Francis/Gammon Heir Hunters

Today, the heir hunters are struggling with a case

which is proving a tough one to crack.

It looks as though this family's really very small

and dies out completely.

Deceased on birth certificate.

A second case has its roots in rock and roll.

He discover the '80s pop sensation Katrina And The Waves.

It's all in a day's work for the heir hunters.

If I'm in Ely now, it always seems strange I can't ring him up,

say, "What are you up to? Are you coming for a beer?"

In the London offices of probate genealogists firm Finders,

case manager Ryan Gregory

and the team are starting work on a new case just in.

I was hoping to ask you a few questions

and then I can give you some information.

When someone dies without a will,

most assignments land on the heir hunters' desks via the

Government Legal Department's unclaimed estates list -

but not today's.

So this is the estate of Violet Francis.

The case has been referred to us privately,

and we're just going through the information that we have

in the initial contact e-mail from the person who referred it.

So far, we know that Violet Francis was born on the 10th November 1929

in London.

She passed away a spinster.

Her parents were William Francis and Violet Francis, nee Ware.

Ryan was also given some other interesting information

in the referral letter.

We know that she worked for the Ministry of Defence.

We know that she had an Imperial Medal in her possession,

which is for faithful service, if you've worked as a civil servant.

Violet Francis lived in Littlehampton, West Sussex.

She called the seaside town home for around nine years

after moving there from Staines in Middlesex.

Edna Smith lived on the same street as Violet

when she was still in Staines.

Violet was very much her own person.

Lived on her own. Never married, as far as I know.

I never saw her with anybody else.

Never saw her with friends or anything.

She just kept to herself.

And we'd meet perhaps on the way to the shops,

or on the way back from the shops.

And we both used to feed the horses in the field up the road.

Violet is also remembered by Pauline Hawkins, who bought her house

when she decided to move from Staines to the coast.

She just felt like a person who lived... She lived on her own.

A very lonely person.

But then, I did speak to the neighbours after

and they said she always took Christmas presents round to them.

Like, for the children.

But I don't think she had any other young family.

Violet Francis died aged 85

on the 7th of October 2015

after suffering a stroke.

In the heir hunters' office, Ryan's working on her case.

She left a sizeable estate when she passed away.

As far as we're aware, the estate comprises of a property which

may be somewhere between £300,000 and £400,000.

And then there's going to be some shares

and some bonds on top of that as well.

So we're talking a large amount.

Everything's gone over with a fine-tooth comb

and Ryan's double-checking there are no close kin that have been missed.

We've been told that Violet passed away a spinster,

but that's obviously something we always check in-house.

You never know whether someone may have married previously

and just reverted back to their maiden name.

So, there's three possible marriages which look like they could fit.

Meaning they're around the London area. So we've applied for those.

They'll be back with us tomorrow.

But for now, you know,

that's just something we have to do to cover all bases.

Yeah, no. What do you mean? If we go back and find her death? Yeah?

Find her death...

Although not all Violet's personal history is immediately clear,

because hers is a referral case,

Ryan and the team do have some decent clues

to kick off their search.

The bit of information we have is that her father,

William Francis, was a chief petty officer.

So he had a role in the Navy.

So there is a bit of a military connection between Violet,

who passed away, and her father.

All hands are on deck and Amy's also on the case.

I'm trying to look into the maternal family tree

just to see what we're looking at.

Size wise.

I found a 1911 census for the Ware family.

And it says that Violet's mother, Violet,

was one of just three children.

There was Violet herself and then a sister,

SFE, turned out to be Sarah Fanny Elizabeth Ware.

And a brother, John Henry.

Although the heir hunters have a head start on Violet Francis's case

with a few clues to get them started,

they can't rely on it all being fact.

Even though we've got quite a few bits and pieces here,

really we have to start from the beginning anyway

and verify all of it before we even get going.

