Percival/Walley Heir Hunters

-Today...

-Hang on, let me get stuff up.

..the race is on to find heirs to an enormous fortune.

I knew she had a lot of money, but I didn't think it was 1.3 million.

A family's history reveals the ordinary women

who changed the face of Britain.

They did something amazing, incredibly brave.

And in Cheshire, the heir hunters tackle a 25-year-old case.

So this is good. We're getting closer now.

Across the country, the hunt is on.

With millions of pounds waiting to be claimed,

could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

It's 2pm in Merseyside

and heir hunter Saul Marks has an urgent mission

in a hunt for heirs.

The case we're working today is Edith May Percival.

She was from north-east Cheshire.

The case is one of the toughest Saul has ever tried to crack.

We actually started work on the Percival case nearly 18 months ago

and, for one reason or another, it's been quite difficult.

Saul is part of Celtic Research,

an heir-hunting company with offices around the UK.

Hi, this is Hector Birchwood. I'm returning your call.

Edith Percival's case was started by colleagues in London

but as Saul is local to where she was born,

it has fallen to him to try and crack it

and today, Saul has a critical lead on Edith's family.

We're going left here.

And he's racing to the local archive to check it out.

"No access to Bridge Street." Fine, all right!

Saul is feeling the pressure,

but he's also excited to be doing some old-fashioned research.

You've got a little mystery here and it's quite sort of romantic,

in a way, that there are some things which you still can't get online

and you've got to come and do the actual work,

um, in the actual archives and touch history and feel history.

Love it! Fantastic stuff!

Edith May Percival was born on a farm in rural Cheshire in 1918

but retired to nearby Knutsford in the 1970s.

I'd lived here, next door to her,

for probably about 12, 15 years.

Edith was a pleasant but shy neighbour.

She be spending time in the front garden

but she always kept the hedges well-trimmed

and just kept herself to herself.

Very private, very quiet. You hardly used to see her, really.

You'd hardly hear that she was there.

Edith passed away in 1991

with no will or any close family to inherit her estate.

The case passed to the government's legal department,

where it remained for 24 years,

until Saul and the team picked it up.

If a case remains unclaimed for 30 years,

it can then be claimed by the Crown indefinitely.

So, there's a certain cut-off point

and you find yourself working cases that are old,

thinking, "We've not got much time left to crack this

"or it's all going to go to the government."

And time pressure wasn't the only incentive.

The team believed the case was worth at least £60,000.

Which means it's a fairly high-value case and, if we can solve it,

there'd be plenty of money for the heirs.

Today, Saul is heading to the Cheshire archives

to dig deeper into Edith's maternal family.

Edith's mother was Hannah Scarisbrook Foster

and she was the youngest in a family of Fosters.

She actually had three brothers.

Saul has hit a dead end for these brothers, uncles of Edith's,

whose descendants would be her heirs.

But Saul has a trick up his sleeve.

He thinks the Cheshire newspaper archive from 1928

will have vital clues about one of her uncles, James Davies Foster.

James, on his death certificate, it showed that he died of meningitis

but that there was a postmortem with an inquest.

Now, hopefully, that inquest will have been covered by the local press

and the idea is that, hopefully, we'll find a nice report

which will mention his two surviving brothers and where they lived.

No-one had been able to successfully trace these three uncles

over the last 20 years,

so any new information about them would be crucial.

Saul's mission is to find out if any of them had any children

who could inherit Edith's estate

or whether all three died without heirs.

Right, it's just down here on the left.

Right, let's go to work.

But there is no guarantee Saul will find what he needs at the archives,

making today's work a complete gamble.

Hi, I reserved some newspapers.

-You've got a booking, haven't you?

-I have.

Many people don't realise the amount of risk involved.

We can take them over to where you can look at them.

There's an awful lot of time that we put into cases

which, quite often, comes to nothing.

That's huge!

Saul is looking for any mention of James Davies Foster

or his two brothers, which could give clues

to whether they married or had children.

There you go. July 28th.

He zones in on newspaper reports

which would have covered James's death in 1928.

In this edition is a report, hopefully,

of the coroner's inquest, but the print is so small,

it's going to take us a while to go through this.

They got a lot of words in these old things, didn't they?

But having examined the whole page, Saul becomes disheartened.

