Oldest surviving victim of Post Office scandal, 92, FINALLY gets her payout - after husband died still worrying if they were going to run out of money

The oldest surviving victim of the Horizon scandal has heartbreakingly told how her husband died worrying whether they were going to run out of money. Betty Brown, 92, had proudly run the Annfield Plain Post Office in County Durham in the 1990s and early 2000s with her husband Oswall. But the faulty software turned the couple's dream into a nightmare with a £500 financial hole showing up just an hour after the system was switched on. It left the couple with no choice but to use £50,000 of their life savings over the years to plug the constant gaps in their accounts, having been threatened with the sack by bosses. The Browns were eventually forced out of their Post Office and into retirement in 2003 when they sold their branch at a loss. Oswall died a year later from cancer, with Mrs Brown blaming the stress on causing his death. Yesterday, 21 years after her 'life was destroyed', Mrs Brown finally received compensation for the ordeal. The former sub-postmistress said today how Oswall died worrying that they had run out of money, as she recalled one of her final conversations with her husband of 47 years. Mrs Brown, who did not face the torment of being wrongly prosecuted, said her husband died never knowing she had been given compensation and was financially secure. She would visit him every day in hospital, where, as he lay dying, he would constantly ask her whether the Post Office had been in touch. Mrs Brown said during one visit, he had turned to face the wall after she had given her usual response of "no". She told Good Morning Britain: 'He looked at the wall for five minutes then he turned around and looked at me and he said "they are never ever going to pay it. They don't want to pay it". 'And after that, he just died. But what was in his thoughts, and his dying thoughts, there was no money left.' Mrs Brown said she shouldn't have had to fight this long for compensation, and congratulated campaigner Sir Alan Bates for his multi-million-pound settlement saying he 'deserves every penny'. She told of how she had a deficit of about £500 within an hour of Horizon being switched on. 'Big money, oh dear what has happened? But the installers put it down to an incorrect figure being entered,' she said. 'But that £500 never came back. And it just increased and increased and multiplied all the time.' The glitch in the software meant the Browns were paying out at least £1,500 a week of their own money. 'The rule of the Post Office was that if you did not make good that money immediately, you were sacked. So you had to put it in,' she said. And she revealed how three senior managers had told her how to 'fiddle the figures' after warning her she was going to lose her job as 'there are too many mistakes'. But she refused, despite bosses threatening her she 'would be finished', as 'the book says you must show an honest and true picture at that point in time, and I'm not doing that'. She spoke yesterday to the BBC after receiving her settlement and declared she could now 'settle up my affairs. I can turn the heating up full blast, and that will be wonderful'.