatsoever. The expression on his face is one of smugness. Once again, he has cocked a snook at the authorities, at the police, at those who suffer because of his crimes.

Baby Barry, wrapped in a patterned blue blanket and playing on a silver iPad that has been placed in front of him, is, as yet, blissfully unaware of the dysfunctional family into which he has been born, or that it was a text message that his father sent to a customer last June, saying that there would be a delay in supplying drugs due to Barry’s impending birth — which helped convict his father.

Nor does he yet know that, if the past is anything to go by, the chances of his parents staying together are extremely slim.

For now, he smiles sweetly, the embodiment of childhood innocence, oblivious to the depressing truth about the criminal family he has been born into — and the scrounging, drug-dealing father at the head of the dynasty.

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[Hugh_Janus]

*ignores thread*