There is no mention of James Davies Foster.

I would have liked...

I would have hoped, really, that it was on this page,

and it's not, so I'm going to move over to this page

but I'm a bit...mm.

You never know, you never know.

All is not lost yet.

But suddenly, a new clue leaps out of the pages.

Ah! Now, hang on!

Right...

I'm going to read this cos it's relevant.

"The tragedy of a Crewe Railway works employee

was investigated by Mr HAW Hastings,

the deputy coroner at Ford Lane Police Station on Thursday week."

This is very encouraging because HAW Hastings was the deputy coroner

who carried out the inquest on James Davies Foster.

So, if the inquest that we want

isn't covered in this edition of the paper,

it might be in the following week's edition.

But, either way, they are covering his work, that coroner's work.

We're getting closer now.

What have we got here?

HE SIGHS

But after going through all the available editions

for James Davies Foster, Saul hits a dead end.

I'm getting quite stressed now cos I haven't found it.

There are two things that I'm stressed about.

One is that it might not be here

and the other one, that it IS here and I've missed it.

Because, after all, despite being a professional, I'm only human.

Which means I've got to go through this again.

Saul can find no mention of James Davies Foster's inquest.

His trip looks like it may have been wasted.

But, as the record office is about to close, the archivist notices

an intriguing detail on James Davies Foster's death certificate.

Right, this death certificate, it actually says that he died

-at an institution, Bexton Road, Knutsford.

-Right.

-The institution could well be the workhouse.

-OK.

-The Altrincham Bucklow workhouse, but we can check that.

-OK.

If you could, that would be great. Thank you. Brilliant!

The archivist recognises the address

of where James died as the local workhouse.

Workhouses were an early form of the welfare state

and National Health Service.

They provided shelter, food and medical treatment

for those who had fallen on hard times.

As James had been struck down by meningitis,

if he couldn't afford a private hospital,

the workhouse would have been his only hope.

If the archivist's hunch is correct, Saul may have a new and vital clue

in the hunt for the information on James Davies Foster.

The workhouse is actually in Bexton Road in Knutsford.

-Right, so he died at the workhouse?

-Yes.

-Are there any workhouse records?

-Yes, there are, actually.

We have, for the Altrincham and Bucklow Union,

we have admissions and discharges, which is 1908 to 1940.

Would that include family members,

like someone who booked him in, as it were?

Yeah.

-So, I need to order some stuff, don't I?

-Yes.

There may, therefore, be workhouse records

which might possibly give information

about this gentleman's family,

which is what I haven't been able to find here.

Let's hope tomorrow brings some better luck.

But the archive is closing, so Saul will have a tense wait overnight

until he can see the records.

That was a bit of a rollercoaster. Hmm...

Right...

All we need is something like, "Brother - Frederick Foster",

and such and such an address.

Then we can go to electoral rolls, censuses, the 1939 Register.

Then we'll find him and his wife and then we'll find their marriage

and their children and it'll be wonderful!

But when he returns to the archive,

will Saul find the crucial clue he's been looking for?

So close and yet so far.

When heir hunters open a new case, it can reveal hidden fortunes.

It can be fascinating.

You never really know what you're going to find.

It can be an emotional rollercoaster for all involved.

It is a jigsaw puzzle where you get the first piece

and I still get butterflies every time.

And it can uncover life-changing sums for the heirs.

Some people genuinely need the money and I like to call those individuals

and let them know that the money's on their way. OK, thank you.

Fraser & Fraser case manager Ben Cornish

came across one such estate in March, 2016.

The case of Jean Walley was a private referral.

Jean had passed away on 24th February, 2016.

Her friends had called the team

to see if they could track down relatives.

When we were given the details that Jean had passed away,

we knew that she was married to a Mason Harwood Walley.

Mason only died in 2015.

Jean had inherited her husband's estate,

but she, herself, hadn't left a will.

But before Ben could search for her family,

he needed to check if there was any value in the estate,

so he looked at Jean's last address.

I checked the land registry documents

to make sure she owned it

and she was the sole proprietor of the property.

Average property prices in Jean's street were around £300,000.

I just want to clarify with you if we're on the right track or not.

Ben needed to work fast now.

Although it was a private referral,

her estate could have been made public at any time.

If it's actually worth pursuing, you know you've got to speed up

and make sure you get there before anyone else.

