Ivor Price described his sister, Carol, as an excellent student, gifted in languages. She had wanted to go to university, you may remember, but her ambitions were thwarted by a lack of money on her father's death. She went to work in the town hall in Barrow instead, but later qualified as a primary school teacher. She trained at a college at Matlock in Derbyshire, and we heard from one of her friends at that time, Mrs. Farmer, Rosemary Farmer. She told us that she remembered Carol meeting the present defendant in about 1962 or 1963, and she recalled Carol bringing him to a college ball in one of their trainee years. Mrs. Farmer described Carol as levelheaded, cheerful and bubbly. Her hobbies were of the outdoor type. She liked rambling, camping and youth hostelling. I think every witness we heard used that word 'bubbly' about Carol Park; that occurred several times.
She married the defendant on the 28th of August 1967. Mr. Park himself told us about this early period. He was a Barrow boy, in the sense of coming from Barrow. He left school in the first year of the sixth form, when he would have been 17 in 1961. He told us he had been in the Scouts. He had learnt some knotting skills at that time. He had learnt knots such as the reef knot, the bowline, the sheep shank, the eye splice and the round turn and two half hitches. I think that was confirmed by Mr. Rideard, who had also been in the Scouts, that he had learnt similar skills at that stage. Mr. Park told us that the figure of eight stopper knot that we see later in the case he had learnt at a later stage, not in the Scouts. He also enjoyed camping, fell walking and climbing. In school days he did some basic climbing without climbing equipment. I will return a little later to sailing, which was Mr. Park's other hobby or passion.