Two friends on a pub darts team cooked up a clever scheme to defraud a lord of the manor, a High Court judge has ruled.

Lewes plumber Roy Hammond took aristocrat Viscount Hampden and the Glynde estate to court in a £1 million row over a heating contract.

The plumber claimed estate worker Edwin Pilbeam signed him up to carry out plumbing and central heating work on 130 estate properties in June 1997.

Mr Hammond claimed the estate had reneged on the contract, worth £1.1 million over six years, and sued Glynde's trustees for compensation.

At the High Court yesterday, however, he and Mr Pilbeam, fellow members of the Trevor Arms darts team, were accused of cooking up a "clever scheme" to defraud the estate.

Deputy Judge Nicholas Strauss QC ruled Lord Hampden had not given his permission for Mr Pilbeam to sign the contract, rendering the agreement meaningless.

Yesterday's ruling left Mr Hammond, who trades under the name Plumb Care Heating and Plumbing in Mildmay Road, Lewes, facing financial ruin.

Forced to lay off all his staff following the collapse of the firm's biggest ever contract, he now faces an anxious wait to hear who will have to pay the bill for the action's heavy legal costs.

Speaking after the case, Mr Hammond said: "I have already lost everything I have. Now I'm going to lose more than I have."

The bitter dispute erupted four years into the five-year contract when the trustees' solicitors gave notice they did not consider themselves bound by the agreement.

The legal row hinged on whether Mr Pilbeam, employed on the estate since 1966, had entered into the agreement with the approval of Viscount Hampden.

Mr Pilbeam, who then lived in a cottage on the estate but has since been made redundant, agreed he had no authority to sign the contract himself but claimed the peer had given him the go-ahead to sign on his behalf.

But the judge described his evidence as "implausible".

He said: "I cannot imagine that, whatever might have happened on more routine matters, Lord Hampden would have thought it appropriate to have a contract of this importance signed by Mr Pilbeam."

Finding in favour of the peer, the judge ruled: "I have no doubt that this is a dishonest claim.

"There are serious contradictions and inconsistencies in the evidence of Mr Hammond and Mr Pilbeam and parts of their evidence are incredible.

"Nobody in his right mind, let alone Lord Hampden, who is shown by the evidence to have been a careful and concerned steward of the family estate, would have entered into a contract on these terms."

Legal costs will be decided at a later date.

After the case, Mr Hammond said: "The judge has totally failed to examine the other side of the coin, which is that no plumber in my position would invest more than £250,000 of his hard earned money into heating systems for somebody else's houses unless he had what he took to be a valid contract."

He said he hoped his past customers and those who knew him would remember that he dealt with them fairly and honestly and said he felt able to hold his head high.

He said: "For the last two years, I have been living and working under the most enormous pressure, that has grown as the court date came closer."

Following the judgement, Adams and Remers, solicitors for the defendants, confirmed Lord Hampden was pleased with the result and relieved that the matter was over.

However, they said he remained disappointed he had been badly let down by a trusted employee and that such a case had been brought at all.

He considered the judgement vindicated the stance taken throughout the case by the estate's trustees.