Ben needed more information, so spoke with neighbours of Jean's.

She lived in the Romford area for almost four decades

and was well-known by everyone on her street.

I moved here about five years ago.

The neighbours across the road there

used to take great care of Jean and her husband.

Alan also helped Jean out where he could.

My interaction with Jean was much more limited

to cutting this hedge here.

I used to do that about twice a year.

Jean was a well-loved member of the neighbourhood.

It was very common to see her sitting there

in her chair in the window, and we used to wave to her.

So, she was very well looked after in this little small community here.

Jean died only 11 months after her husband, Mason,

and close friends were able to tell Ben and the team

they never had children.

Hang on, let me get stuff up.

If Ben was to find heirs to Jean's estimated £300,000 estate,

he needed to search back through her family history.

We found out that she married in 1953

and her name, at marriage, was Jean Biggar.

When we looked for Jean's birth record,

we discovered she was born in 1928 in Carlisle.

On her birth record, it showed that her mother's maiden name was Nixon.

With this information, Ben quickly discovered Jean was an only child,

so moved on to locating her parents.

We did a marriage search

and a John Robert Biggar married a Lilian Nixon in 1927 in Carlisle.

And from that, we started our research.

Go on, then.

Ben needed help to look at their families,

so recruited research manager Isha Adams to start looking

at Jean's mother's family in Carlisle.

We knew that her mother was called Lilian Nixon

and she was born 24th December, 1904.

So we had a look at the births and there was a birth in Carlisle,

so we knew that was our Lilian.

Just start from the beginning.

Now the team could look for Lilian's siblings and parents

on the 1911 census records.

I've got a confirmation.

And they quickly had success.

We found a 1911 census of a Lilian Nixon,

born around 1905,

but, luckily, it was in Carlisle, so we knew we were on the right track.

The 1911 census showed

Lilian's parents were James Nixon

and Mary Blackburn,

a hatmaker and a housewife,

both born in Carlisle.

It also had the vital information Isha was after -

Lilian's three siblings.

We knew we had Lawrence, John and Matilda,

who are uncles and aunt of the deceased.

The next step, we were looking into the aunt and uncles

to see if we could find any heirs.

The team had made quick progress.

Thanks, bye.

But they were about to hit a major stumbling block.

Although Nixon may not seem like a very common name,

unfortunately, when looking for the aunt and uncles of the deceased,

Nixon is a very common name in the north, especially in Carlisle.

The team took a deep breath and started with Jean's youngest uncle.

Keep that just in case.

We're looking into a John Nixon.

John is a very, very common name,

so it was a bit tricky trying to find his family.

The team combed through records in Carlisle

for John Nixon marrying and having children...

..and eventually came up trumps.

We went on to find a marriage for him to a Mary Winifred Wilkinson,

but we couldn't find any children off that marriage.

It was a dead end for the team,

so they hoped for better luck with Jean's youngest aunt, Matilda.

Matilda married a William Pendergrast,

which is a really good name to research.

We then found one issue, John Pendergrast, born in 1932.

So, looked into that and, literally, couldn't find

anything for John past his birth.

They just seemed to disappear.

This was a huge problem for the team.

John would be an heir and they couldn't just leave him untraced.

Ben picked up the research and looked further afield for John.

We start looking through the cases where people would emigrate to,

so you're looking at the Australias,

you're looking at the Canadas, the States.

These two are alive as well.

They could be anywhere in the world

but the records aren't like they are in England and Wales.

They're not a centralised record database.

They change from province to province and state to state.

But the team's hard work wasn't in vain.

When we cast the net a bit wider,

we discovered that John Pendergrast actually emigrated to Canada

and sadly passed away in 2012.

But they still needed to check if John had any children,

so Ben had to do some transatlantic detective work.

We found the funeral home who dealt with his funeral

and managed to get hold of his daughter through marriage.

This step-daughter of John's could be an heir, if John had adopted her.

Adoption is one of these special rules we have to know about.

The same as having a blood transfusion,

you become part of your adopted family.

Ben needed more information about John's step-daughter.

He brought this individual up since she was one

but, sadly, she was never formally adopted,

which means she's not going to be entitled to benefit from his share.

OK, cool, I will.

With only one uncle left to trace,

the team were running out of options that might lead to heirs.