As Violet's case is unfolding, Ryan makes a tragic discovery

when he receives her mother's death certificate.

Mother, Violet Francis, formerly Ware, deceased on birth certificate.

It turned out that Violet's mother,

she sadly passed away during childbirth.

So she died around the same time that Violet was born,

in November 1929.

That means that we only have a nine-year gap

to fill in terms of any siblings of Violet.

As the parents married in 1921, we've done a birth search

from 1921 to 1929 and haven't found any other issue to that marriage.

So it seems as though there is no brothers and sisters.

So we are looking at the maternal and the paternal families.

Confirmation has come in that Violet never married.

And because she had no siblings,

the next step is to find out who her grandparents were,

on both her mother and her father's side of the family.

Ryan hasn't been able to go that far back up Violet's family tree -

he's still stuck at her parents,

and has discovered some more details about William Francis.

I think I've found the deceased's father.

In 1911, it appears that he was already serving in the Royal Navy.

He was down in Portsmouth.

He was a cook's mate in 1911.

Violet's father, William Francis, was born in 1890.

He joined the Navy in 1907

at a crucial time for the beleaguered British Empire.

However, he wasn't on the front line -

and his naval career came from humble beginnings.

Essentially, throughout

his career in the Navy,

he was part of the cooking staff on the ships and bases

he served aboard.

He would have done various jobs within the ships or the bases'

galley, and it would have been everything from initial food

preparation, actually cooking things up, maintaining the big ovens.

Although there was a lot of hard graft involved,

a career in the Navy at that time was an attractive one.

It was seen as the glamorous of the two military services that

existed at the time.

And it was also an interesting job for young men that offered

the promise both of regular pay and also long-term employment.

But there wasn't much glamour on board, where even the ship's

catering staff, like Violet's father,

had to get their hands dirty.

There was one very unpleasant job that nobody on the ship was

able to escape, not even officers.

And that was the very dirty business of coaling ship

when they were in port.

This was essential work. It took a lot of time.

It was very dispiriting and backbreaking, literally.

After a stint at sea, a ship would have to load fresh

stocks of coal every three or four days.

And it was a messy job that ended up with the ship being

covered in coal dust.

However, having said that, there were also some perks to

being in the Navy.

Some of which where interesting throwbacks to Nelson's time.

As a member of the crew,

William Francis would have been entitled to his right

to his daily ration of grog, which was two parts water to one part rum.

William Francis would have alternated his service

between land and sea.

But in the years of conflict,

during the Great War, he was based on dry land.

He saw many changes over his 20-year naval career.

In terms of how his job has evolved...

As time progressed, it would have got slightly easier

because of improvements in technologies.

He even had a chance to serve in one of the Navy's first

aircraft carriers in the 1920s, HMS Argus.

So he would have seen the Navy evolving around him

from this coal-fired, big-gun weapon system

to one that became much more three-dimensional.

The records are painting

a clear picture of Violet Francis's father's past.

In the office, Ryan is still working on the family tree

but is struggling to branch out.

At this time, we don't know who the paternal grandparents were.

We know the paternal grandmother was called Elizabeth Francis.

But because she was widowed by 1901,

we don't know exactly what her husband's full name was.

I'm just going to try and see if I can do a marriage search

to see if anything pops up.

Then we can hopefully piece it together like that.

Although the team have been referred this case,

it's still essential they solve it as soon as they can.

If we fail to identify the heirs

to an intestate estate

or there are no living heirs,

the estate will pass to the Crown in England and Wales.

Ryan's hoping this won't be the case with Violet Francis,

and later, there's a glimmer of hope.

It was a bit of a surprise.

To say the least.

All over the country, heir hunters are researching

the family histories of people who have died with no next of kin

and leaving no will.

In those cases, if living relatives can be traced, they will inherit.

Hello.

-Newmarket.

-Oh.

-What do you think?

-I like that.

John Gammon, from Ely, in Cambridgeshire, is one such case.

