Skudder/Knowles Heir Hunters

Today the Heir Hunters are on the trail of a missing boy.

We've got a bit of a bombshell. What if James had a brother?

And it's a case where the stakes are high.

It appears that the estate value has actually risen to in the region of

around £800,000.

While on the estate of a distinctive South Londoner.

I think she was about three foot two, three foot, something like that.

I suppose she'd come up to there on me.

The team are facing a huge gamble.

You don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of money

-if it's all for nothing.

-It's all in a day's work for the Heir Hunters.

Finding people's lives, really, it can be fascinating,

it can be really, very, very interesting.

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

At Fraser & Fraser headquarters in Central London,

the team are working on a roller-coaster of a case.

We've managed to piece together most of it but we're still carrying out

little bits of research.

They've been searching for relatives of a lady called Rosina Skudder,

who passed away in August 2015.

And when Case Manager Mike Pow took it on,

he had little idea of what was to come.

Rosina died in south west London,

so we obtained a copy of her death certificate,

which states she passed away in King's College Hospital

in Denmark Hill.

The certificate led us to her address.

Little Rosie we called her.

Rosina lived on a quiet residential street in South London.

It was Rosie, that's all you can remember her as.

Neighbour Margaret was a close friend.

We used to notice her walking up the road from work or going down the

road. She used to put her make-up on lovely.

She always had her make-up on when she went out.

You know, she always looked smart, always.

Rosie was a very recognisable figure as she had been born with dwarfism.

I think she was about three foot two, three foot, something like that.

I suppose she'd come up to there on me.

Rosina appeared to live an active life.

She used to go off on the bus up to London, up to the Aldwych Theatre,

and come back late at night and walk up the road.

She had no fear at all.

It was only as she got older that it seems Rosina started to suffer

as a result of her height.

It's common in later life with dwarfism,

you can have difficulties with walking and mobility.

The difficulty of getting out and about, moving around,

but also as you become older you become,

you feel a bit more vulnerable.

For the last eight years of her life,

Rosina was mostly bedridden and neighbour Margaret

also became her carer.

And I used to do her shopping and her washing.

Towards the end she couldn't stand on her little legs at all.

When Rosina died, she hadn't left a will and had no known relatives.

She never ever mentioned a family or cousins or anything like that,

so I don't know whether she had any at or not.

For the Heir Hunters, the search for Rosina's relatives was on.

The case originally came from the Government Legal Department,

who look after all unclaimed estates where there's no valid will.

It was then advertised for next of kin,

which is where we became involved in trying to locate beneficiaries.

But before going any further,

the team needed to establish if there was any value to Rosina's estate.

We had no real indication at all when we first started

whether there was going to be any value.

She didn't own the property.

She'd been there for a long time but it looked like it was rented.

Estates where people didn't own a property are often low in value,

which is bad news for the Heir Hunters,

who are paid a percentage of each estate.

For us, one of the biggest challenges is the gamble

we have to take.

We never know the value of an estate before we start work on it.

It's a gamble of working out whether we're dealing with an estate

which is worth some money,

an estate which is worth a lot of money, or sometimes an

estate which is worth no money.

And just being able to tell at the right moment so you don't waste

money is very, very important.

And on Rosina's estate, the signs weren't good.

There was the massive risk that our costs would far outweigh

our fee once we got to a point of distribution.

But there was a crucial piece of information

that gave Mike some hope.

Well, we'd spoken to a neighbour of hers who gave a small indication

that she may have left some funds.

Although he didn't know the value of the funds,

Mike hit the go button on the research and Rosina's unusual

surname gave them a good start.

We've got her full name of Rosina Ellen Cecilia Skudder,

we have the name of her father, which was Robert Skudder,

and we also get the name, surname and maiden name of her mother,

which was Rosina Winifred May Skudder,

formerly Englefield.

Researcher Katie began searching to see if Rosina had ever married

-or had children.

-I knew that she was a spinster.

I did a birth search to see if she had any siblings using the mother's

maiden name and the surname Skudder

but there was no other siblings to the deceased.

Having ruled out siblings,

the team turned their attention to Rosina's parents, Robert and Rosina.

And they soon made a tragic discovery.

So when looking into the deceased's immediate family,

for example her mother,

she passed away when Rosina was actually only two years old

in the Blitz.

'Schools...'

From September 1940

London was under attack, and as German bombs rained down,

families like the Skudders were left living in fear.

The Blitz would have been particularly traumatic for children,

especially children like Rosina who lived in the heart of London.

A lot of children from London were also evacuated to the countryside,

to places like Yorkshire and Cheshire.

They probably also had family members that were away that were

actually fighting in the war.

Just two weeks into the Blitz,

the Skudder family home in Walthamstow was hit.

'The people of London...'

Rosina, aged just two, was left without a mother.

And for the Heir Hunters, it was unclear what happened to her next.

Obviously her father most likely went to war.

We constantly look at censuses and see where she lived.