Lawrence was really our last hope.

If I didn't find anything from him, it would not look good.

But the team's determination would pay off.

We found a marriage. He had three children.

The team had finally found potential heirs

on the maternal side and set about contacting them.

But they still had the paternal side of the family to crack

and, as Ben looks deeper into Jean's family history,

he will make a discovery about her estate

that will raise the stakes even higher.

I knew that she had a lot of money,

but I didn't think it was 1.3 million.

Every year in Britain,

thousands of people get a knock on the door from the heir hunters.

I was quite shocked because I didn't realise

that there was anybody in the family that we could inherit from any more.

But there are still thousands of unsolved cases

where heirs need to be found.

Today, we've got details of two estates

on the government legal department's bona vacantia list

that are yet to be cracked.

Could you be the heirs they are looking for?

The first case on the list is Walter Alderdice

who died in Weymouth, Dorset,

on 5th May, 1994, aged 80.

Walter was born in Poole, Dorset, on 9th March, 1914.

Despite Walter appearing to live on the south coast most of life,

Alderdice is a name with Scottish origins.

Are you related to an Alderdice

and have connections with Scotland or the south coast?

Could you be the person the heir hunters are looking for?

The next case is Mary Ahern,

who died in 2002 in Hampstead, north London, aged 76.

She was born on 16th December, 1925.

Could you be a relative of Mary's?

Do you know anything that could help solve the case

of Walter Alderdice and Mary Ahern?

Perhaps you could be the next of kin.

If so, you could have thousands of pounds coming your way.

Celtic Research case manager Saul Marks is engaged

in a desperate hunt for heirs of Edith Percival,

and he's struggling to find descendants

from three of her maternal uncles.

It's vital for us, in our job,

to make sure that we've covered every line of the family.

We've either got to prove that there are no heirs

or prove that there ARE heirs.

We can't just leave them untraced.

Edith's estate has sat unclaimed for 24 years,

so doing research into such an ancient case is a huge gamble.

I should actually file this in the correct order.

One of the risks of picking up an old case

is that you're going to duplicate work

which, perhaps, other companies have done.

So, I might put a lot of work in on a case

and just be rehashing work which another company did ten years ago.

Right...

Saul has already spent the previous day

looking for one of Edith's uncles, James Davies Foster,

in newspaper archives, without any result.

But today, he has a new lead, back at the archives,

and it's his last resort in his hunt for Edith's mysterious uncles.

I'm really hoping that the records are going to tell us a bit more

about James Foster and, hopefully, lead us directly

to Edith Percival's next of kin.

Saul has been forced to take such an unconventional route

due to the extreme mystery surrounding Edith Percival's family.

She was an intensely private person,

as her neighbour Jeff Tenner remembers.

What we did know was she'd spend time in the garden

but always kept herself to herself.

Jeff lived next door to her for over a decade in the 1980s,

but never gleaned any information about her family life.

I think, conversation-wise, we would never have had more than,

in all those years, half a dozen conversations.

Edith passed away in 1991, without close family or a will,

and her money has sat

with the government legal department ever since.

While Saul is struggling to locate Edith's maternal uncles,

he's already had just as much trouble

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

Right, this is the paternal side. This is the Percival side.

Edith May Percival's father was Thomas Percival.

Edith's mother's family and her father's family

were both farming families from the same district,

so they're very much a localised family

from that part of north-east Cheshire.

Marriage records showed Edith's father, Thomas Percival,

married Hannah Foster in 1918...

Come on! This way!

..and was a dairy farmer.

Farming was a very important activity

in Cheshire and, particularly, dairy farming,

with its moist and rather wet summers,

is a thriving, expanding industry

as a result of the growing demand for milk.

But dairy farming 100 years ago was a tough, all-consuming job.

Go on, budge up. Let's have you.

Milking is easier today than it used to be years ago.

It would all have been in churns

and it would have had to be lifted manually onto the lorries,

so a lot of hard work, lifting heavy churns of milk.

Stop fidgeting.

Still a seven days a week job,

half six in the morning till half six at night.

It's not just something you do in your spare time.

Thomas Percival was also a potato farmer,

as this photo of his actual farm in 1908 shows.

To cope with the endless labour, Thomas's siblings, Lucy and John,

would also have worked on the farm, leaving little time for love.

