A SALISBURY legal secretary, who sued for age discrimination after colleagues bought her a 50th birthday card, has had the case thrown out.

Hilary Munro received the card in the post while on holiday but told an industrial tribunal in Bristol she was shocked on her return to be told: “You are now 50. You can’t hide it from us.”

Ms Munro, of Salisbury, who worked for Sampson Coward LLP in Salisbury, had been at the firm for six months when she took time off around her birthday in May 2018.

While she was away, another legal secretary worked out it was her 50th.

Ms Munro then wrote a letter to her boss stating: “I come to work to earn money. Even so, I try to be friendly, polite and sociable.

“However, I’m a private person with a belief that personal matters can remain private and should do so if the individual wishes it.

"I have not sold my soul, only my working hours. I don’t want or expect a colleague to come to my desk and ambush me while I’m working and point out something they believe they know about me which I have not chosen to disclose to anyone."

She told him she was angry and upset with her colleague’s “utter insensitivity and blunt rudeness at coming to my desk and announcing to my face, very proud of herself, what she believed she knew about my passing years and rubbing my nose in it.

"Her unsolicited and unwelcome comments left me reeling. I felt ambushed, punched, slapped and humiliated.”

She resigned from Sampson Coward LLP in Salisbury several weeks later and raised the discrimination complaint.

But her claim was thrown out by the tribunal.

In its ruling, it said the office was one where birthdays were celebrated with cards being sent and they did not believe she had been treated any differently than colleagues.

It said: “We concluded that the birthday card was intended for the Claimant as an act of kindness.”