He made a name for himself in the music industry in the 1980s

as a hugely successful journalist and band manager,

in a career spanning four decades.

John's friends have fond memories of the early days.

I met John when I was a teenager.

About 17.

John worked, at that time, at the local hotel.

And we met at a coffee bar come...the sort of thing

we had in those days, jukeboxes, pinball machines.

That's how I first met John.

And we hit it off...from the word go, really.

In August 2015, John sadly passed away after battling

a serious illness. He was 63 years old.

John became a very close friend

over the last 20 years.

I got to know him first of all when I was a corporate manager

at Lloyds Bank. John was a client.

He had his loves in his life,

he had his Tottenham Hotspur, that he loved.

John was passionate about his music

and about writing and reading, but most of all he loved his music.

Our friendship just developed from that,

because he was unlike most customers that you have as a bank manager.

Although John was much-loved, because he died leaving no will,

his case was taken up by London-based heir-hunting firm

Fraser & Fraser.

The way we source our work has changed

dramatically over the years.

And now we rely a lot more on the internet.

What caught my eye was the fact that John, during his lifetime,

appeared to have been a successful music journalist.

And had also been a manager of several successful bands.

Pull that open and have a look at these different ones.

He discovered the '80s pop sensation Katrina And The Waves

and ran a promotions company called Ham Acts during the same period.

Katrina And The Waves. They were...

Eurovision Song Contest winners, weren't they?

I don't know. It's before my time, I think.

-Yeah. 1997.

-THEY LAUGH

Before your time. Yeah, it was before mine as well(!)

There's lots of tributes about Mr Gammon.

"I shall miss his blunt sense of humour

"and his general love/hatred of the live industry."

"Just the worst news. John was an absolute one-off.

"And the wittiest and most entertaining of company."

John's entry into the world of journalism

set him off on his path to following his dream.

He went on to the Newmarket Journal.

He was getting six albums a week, cos he was doing music reviews,

and we were all very envious of John that he got so many albums

while we were saving up our ten and sixpence,

whatever it cost in those days for an LP.

John managed to make a success of his passion.

John had a number of career highlights.

The first of which was he was extremely proud the first time

he got his name on a record sleeve.

John was very content in his life.

Yeah, he was doing what he loved doing,

which was working from home, writing.

He had his circle of friends that he would meet up quite regularly,

chat and put the world to rights with.

And the world that John was living and working in at that time

was a thrilling one.

I think the '80s was THE most exciting time for pop music

and pop culture, particularly in Britain.

You had to this incredibly rapid turnover of scenes and styles

and tribes. You had, you know, the 2-Tone Rude Boy movement,

you had Goths and New Romantics.

It seemed that every week you picked up a magazine, there was

something new happening, something that would change your life

and completely blow your mind.

And all this was going on against the background of economic doom

and gloom and political fear,

and I think the attitude of pop culture was, "Well, if that's

"how it's going to be, we are going to party like it's the last days.

"We are going to dress up, we're going to be as colourful

"and flamboyant as we possibly can."

Not only were the '80s the dawn of a new era in music,

they also brought with them another change which would alter

the face of the industry forever.

Well, as the song said, "Video killed the radio star."

And I suppose in the days of radio,

it didn't really matter what you looked like.

But when video came along, you had to have a strong look.

And bands that did have a strong look really flourished.

The impact of music television really changed the way that

bands could become big, that they could break themselves globally.

And they could become stars overnight.

John Gammon's love of music came at an exciting time.

He started off working as a manager for live bands.

John Gammon was a live agent at a time

when a live agent was a pretty important thing to be.

The received wisdom with the music industry is

that 20 or 30 years ago, you went on tour to sell your record.

Whereas now, you put a record out to sell your tour.

MUSIC: Walking On Sunshine by Katrina And The Waves

And as John was pounding the streets

looking for bands that caught his eye,

one rock group with its American front woman stood out to him.