You've got a hierarchical class structure,

which means that it would be frowned upon

to marry outside your position in life.

This meant Saul's hopes of finding heirs

from Lucy and John would be narrowed.

Because there were limited opportunities

to find someone to marry,

you'd tend to find a disproportionate number of them

might finish up as bachelors, in the case of men,

or spinsters, in the case of women.

Saul's worst fears would be realised when he looked into Lucy and John,

the siblings of Edith's father, Thomas Percival.

His sister lived to quite an old age but was a spinster,

so there were no heirs from her line.

And his brother, Thomas and Lucy's brother,

was sadly killed in World War I,

and he hadn't married or had any children,

so his line dies off as well.

So, therefore, we were able to establish, definitively,

that there are no heirs on the paternal side of the family.

It was a devastating blow.

It meant Saul's chance of solving the case were slashed in half.

Only Edith's mother's side could now have heirs.

You work one side of the family through completely,

and you totally eliminate the possibility

of there being any heirs.

The question is,

are you going to find any on the side you haven't yet traced?

It means Saul's work in the archives on Edith's maternal uncle,

James Davies Foster, is even more important.

James died in the local workhouse,

so now Saul needs to search the workhouse archives

for any mention of James and his family

to give him new clues to their descendants.

Hopefully, he's going to turn up in one of these.

This is the last resort.

A-ha! Inquest.

"Mr CAW Hastings..." I thought it was HAW Hastings.

"..deputy coroner, held an inquest on James Foster on July 25th.

"A verdict of natural causes was returned."

What we have here is, indeed,

a record of James Foster's death in the workhouse

that's a bit more information than just the death register.

All it gives, though, is the date of the inquest and the verdict.

It doesn't mention James's brothers or anyone else in his family.

It's a hammer blow to Saul's hopes of finding heirs from James.

It's pretty frustrating to come here

and look through all these different sets of records

and get so close to finding information about James.

So, yeah...

So close and yet so far.

Saul has wasted hours of research

and, after a whole day in the archives,

he's back to square one.

I'm going to have to go back to the office

and look again at some different sources and see if we can try

and find these brothers some other way.

While this stage of research draws a blank...

..all is not lost,

as Saul has made progress

with another part of Edith's maternal family.

Sometimes, you work a case for so long,

it becomes this personal challenge to try and solve this niggling case.

You just kind of keep going.

And Saul's persistence would pay off when he checked different records

for Edith's elusive three uncles.

I ran a baptism search in the Cheshire baptism records

for members of this family

in the hope that I would find entries for James and Frederick.

What I actually found, much to my amazement,

was the baptism record of another brother.

This is George Foster, who was another brother of Hannah's,

who hadn't appeared on any of the census returns

that I'd looked at up to that point.

After so many dead ends,

Saul finally had some information he could run with.

Once I'd established that George Foster

was definitely another brother of Hannah Scarisbrook Foster,

I was then able to go back to basic sources,

like the censuses and birth, marriage and death indexes,

and trace his family down.

Saul rapidly discovered George married and had a child,

Hannah Foster, Edith's cousin.

Hannah, herself, married,

so Saul was tantalisingly close to finding a living heir

on this case which had foiled all the other companies

for over 24 years.

But would Hannah have children?

Hannah had one daughter, named Margaret Swindells.

Margaret was the only heir Saul had found.

It was a monumental breakthrough on the case,

but fate would deal Saul a cruel blow.

Margaret died without children in 2003,

though he wasn't giving up hope.

If Margaret left a will,

then anything that Margaret would have inherited from Edith

would pass to the residuary beneficiaries of Margaret's will.

It was a tense wait for Saul to discover

if Margaret died with a will when he searched the probate records.

Margaret left a will and she left the residue of her estate

to a friend of hers named Christine and a couple of charities.

And Christine and those charities, finally,

were the first heirs I'd found to Edith's estate.

What you doing? There's a good boy.

Christine was one of Margaret's closest friends

and had inherited money from her when she passed away in 2003.

Shall I get your ball?

So, when Saul called her to say she may inherit from Margaret again

over ten years later, she was sceptical.

I didn't believe it. I was suspicious of it, initially.

Christine had met Margaret in the 1960s,

when she'd moved to Cheshire as a young mum.

