We began this post when we noticed changes on Jim Perrin’s Wikipedia page, the 7th., 8th., and 9th. of November last year in which it was stated: ‘…of Huguenot descent, he was born James Earnest Perrin in Manchester, England. Since 2007 he has lived in the Midi-Pyrénées department of Ariège.’ In the past we have drawn attention to other anomalies on his Wikipedia page, but this post relates to changes which were made from November, last year. (Readers may see them for themselves by googling the Wikipedia page and going to ‘View history’.) There were A). a name change, B). the removal of details of his children, C). a claim of Huguenot descent and D). information that he had not lived in the UK since 2007. (On 08/11/2016 details of eight extra obituaries written by Jim Perrin were given — a phenomenal example of retrospective name-dropping…)
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Concerning A). When his name was altered to James Ernest Perrin, although on his birth certificate (and previously, all these years on Wikipedia as we have noted) it was shown correctly as Ernest James Perrin, the Wikipedia editing note gave the reason for the change as ‘Personal details corrected’. This was a lie, obviously. Perhaps the author preferred the sound of it? We believe the switch was made intentionally on ‘artistic’ grounds, rather than conforming to the scrupulous record which is Wikipedia’s raison d’être.
Concerning B). Gone were the details of his children — we know of five by five different mothers and of two (no longer alive) by two other young women. The first of these mothers was so traumatised by Jim Perrin that she subsequently lost her baby. The second to die was Will (the only one listed in the edit we are discussing) who tragically took his own life; he was greatly admired as a young climber of remarkable talent. Yet as Wikipedia is by intention encyclopaedic it is a moot point that only the son who climbed — as, of course, did his father — was then mentioned and the other living children had been deleted from the history. If his children are to be included in Jim Perrin’s biography the entry should surely have referred to them all.
Concerning C). After years of claiming his family’s Welshness, he was now able to assert with absolute conviction that he ‘is of Huguenot descent’…
There may be an explanation for this. For a time, up to October 2010, he lived in the Welsh village, Penrhyndeudraeth, with his (then) latest partner; one whom before long he callously abandoned. His intention, he said, was to go to France to find somewhere for them both to live and then he would send for her to join him. But he reneged, explaining that he had met ‘the love of his life’ in Ariège and their relationship was over. Except that we know his primary aim was to avoid the CSA who had located him in that area of Wales.
He has moved on many times in this way. He deceived our sister, Jac, when he was avoiding the CSA. ref. Jac believed what Jim Perrin told her, parts 1 and 2, and doubtless he was similarly motivated when he left two other addresses with his current partner. We know that from neither of those addresses did he respond to the authorities when they contacted him.
There were times when he did live in his bolt-hole in France with the new ‘love of his life’, travelling back and forth from Wales where he also lived with his current partner. For some time neither of these women was aware of his close relationship with the other. (He has managed this legerdemain before — we know that he has done it more than once; that is, having a relationship with two different women concurrently — and as we have been told by several of his former partners he would be absent for long periods unaccountably ‘out of touch’.)
Two young women, after Jac died, lived with Jim Perrin — first one, then the other: both were persuaded to ‘invest’ and both, in turn, lost many tens of thousands of pounds, the price indeed of a property. Both had their hearts broken and suffered incalculable mental anguish.
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But to return to Jim Perrin’s Huguenot forbears: it was while he was living with ‘his (then) most recent partner’ that by an extraordinary chance there also lived in the village a gentleman who although in no way related to Jim Perrin yet he had the same name. It was he who had successfully traced his family origins as far as the Huguenots and he kindly showed the results of his research to Jim Perrin. It was a great talking point between them, as the Reverend Perrin told us himself three years ago.
Bearing in mind that we have shown Jim Perrin’s details on this site, ref. Jim Perrin’s family background, it seems that the Huguenot ancestry he was recently claiming on his Wikipedia page was an opportunistic pretence, and that but for his chance acquaintance with the reverend Perrin in the same village he would not have written of it. His first and only other discussion of this ‘history’, which was after his meeting with reverend Perrin, was in a radio interview with Colin MacKay, (ref. Jim Perrin admits being racist.) This was to promote his ill-starred book West — a book described ‘as near to biography as this author has written’, but a book in which there was, surprising if it were true, no mention at all of Huguenot links…
Jim Perrin’s family tree is for the most part deeply rooted in Lancashire and has been traced back only so far as 1768, and there seems to be nothing at all to substantiate his assertion ‘of Huguenot descent’. It would appear to be merely fanciful. Before his acquaintance with the reverend Perrin he had neither spoken nor written of any such thing and in our opinion it could even be suspected that the details were purloined — magpie-like — from another…
The coincidence of the shared name caused considerable embarrassment to the gentleman concerned as when Jim Perrin left the village for France — in a hurry — ( we were told this was because the CSA had located him) he had failed to pay a particularly large telephone bill and British Telecom needed to be convinced that it was a case of ‘mistaken identity’.