John would have discovered Katrina And The Waves in Cambridge,

playing a local gig, because they were a local band.

A band like Katrina And The Waves would have probably just been

doing the thankless thing of slogging around the local

live circuit, just hoping that someone like John might happen

to be in the room with his notebook and might happen to see them.

And John's hunch about Katrina And The Waves paid off.

I think probably the highlight of John's early career would have been

seeing Katrina And The Waves having a huge international hit record.

And that happened with Walking On Sunshine.

Which...it got to the top ten in the States and the UK.

And this is a time when record sales were at quite a peak,

so a number one record would be selling millions.

But even a record at number eight or nine would still sell

hundreds of thousands. That would have been so satisfying,

to see a band that you've really invested so much of your

heart and soul into finally making it big.

# Don't it feel good? #

In the '90s, Katrina And The Waves went on to win

the Eurovision Song Contest - the last British act to do so.

In the same decade, John concentrated on his writing

but didn't let go of the music.

So, in 1995, John became an investigative journalist

working in the music industry's trade publications.

And his job, I suppose, would have been to explain the music industry

back to people working in it, to let them know what was going on.

To give them all the kind of inside scoops on certainly what was

happening in the live music side of things.

John Gammon didn't only make a successful career

from his love of music, he also gained respect from his peers.

John's reputation is one of an absolute gentleman.

And that's actually quite difficult to maintain in an industry

with so much backstabbing, gossip and resentment going on.

So the fact that he managed to last for so many years in the industry

without making enemies and maintaining a lot of friendships

speaks well of him.

Despite all John's success, the heir hunters were having trouble tracking

down his nearest and dearest - potential heirs to his estate.

-So, John Gammon.

-I'll get that tree out the way, in fact.

1951.

Hoping to be able to pass on an estate of some value to John's

next of kin, David's team members

began looking at the birth and death records.

The first thing we did on the John Gammon case was to

attempt to find his birth.

When we found his birth in Cambridgeshire,

we had to identify his parents' marriage.

If John's parents could be traced,

the trail might lead to siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins -

all potential heirs.

So you see here...

the local coroner's asking for information.

There were also travelling researchers hitting the road.

It's their job to speak to friends and neighbours,

gathering information.

John was a very private person.

He would only let people into what parts of his life

he felt they needed to be let into.

And he never really talked about his family at all.

-We can't work out...

-She's 4th of March.

Do we know were momma and poppa were born?

Coupled with the information we received from speaking with

some of John's neighbours and friends, we were quickly able

to establish that John remained a bachelor throughout his lifetime.

And he was an only child.

The nearest next of kin to John would be aunts and uncles

or cousins on both his mother and father's family.

John's birth certificate would be the starting point

to unlocking the clues to his family tree.

First, it confirmed his parents were Lizzie Eden and John William Gammon.

They married on March 9th, 1940.

John William Gammon, he was 26 at the time of marriage.

He was a bachelor.

His occupation was that he was a builder's labourer.

Lizzie Eden, she was 24 at the time of marriage. She was a spinster.

At this time as well,

it was quite uncommon for women to have professions.

So that is unfortunately left empty.

John's parents' death certificates revealed some sad news.

Both parents, we discovered, died in the 1960s.

This is the death of John William Gammon.

He was 46 years old when he died. He was quite young.

And that was on the 23rd February 1960.

Just a year later, he was to lose his mother.

Born in 1951 himself,

this would have meant John Gammon was just a boy when he was orphaned.

It must be very tough for a child to go through. Especially at that age.

From John's parent's certificates, his grandparents could be traced.

And with their details the family tree could begin to grow,

which would hopefully lead to heirs.

So the marriage was what, 1940? Let's see how many Lizzie Edens.

Research began with John's mother Lizzie's side of the family.

We were able to establish that Lizzie was born in 1915...

in Newmarket.