I went to have my son and came home with him

and she came running out and said, "Can I have a peep, please?"

And...and that was it, after that.

They were the kids she never had.

Christine looked after Margaret until she died

and inherited a third of Margaret's estate.

The first lot that I inherited, I've not spent very much of it

and I've not spent it on myself.

So, when Saul persuaded Christine he was legitimate,

the idea of more money coming from Margaret's estate was a shock.

I didn't know how much the money was and I was too much of a lady to ask.

And Saul had some good news on the size of Edith's estate.

During the time we'd been working this case,

we'd been under the impression it was worth approximately £60,000,

which is a fairly sizeable estate.

We've now heard from the Treasury that they believe, in fact,

it's worth double that.

It's worth, supposedly, about £120,000.

Fido.

So, Christine will treasure

her inheritance from Margaret and Edith

and she won't be wasting it.

It's a nice warm feeling because whatever's left when I go

will go to my two children, keep it in the family.

In London, case manager Ben Cornish,

at heir-hunting firm Fraser & Fraser,

was working the case of Jean Walley,

which had already taken some dramatic twists and turns

to find heirs from her mother's family.

You can never look at a case and say whether it's an easy case or not.

-We've got that, haven't we?

-Yeah.

The heir hunters knew Jean owned her own property,

so the case was worth an estimated £300,000.

But they were about to discover the true value, which was much higher.

So, if Ben and the team found heirs on her father's side,

these people's lives would be transformed forever.

If we can trace them as quickly as possible.

Brilliant, OK.

Friends of Jean had given Ben and the team

a head start into Jean's family history.

We were informed that she was married to a Mason Harwood Walley.

Both her and her husband were originally from up north.

Although they were from Carlisle,

by the 1960s, Jean and Mason had moved south

and spent their retirement living in Romford, Essex.

So, she was a very chirpy, very dignified lady.

She became a bit sad when her husband died,

which was about a year to a year and a half before her,

but she didn't give up.

Jean had been married to her husband, Mason, since 1953,

when he was a Petty Officer in the Royal Naval Air Service.

But when he left the navy,

he went to work at the Ford motor factory in Dagenham.

The factory is still in production today but, back in the 1960s,

it would have been a very different place.

It would have been a site

that produced vehicles that were sold across the UK.

It would have been far more labour-intensive,

more semi-skilled work, and the environment itself

would have been much darker,

probably a bit dirtier than you see today as well.

Mason was also likely to have witnessed an amazing period

in the company and the UK's history.

Although the vast majority of employees at Ford were men,

167 women had a vital role,

sewing the upholstered seats for every car the factory made.

That was the first car I worked on when I joined Ford.

-These are beautifully made.

-It is lovely.

It brings back memories of what we done.

During the 1960s, Gwen Davis and Eileen Pullen were sewing machinists

who worked alongside Mason Walley in the Dagenham factory.

It was hard work at first but you got into it.

We used to have to make 19 seats an hour

and you had to put your number on the seat

because, in case there were faults, then a seat would come back to you.

You couldn't get away with doing bad work.

But, despite doing a technically demanding job,

the women were not rewarded for their expertise.

Many of them had hailed from skilled jobs

in the rag trade in the East End of London.

They knew that they were skilled.

In this factory,

they were paid at the very bottom of the pay hierarchy.

Resentment grew when the female sewing machinists saw

that less skilled male colleagues got paid the same as them.

The janitors, who were graded the same as us,

sweeping up, they couldn't do the work WE were doing.

The could never come off what they would do

and go onto another job because they didn't know how to do it.

All they knew was sweeping.

So, in 1968, the women, led by Gwen and Eileen, decided

the only way Ford would listen to them was if they took direct action.

The moment we lay down our tools and said, "No more"...

-They didn't have no more seats.

-Yeah, they lost, what was it,

a week and a half? Then they ran out of seats.

So, it showed our job was important.

-You can't run a car without a seat, can you?

-No, no.

Production at one of Europe's biggest car plants ground to a halt.

One of the very high representatives said

we either go back to work or he'd lay everybody off.

But the women's strike couldn't be crushed,

as it had caught the public's eye.

They want to be understood as the skilled people that they were

and they wanted to be rewarded accordingly.

Now, that got reinterpreted as an equal pay strike.

