A former student of Ann Moore-Martin has said she has no desire toand is instead choosing to remember her former teacher as someone ‘who did a lot of good in the world’.
In the late 1970s, journalist Katherine O’Donnell, 58, was a student at St Thomas’ Primary in Canterbury, Kent.
For two years she was a pupil of Moore-Martin, a person she singles out as having a lasting impact on her life.
‘I remember her and she stands out in my memories,’ she explained.
‘Most of us have been lucky enough to have teachers in our lives who we remember, and we value and she was one of a handful in mine and I remember her as being exceptionally kind and empathetic and joyous in her teaching.
‘As a child you can’t make any kind of judgment about how good somebody is a teacher but as an adult, looking back over a 50-year perspective, I think it’s very clear to me that she was exceptional.’
The final years of Moore-Martin feature in the recently released BBC series The Sixth Commandment, which explores her death in 2017, and that of her neighbour Peter Farquhar two years earlier.
When 81-year-old Moore-Martin first met Benjamin Field in November 2014, she was completely .
The pair began a romantic relationship, but it was all because Field had wanted to get his hands on her inheritance, a fraud he’d also undertaken with Farquhar, convincing the teacher and author to change his will to make him a benefactor.
When Moore-Martin’s death triggered a double murder investigation, it was eventually uncovered that Field had repeatedly drugged Farquhar to ‘torment’ him, for ‘no other reason other than it was cruel’.
While he was eventually sentenced to life in prison for ‘suffocating’ and killing Farquhar, Field was found not guilty of killing Moore-Martin.
At the time of the details of the case being released, Katherine was working as a night editor of The Times in Scotland and made the connection, realising her former teacher had been wrapped up in the shocking crimes.
She said finding out about the recent series had brought the case ‘very much back into my mind’.
However she said she knew almost immediately she would not be watching.
‘I have to say that aside I’m not going to watch it and not because it seems like it is a bad series, but I shan’t watch it because it’s the life of somebody that I knew and liked and admired many, many years ago,’ she explained.
‘As a journalist we constantly run into a conundrum when we report on events, particularly violent deaths or people whose lives have been touched or ended by criminal or violent events, and it’s the nature of news that we see them through the lens of how they died, rather than the whole person and what their life has been.
‘For somebody like Ann, whose life was long, she helped an awful lot of people on their way in life and I don’t want to think of her within the awful circumstance of her death.’
She added: ‘I would rather think of her as a life that was well lived, as a person who clearly did a lot of good in the world.’
However, she did acknowledge the difficult task the writers of the series had to share the details of the crime, as well as honouring the people who found themselves wrapped up in them.
‘I won’t watch but I hope they succeeded in presenting her as a rounded person,’ she explained.
‘I would like her to be remembered by the sum of her life and not by how it ended.’
‘I think that she was somebody who clearly achieved a great deal in her life and we must try and celebrate that rather than perhaps dwell on her grim end.’
The Sixth Commandement stars Timothy Spall as Peter Farquhar, Anne Reid as Ann Moore-Martin and Éanna Hardwicke as Ben Field.
The Sixth Commandment is streaming on BBC iPlayer.