And it showed that her mother's maiden name was Sennitt.

Very unusual name.

So it didn't take very long for us to find

the marriage of Edward Eden

to a Lydia Sennitt.

Literally a year before

Lizzie was born.

From there, we then looked to see if Lizzie had other siblings,

ie - aunts and uncles to the deceased.

Unusual surnames,

they are useful in the research

process purely because

there aren't many of them.

Sometimes we have a name that is so unusual that all the people you

are looking at in the records are the family you are trying to trace.

Now they knew they had found John's grandparents on his mother's side,

his family tree was beginning to take shape.

Extensive research of the birth records of both England and Wales

uncovered just one aunt on John's mother's side.

Lizzie appeared to have just one sibling called Kate,

who was born in 1917, also in Newmarket.

If living, John's aunt Kate would be an heir to his estate.

Basically, the next step is to work out what happened to Kate.

And if traced, perhaps she would have answers to the riddles of young

John's childhood and what happened to him after his parents died.

Every year in Britain, thousands of people receive an unexpected

knock on the door from the heir hunters.

I'm really pleased he was able to live his life how

he wanted to live it.

Today, we've got details of two estates on the

Government Legal Department's unclaimed estates list

that, as yet, no-one has stepped forward to claim.

The first case is Peggy Gladys Hilda Williams.

She was born in 1911,

in Lewisham, in London.

When she died on the 27th of September 1996 in Plymouth,

in Devon, she was 85 years old.

Peggy's father, George Williams, was born on the 30th of July 1867,

in Balsham, in Cambridgeshire.

And her mother, Clara Taylor,

died on the 7th of May 1960,

in Bromley, in Kent.

It's known that her brother Harold Williams served in the Army.

And the 1911 census tells us that her father

had at least three siblings.

Next, it's Valentina Znamensky.

She was born on 13th of January 1899,

in Tver, in Russia.

She died in Isleworth, in Middlesex,

on the 8th June 1997, aged 98.

It's thought that Valentina moved to London in 1919

after the Russian revolution and became a British citizen in 1947.

If you think you may be related to either of these people, you would

need to make a claim on their estate via the Government Legal Department.

Are you their next of kin?

If so, you could have a windfall coming your way.

In London, the heir hunters are searching

for beneficiaries to the estate of the late Violet Francis,

who moved from Staines in Middlesex to Littlehampton in West Sussex,

where she sadly passed away in October 2015.

Violet was very much her own person. Kept herself to herself.

But she wasn't unfriendly. But I never saw her with anybody else.

Never saw her with friends or anything.

So far, the team has come up against some obstacles in their hunt

but they're continuing their quest to find heirs

to the retired civil servant's considerable estate.

Can you ask them to clarify what they mean by that?

Yeah, I have e-mailed.

Ryan's managed to establish who Violet's father was

from information that was passed to the team

from a referral to the case.

But her paternal grandparents, who are key to unlocking more clues

to potential heirs, are proving harder to trace.

One of the key parts of being a successful heir hunter or

genealogist is to really tap into the experience that you have.

I mean, that can make you go with your hunches.

And the more your hunches are correct,

the more success you are going to have with the end result.

The team has just uncovered the identities of Violet's grandparents

on her mother's side of the family

from her mother's birth certificate.

They were Johan Richard Ware and Sarah Naomi Long.

Married in 1882,

they had three children,

including Violet's mother,

also called Violet.

Working on the other side of

Violet's family, Ryan has asked

researcher Suzanne to try to track

down siblings of her father, William.

William Francis...

He's the youngest paternal uncle.

-How is Charlie spelt?

-It's just Charles in 1911.

-OK.

Do you mind seeing if you can find a marriage and a death certificate?

Yeah.

Amy's next job is to look for any children of Violet's

maternal aunt and uncle.

It looks like only her uncle John married and had children.

There are two possible children which,

if correct, would mean that we've got two maternal cousins to look at.