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Concerning D). ‘Living in France since 2007.’ We do understand that refreshing a Wikipedia page is sometimes necessary yet this author’s page-changes have been innumerable (Wikipedia — ‘view history’.) Apart from the entries we have pointed out there was a new and most revealing edit on 07/11/2016. To repeat, it read: ‘Since 2007 he has lived in the Midi-Pyrénées department of Ariège.’ But: the most revealing thing is that, barely a month later, on 12/11/2016, that detail on Wikipedia was deleted — whisked away — ‘blink and you would have missed it.’
‘Since 2007’? This, we believe, was a ‘plant’ of deliberate misinformation and might well have been part of Jim Perrin’s on-going stratagem to throw sand in the eyes of the Child Maintenance Service — to convince them that he is not resident in the UK, nor has he been ‘since 2007’. Certainly he very quickly removed it, perhaps having thought better of it for it was without doubt, as we will show, just another of his facile lies. (The Wikipedia edit note says: ‘removed irrelevant detail.)
Whilst we acknowledge that Jim Perrin has had a bolt-hole in Ariège we know that he has lived in Wales ‘since 2007’ and not, with any permanence, in France. After his exploitation of the two young women mentioned earlier, and after his relationship with his next partner in the village we referred to, there was — whoever else he may have been involved with — another, his current partner, in Lampeter. He lived there until it was decided to buy a house in Harlech. But he swiftly became apprehensive, ref. Jim Perrin the Guardian Country Diarist for Wales is a wanted man and Jim Perrin moves on again and he persuaded her to put it in the hands of estate agents. Living briefly in rental accommodation after it was sold their next house was bought in Drefach Felindre by the same partner. Although the houses she chose were charming, as the photographs convey, Jim Perrin while living there was something of a sitting duck — again ignoring any communication from the Child Maintenance Service — and, at his instigation, that house too was put on the market and sold in November 2016. The coincidence of the dates on which he edited his details to say he was living in France is interesting and he may well have gone there for a while. He ‘has, as the Arab, folded his tent and silently slipped away’; is now ‘of no fixed abode’; and, for the time, is presumably safe from the Child Maintenance Service as those around him keep his whereabouts secret.
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This author’s determination over the years to avoid capture and its consequences has involved him in many changes of address. But it is not always the case that ‘a rolling stone gathers no moss’. Details of the last two houses in which he lived in Wales (‘since 2007’ when he claimed to be living in France) may, at the time of writing, be viewed online (details below).
Furniture which Jim Perrin took from our sister’s house is to be seen in both sets of photographs. The cream damask armchair; the matching sofa — the very one which he removed by roughly breaking the window frame, ref. our post Pillaging; a wooden desk with drawers which came from Jac’s family; his shelves of books; the sleigh bed — (we realise they are ubiquitous but in this list it is meaningful); the same pyramidal chest of drawers. A first edition of his own The Villain is by a bedside and, most evidentially of all, there hangs the large portrait of one of his heroes which he always has prominently displayed.
Our reason for giving this list of furnishings is that they all point to Jim Perrin’s occupation as an inhabitant on a domestic level of these two properties, in Wales, ‘since 2007’. All bear witness to his having lived there, with his own possessions — possessions which we recognise from the time when he lived in our sister’s house.
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As, in each case, the authorities have located him he might well be very keen to ‘retire’ to France as he has in the past, and given them the slip — all to escape the irritating importuning of the Child Maintenance Service. Why will he not face them? Why, instead of taking the coward’s way, will he not come to terms with them — and finally make some recompense to his children?
Instead, he continues to ‘cock a snook’ — it is a game to him — somehow secure in his confidence that they will never be able to pin him down. So much so that he has boasted of their inadequacy with their failed attempts to bring him to justice; and of his own ability continually to mislead and evade them.
It is our opinion that Jim Perrin is a profoundly dishonest man and that he has neither shame nor scruple; and in what appears to be the tinkering on his Wikipedia page in November and December last year we believe his willingness to adapt the truth to his own purpose is again made evident.
Jac’s Sisters
NB. While this post was being written someone, not ourselves, removed the Huguenot details from Wikipedia, corrected the name change and put back the missing children, (13/02/2017). However, the reference to living in France was removed before, as we said earlier, and we think the conclusion can only be that it was Jim Perrin who, for his own purposes, wrote it on 07/11/2016 and then, most damningly, deleted it on 12/12/2016. As we have said many times before of his online activities: ‘Who else but He would care, or would be sufficiently interested, or would have the motive?’