The women marched on Whitehall to protest for equal pay

and to try to negotiate an end to their strike.

The women public, I think, looked at these women

-as

-I

-did as a young woman, with a sort of quiet thrill.

This was very exciting.

After three weeks of strikes,

protests and government intervention,

the women won a pay rise, but not equal pay.

Then we went back.

I think it was a rise of about 7p or 9p on the hour,

not nearly as much as we wanted.

They never got their regrading.

Took another, I think, 16 years.

But Gwen, Eileen's and the other women's actions

altered Britain forever.

It put the idea of equality on the agenda,

so these women were an inspiration for the women's liberation movement.

In 1970, the Equal Pay Act was introduced,

prohibiting companies from giving women

less favourable treatment than men.

I, personally, find it really inspiring

that, as a result of something that happened here,

it led to a much wider change in society.

The women's actions were so important,

they've been immortalised in the movie and musical Made In Dagenham.

They did something amazing, incredibly brave.

Mason Walley would have worked alongside the women in this new era

until he retired in the 1990s, as a senior manager at Dagenham.

But when Mason died in 2015,

his estate passed to his wife, Jean, who hadn't left a will.

So, heir hunter Ben was trying to ensure her estate

-went to the rightful heirs.

-All right then.

With Jean's house worth at least £300,000,

Ben and the team were working fast,

in case other companies got wind of it.

When there's a property on a case, the stakes are high

because you know there's a value to the estate

and you know that you're going to get competition.

Cheers.

Having already found three heirs on Jean's mother's side,

he immediately got to work on her paternal family tree.

On her birth record, it showed her surname was Biggar.

This was great news for Ben.

Biggar was a fantastic name for him and the team to research

and helped them work quickly.

They found Jean's father, John Biggar,

had been born in 1905 in Carlisle.

Ben quickly traced John's parents, Jean's paternal grandparents.

This is the family tree of Jean Walley.

We've got Robert Biggar and Mary Elizabeth Carr.

Ben found Robert and Mary with Jean's father, John,

on the 1911 census.

He discovered Jean's paternal grandparents

only had two more children.

One of whom was a Mary Elizabeth Biggar, born in 1907 in Carlisle.

She married a Robert C Douglas in 1930.

Ben could quickly trace their children,

one of whom was Robert, who was still living in Carlisle

and who received a letter from Ben and the team.

Well, I seen this envelope come through the door.

What's this? Who's wanting money off of us?

I'm sick of getting stuff through the door.

And then I opened it again

and it was saying, "Estate of Jean Walley."

I says, "I don't know them!"

I says, "I better phone them and tell them

"they've sent it to the wrong address."

So, I got on the phone and he says,

"Oh, yes, can you remember her husband being a petty officer?"

I says, "I know who it is! It's my cousin Jean."

I says, "I was trying to get in touch with her for ages

"and I didn't know where they'd all gone,

"after their mother and father passed away, you know."

Robert has been left with a feeling of regret

for not being able to find Jean before it was too late,

but he still has fantastic memories of Jean.

She had a good head on her shoulders.

She was always happy looking and always helping people, just like me.

I just wanted to check with you two things.

Back in the office, Ben and the team have almost completed

their hunt for Jean's heirs.

The current status is that we've now completed our research.

We've established who the rightful beneficiaries will be,

so we need to market and sell the deceased's property

and collect in any other assets.

Ben found a total of eight heirs to share Jean's estate.

But when he had done the sums for what the total value would be,

it came as a surprise.

The final value of Jean Walley's estate

was approximately 1.3 million.

It was made up of the house price of £300,000,

plus stocks and shares and other savings.

I knew that she had a lot of money,

but I didn't think it was 1.3 million.

As there's only eight beneficiaries,

it's going to be a life-changing amount of money.

It's shocking news for Ben, but one he will enjoy breaking to the heirs.

It's always nice to see, sometimes,

when you get these cases where there are only a few beneficiaries

and they are in genuine need of the funds, it's a really nice feeling

for us to be able to give them something back from their family.

Not only will Robert inherit a large portion of her estate,

it's been pleasant for him to relive memories

of Jean and their shared childhood.

Always happy-go-lucky and she used to always be going to dances

and always, like, jolly.

She was always jolly when she came, you know.

She was always laughing and joking.