There are both born in 1910,

so they've probably passed away some time ago.

On the other side of the desk,

Ryan's had a breakthrough

tracking down Violet's father's side of the family.

I've just managed to find the bit of information on the

1911 census that we were after.

It shows how many children there was in the paternal family.

Now we know that the paternal grandmother, Elizabeth,

was widowed by the time of the census.

But we just found out that she'd had five children,

four of whom were still living by 1911.

One of those was the deceased's father.

If Violet's grandparents,

Elizabeth and Frank Francis's other children had children,

they could be heirs.

Between the two of them,

Ryan and Amy are hoping to get all the pieces of the puzzle in place.

Amy's still researching Violet's first cousins,

the two children of her uncle John.

I just can't find a death for the maternal cousin Basil,

who was born in 1915.

I think he's passed away.

-So he could still be a potential heir? OK.

-I need...

His wife's death cert from 2005, which would now confirm

if he's dead.

After some more digging, Amy has unearthed disappointing news.

It turned out that although Amy had married, she had ended up

living and passing away at the deceased's most recent address.

So that verified her as a maternal cousin.

She married but had no children

so that part of the stem dies out completely.

I was then just looking at her brother Basil,

who would be another maternal cousin.

He was born in 1915 so, really, I've been looking for a death for him.

I've just managed to come across though...

It looks as if his estate has been previously advertised as well.

So it looks as though this family is really very, very small

and dies out completely.

So that concludes the maternal side.

There are absolutely no heirs.

With such a small family tree,

any leads the heir hunters have seem to be drying up.

On the other side of the family, researcher Suzanne is having

no luck finding living children of Violet's uncle Charles.

Suzanne's got Charles but...we think it probably has died out.

But as they're about to call it a day,

Ryan has some positive news.

So I think we may have just found a potential...

Well, we have found a potential beneficiary on the estate

of Violet Francis.

One of the dead ends in Suzanne's search for Violet's paternal

cousins has suddenly come to life.

I'm looking at the stem of Charles Francis.

He had two children in Staines.

One of them I found has passed away fairly recently.

2009. And he had three children himself.

So it looks like I've managed to find contact

details for two of them.

Now the team has reaped the rewards of their research

and finally located heirs to Violet's estate, it's over to

travelling researcher Phil,

who's in Staines, to tie up the loose ends.

We are going to see two brothers

who are the paternal cousins once removed of the deceased.

We are seeing Andrew and David Francis.

They are both in their 50s.

I've got the paperwork to sign both up as beneficiaries,

or potential beneficiaries, to this lady's estate.

And that should be it.

There should be no other complications than that.

Phil's meeting Andrew and David at David's house.

Their mother Vera's there too.

Her late husband Ronald was Violet Francis's first cousin.

Violet Francis was born on the 10th November 1929.

You two are the paternal cousins...

once removed to Violet.

-Right.

-Your grandfather, Charles...

-Yep.

-..was the brother to Violet's father.

-Who was William.

-OK.

-Do you remember uncle William?

-Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

-Yeah? Mum, do you remember an uncle William?

-No.

-No?

So that's where it's come down, that bloodline,

through your paternal bloodline.

-Right.

-Have you got any other cousins?

-Not on that side, no.

-No.

Can you just sign here?

Once Phil's happy he's found the right family,

Andrew and David sign the paperwork

and all they have to do now is wait for their inheritance.

Not something they were expecting.

I wouldn't jump up and down until I actually got something

-and found out what the amount was.

-No.

Um, yeah, at the end of the day,

something from nothing is better than nothing at all, isn't it?

We had no idea we had a great cousin,

a second cousin called Violet at all.

The first information we had was

when we had a call from the office on Monday or Tuesday this week.

-Thank you very much. Thanks for your time.

-Lovely to meet you.

Lovely to meet you.

'Everything was as we suspected.'

They didn't remember the deceased

but they confirmed their family tree.

