What good would it do sending our son's killer to prison?

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12 April 2012

When the call came on Joan Noble's mobile phone one evening last October, she and her husband were sailing with friends off the Croatian coast. The caller said she was a nurse at King's College Hospital.

Initially there was no obvious reason for Mrs Noble to be alarmed, because her son Ian was a doctor at the hospital, and she assumed it was a routine matter.

But then the nurse asked precisely where the Nobles were, and the conversation took a more urgent, ominous turn.

So Mrs Noble handed the phone to her husband Roderick, a barrister, who quickly established that Ian had been knocked off his scooter a mile from King's on his way home to the Chelsea flat he shared with his girlfriend Annabel Scott, who is also a doctor.

Ian Noble died shortly afterwards in the A&E department of the hospital in which he worked, after his distraught colleagues - who instantly recognised him when he was brought in by ambulance - could not revive him.

Sitting in her Kensington townhouse yesterday, Mrs Noble is still obviously raw with grief. She explains she has not slept well the night before and that she has her good days and bad days, and just hopes she can get through our conversation without breaking down. "When you lose a child, you think about it all the time, it just never leaves you."

Ian Noble was clearly an exceptional, energetic, high-achieving 26-year-old, who had fought the dyslexia with which he was diagnosed as a child and won. He went to Eton, which he loved, then opted to read medicine at Sheffield University, partly because, as his brother Jamie put it, "he didn't want to spend his life just around Old Etonians".

He was a young man broadly of the Left, who identified with colleagues who had not grown up in Kensington, and who slept in a tent the night before the interview for his job at King's to protest against cuts to doctors' accommodation. His mother suspects he might have planned eventually to go into politics.

Ian Noble's death was unremarkable in the sense that it was one of the many private tragedies played out on the streets of the capital each year. What made this case stand out was a letter the Nobles wrote to the judge presiding over the trial of the driver who was convicted of careless driving.

Roderick, Joan and their son Jamie Noble told the judge "our lives are wrecked. It is unlikely we will ever get over this loss."

But they asked the judge not to jail Everton Wright, a 32-year-old plumber from Croydon, who had turned across the northbound carriageway without spotting Ian Noble driving his scooter northwards in the bus lane. Noble was thrown eight feet into the air, and though his crash helmet was fastened, it still came off and he suffered fatal head injuries.

Their son would not have wanted Wright to go to prison and they felt he should "do something for the good of society". After praising the Nobles for their "quiet dignity", and noting that Wright had shown profound remorse and pleaded guilty, Judge Roger Chapple sentenced him to 150 hours of community work.

Joan Noble says she is astonished that their stand has generated media interest. They were abroad when the careless driving case came to court earlier this month but would not have attended the trial anyway. They have had no direct contact with Everton Wright; they just wrote to the judge because they thought it was the right thing to do.

"Mr Wright said from the very beginning that it was his fault, he didn't seek excuses, and say his brakes had failed. Credit should be given for that," Mrs Noble says.

But it is more complicated than that, too, and she brushes off suggestions that it is almost heroic to be able to forgive someone who is responsible for the death of your own child.

Retribution is pointless, she says. "What good is that? You could become vindictive and angry, but when something like this happens to you, there are already enough negative feelings flying around. I think what we did was just the natural thing to do."

Perhaps so, but I suggest to her that many people in such circumstances channel their grief into seeking revenge, or finding some form of "justice" for their dead child. Mrs Noble simply shrugs, and says: "Can you tell me what good it would do sending him to jail?" And of course she is right, but who of us could be confident in such terrible circumstances that we would react in that way?

Ian's death was bad enough in itself, then came another tragedy. Ten days after the accident, his paternal grandmother Gwen, a sprightly 99-year-old who lived in the basement flat of the family home and was planning a trip to Australia to celebrate her centenary, suffered a devastating stroke.

She was in hospital for her grandson's funeral, and died two days later. "She was terribly affected by it, and then we found we had suddenly lost half our family."

Ian Noble was about to embark on a career as an orthopaedic surgeon. Instantly recognisable by his bright red hair, he was active in medical politics, an elected council member of the BMA, which hosted a memorial service for him in Tavistock Square that drew 500 doctors and nurses to pay their respects.

He was a keen Fulham supporter and an MCC member who enjoyed going to Lord's. Colleagues at King's recalled that he was known for calling every member of staff - from porter to chief executive - by their first name.

He had alerted a close friend from Sheffield University days that he should prepare to act as best man as he was planning to marry his girlfriend Annabel, who has been devastated by his death though is continuing her own medical career.

Joan Noble recalls that during Ian's training, he was in rural Nepal and found the clinic lacked basic equipment. A crackly call came through one day, and she was despatched by her son to Kensington High Street to buy £200 worth of diabetes test kits at Boots to be sent to Kathmandu. "That was just the way he was," she explains.

Partly because Roderick Noble is a barrister specialising in personal injury cases, the couple were anxious when Ian announced he was buying a scooter to ease the commute between Camberwell and Chelsea.

Joan Noble, who is a consultant on EU agricultural policy, insisted on taking Ian to a bike shop to buy top-of-the- range protective gear. She wakes up at night wondering if there was some inadequacy in the equipment she bought him but there was certainly no evidence in the trial to suggest that was the case.

The Nobles collectively draw clear lines around the notions of responsibility and culpability. After the trial, Jamie Noble, who is two years younger than his brother, said: "It's not about forgiveness, because it was an accident."

Joan Noble concurs, and makes a distinction between Ian's death and the case of Alexander Bell-Irving, a student at the Royal Agricultural Society in Cirencester, who last week was jailed for 32 months for causing the death of his best friend by drunk driving. Donal McGrath, father of 20-year-old Benedict who was killed in the car driven by Bell-Irving, pleaded with the judge not to waste another young life by sentencing his son's friend to a long prison term.

Joan Noble concedes that if Ian had been killed by a man who was drunk or who had been taking drugs, her attitude might be harsher, but she still doubts the benefits of imprisoning young men who make mistakes.

"They have to live with it for their rest of their lives, don't they?"

So, too, do the families of the victims. Roderick Noble initially wasn't sure if he could continue in personal injury law because his work would constantly remind him of the circumstances of Ian's death.

Eight months on, Joan Noble still has trouble sleeping, and concentrating, because memories creep into the mind. They have lived in the same house for 30 years; it is where the sons grew up, so it is full of happy memories, but also of echoes of the tragedy.

Determined to be relentlessly positive and not to allow grief and negativity to overwhelm their lives, the Nobles prefer to concentrate on the bursary fund created in their son's name. It has raised nearly £90,000 to assist poorer medical students to further their studies at Sheffield.

Joan Noble said it was only when Ian died that she learned from his colleagues quite how brilliant and inspiring a doctor he had been, for he was modest as well as motivated. "He had gone a long way for someone so young," she says.

Donations to the Dr Ian Noble Bursary fund can be made via https://onlinepayments.shef.ac.uk/donations/

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