So everything looks in order and we are good to go with it.

A further five heirs were discovered

on Violet's father's side of the family.

And a few days later, another heir has surfaced on Violet's

mother's side of the family,

bringing the total number of heirs to nine.

In a case that's certainly taken a long time to bear fruit,

there's one final twist.

We were actually notified that the deceased had left a will.

The first thing we want to do is notify the family members that we've

contacted that they may no longer be entitled to inherit from the estate.

So that's what we did.

Almost as soon as we told everyone that they may not be entitled

to inherit from the estate,

we got a call from the executors of the deceased's will.

They were able to confirm to us that actually two of the residuary

heirs in the deceased's will had predeceased Violet.

That meant again that the heirs

that we'd initially contacted would be

entitled to inherit from Violet's estate after all.

In London, heir-hunting firm Fraser & Fraser are looking after

the case of music industry veteran John Gammon,

who died in August 2015 after battling a terrible illness.

-There you go. He's the only...

-Mother's maiden name. Eden.

-That's brilliant.

-In Cambridge.

-Look at that.

John lived in Ely, in Cambridgeshire,

and dedicated his life to his career.

He passed away with no immediate family and he left no will.

He loved reading.

He loved writing. But most of all, he loved his music.

John liked to put the world to rights. That's for sure.

You know, I don't know if he'd have made Prime Minister

but he had some very good ideas.

As the heir hunters were piecing together John's family tree,

initial research revealed

that John's mother Lizzie

had one sister, John's aunt Kate.

-That looks good to me.

-Nah, you're spot-on.

-I'll print that off.

There appears to be lots of marriages for Kate Eden.

All spread all over the country. But there is one in Cambridge.

We've got to work on the theory that the family...

She's born in Newmarket,

it's going to be the Cambridge marriage that is the right one.

So we are fairly confident that Kate married Leonard.

OK, so from this record that I can see right here,

apparently he was a military man.

Kate Eden and Frederick Thomas William Leonard were wed in 1939,

just months before the outbreak of World War II.

The war raged for six years,

in which time over 60 million lives were lost.

In 1945, towards the end of the conflict, as the British Army

and other Allied Forces moved into Germany, John's uncle

Frederick Leonard was thought to be part of the liberating forces

of one of the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps.

The liberation of Bergen-Belsen happens right towards

the end of the war.

So we are looking at April 15th, 1945.

Frederick Leonard arrived at Bergen-Belsen as a member

of the military police.

But the camp wasn't always a death camp.

In 1935, it was actually a military training camp for the Wehrmacht,

the German Army.

Then World War II starts. It's a prisoner of war camp.

And then, towards the end of the war, 1944,

it becomes what's called recovery camp.

So again, it changes its nature.

And the idea of a recovery camp is, inmates in other camps that

were too ill or sick to work would be sent to Bergen-Belsen to recover.

But in actual fact, the title is ironic because very few of them did.

The camp had some notable inmates suffering within its confines,

including Anne Frank and her sister Margot.

What British troops were faced with when they arrived

they would never forget.

There were 60,000 people at Belsen when the British got there.

The camp was actually only designed for 10,000, so you can imagine

just the overcrowding that must have been there.

It's quite horrific.

Conditions in the camp were awful.

There were two things in particular the British had to contend with.

One was there was a massive outbreak of typhus in the camp.

So what the British did is they placed

a quarantine around the camp.

The other appalling loss

from death was just simply through starvation,

because these people arrived in the camp

and had just been left with no provisions.

Without actually being there, I can't imagine how horrible it was.

But it must've been absolutely horrific.

And I know many of the accounts of the British soldiers

when they first arrived,

they just struggled to come to terms with what was actually going on.

And there was this dawning realisation of just what

they had discovered.

While the liberation of Bergen-Belsen was unfolding, John's

uncle Frederick would have played an important role in proceedings.

The military police,

their key function is being a police for the military.

And their job was purely with the Army, rather than with civilians.

So the kinds of jobs that he may have been

doing around the camp would be guarding, patrolling,

checking in and out of the camp, that kind of thing.

After the camp was emptied of its abused inmates,

the British concentrated on holding the perpetrators

accountable for their actions.

I believe about 80 guards

and the commandant of the camp, Josef Kramer,

were arrested by the British

and the British then held a trial called the Bergen-Belsen trial

after the war.

Out of the 80 guards that there were, 20 actually died from typhus.

So the number was actually shrinking and a small number fled and escaped.

Kramer and the guards were convicted for their crimes.

11, including Kramer, were sentenced to death.

The team had John's uncle Frederick's war records

but now they needed to discover

if he and Kate had any children during the war years or soon after.

There's two births in Cambridge that look really spot-on

for the time that the parents get married.

We've got Carl Leonard and Anthony R Leonard.

John's first cousins, if living, would be his heirs.

Tony Leonard was discovered alive and well and in his 70s.

PIANO PLAYS

One day, out of the blue,

I had a call to tell me that John was deceased.

And I was quite shocked.

Well, it did come out of the blue,

because John, you see, didn't tell us

that he was even ill.

Or contact any of the family.

And none of us knew that he was ill.

You see, that was the kind of relationship it was.

Tony and John may have drifted apart in adulthood,

but in their early years their lives were very much entwined.

John's parents passed away when he was about nine years old.

His father died, then two years later,

his mother died.

And he came to live with our family.

We were turfed out of our rooms,

we had two single beds in the same room, and he came in the bedroom.

But he didn't fit in too badly and we got on reasonably well.

You know, as a family. But we were both interested in literature.

And we discussed this quite a lot.

We had quite a good lot of discussions on that sort of thing.

After his troubled childhood,

the road wasn't always smooth for John.

As John got into his teens, he became rebellious

and there was a personality clash between him and my mother.

And this resulted in John eventually leaving.

And taking lodgings...

And he went to Cambridge and found some lodgings there.

As he spread his wings,

John's passion for music and writing began to make him a name

and earn him a living, but he and his cousins lost touch after that.

Tony had no news from John

until he received the call from the heir hunters.

I don't know how we'd have got to know, you see,

because we probably wouldn't even have known about it.

So I'm grateful for them, you know, for letting me know.

It's sad to know that families sometimes drift apart, but it's kind

of nice to know that we could inform them of their cousin's passing.

And that they were able to attend the funeral.

In the heir hunters' office,

the team had also located an heir on his father's side of the family.

Bringing the total number of heirs to three.

Benefits of working a case where near kin are involved,

obviously the family often have a lot more family knowledge

and we can really finish the case quite quickly.

So there are going to be less heirs involved.

The heir hunters were successful in quickly finding

John Gammon's beneficiaries.

However, they didn't go on to represent them in this case.

What we did establish from our point of view was that John

appeared to live a real rock and roll lifestyle

and spent all his money.

So the estate was fairly modest.

So, from our point of view, it was nice that we were able to locate

family that weren't already known so they could attend the funeral.

And John's friends made sure he had a fitting sendoff.

I found out that he would have a council funeral.

Um...

I felt that he was too much of a good friend to actually let him

go that way. The band I was in at the time said,

"Well, we'll do a benefit gig for John at a local pub here in Ely."

We had a fantastic turnout.

It was just incredible.

The place was just packed.

Fantastic. You know, almost tearful, you might say.

To just think that people would do that for a friend.

I mean, it's hard to put into words, really.

It restores your faith in humanity.

-To John.

-The boy Gammon.

-It was a pleasure knowing you.

-Cheers, John.

-John.

-To John.

If I'm in Ely now, it all seems strange

I can't ring him up and say, "What are you up to?

"Are you coming for a beer?"

But, yeah, he'll always be remembered very fondly.