With no mother to look after her and a disability that set her apart,

life after the war would have been tough for Rosina.

It's likely that Rosina was put into some sort of institution

or a special school.

In terms of education that would have been a secondary thing for

her because there were, rightly or wrongly, there were assumptions that

people born with disabilities, physical or cognitive,

that they didn't actually have any cognitive ability.

It's unlikely things improved when Rosina reached working age.

Employment opportunities would have been limited for Rosina,

possibly telephone work,

reception work would have been an ideal thing whereby her physicality

was not relied on and she could just sit and do her job and it wasn't

particularly physically exhausting.

The fact that Rosina was likely to have had low-paid work

didn't bode well for the Heir Hunters.

And worse still,

building up a family tree was proving to be a mammoth task.

I think we actually had two files.

This is one of the two, so it's absolutely massive.

It barely fits in the filing cabinet.

Yeah, so we've got one of two and it's really heavy.

There are six siblings on the paternal side

and four, I believe, on the maternal side and all of them

married and had children.

The family tree was growing at an alarming rate,

meaning more research and more costs for the Heir Hunters.

It kind of kept getting bigger and bigger and you don't want to spend

a ridiculous amount of money on it all for nothing,

but kept on going and it didn't seem like a very good idea

to stop just in case if there was some money behind it.

Researcher Katie was finally getting to grips with the huge

Skudder side of the family.

I ordered the parents' marriage to have a look and see.

The father's name's on the marriage certificate.

The Heir Hunters discovered that Rosina's father Robert

had six siblings.

Research into his brother Samuel revealed living children

and grandchildren who would be entitled to a share

of Rosina's estate.

It was a breakthrough and meant

the team could start calling potential heirs.

Obviously it's not a phone call you get everyday,

someone telling you that you're entitled to benefit from the estate

of someone they've probably never met or ever even heard of.

But with the value of the case still unknown,

Mike was hoping the family might have some precious information.

All right, thank you very much for your time. Take care. Bye-bye.

We've got limited information really from the family because most of them

are what we call a cousin once removed,

so they're not direct cousins, they don't share aunts and uncles with the deceased,

they're coming down a further generation.

But the family were able to offer one enticing detail about Rosina.

A few beneficiaries remembered Rosina

and most of them remembered that she was in showbiz.

Could this be the precious nugget of information

the team had been hoping for?

Why is this file so big?

It seems to be getting bigger every time I see it.

At nearby heir hunting firm Finders,

the team are grappling with a major case.

This is the file of James Douglas Knowles.

This was a case that was advertised by the Government Legal Department.

As soon as it came in it was really frantic.

We knew quite early on that there was a property involved.

The property is estimated to be worth £250,000 and the team have

been working flat-out to find heirs.

A relative of his has actually passed away without leaving a will.

Today, they're chasing up a lead that could change everything.

This is a bit different which is quite interesting.

Stewart, one of the company's travelling researchers,

is on his way to a firm of solicitors where some of

James Knowles's belongings are being held.

He's got a box of possessions at the solicitors,

which I'm going to go through to see

if we can find any relatives or next of kin from his possessions.

The team are hoping the box could contain vital clues about possible

heirs to James' £250,000 estate.

Another little box. Ooh, quite a few medals in here.

These are all war medals.

This is a coronation of King George and Queen Elizabeth.

This is his dad's - 1914 to 1919.

The Great War for Civilisation.

James Douglas Knowles died on 3rd of March, 2016.

Little is known about him, but as a young man he'd served in

the forces before settling in the seaside town of Eastbourne.

As James didn't have any next of kin,

hospital chaplain Reverend Nolan was tasked with organising his funeral.

I often have to arrange funerals like this for people who die

in hospital where there are no known relatives or people

who would take responsibility for the funeral.

But Reverend Nolan knew nothing about James except that

he'd served in the Army during the Second World War.

There were no friends that we knew of,

no relatives or other people in the community who were likely to be at

the funeral and it just seemed so sad to me that after his wartime service,

there was nobody there at the end to say thank you and goodbye.

So Reverend Nolan decided to take action.

And turned to social media.

When I made the posting on Facebook,

I'd got no idea that it was going to be shared I think 3,500 times.

It seemed to go across the entire country very fast.

With his appeal going viral, Reverend Nolan faced a new problem.

The family chapel at Eastbourne Crematorium

seats about 25.

What on earth was I going to do if a thousand people turned up?

On the day, a still incredible 120 people came to pay their respects

to a man they'd never known.

There were retired soldiers,

there were veterans from various conflict,

and there were members of the public.

Afterwards, the conversations were basically, "Well done,

"you've done the right thing, my boy."

I just think people felt that we'd all played our part

in drawing James' life, as it were, to a close.

This is a soldier's pay book.

At the solicitors,

Stuart's still looking for vital clues in the search

for James' heirs.

"Soldiers should always be careful to insert particulars

"of his relatives on pages ten."

Quite interesting, that.

He died without making a will yet when he was a regular soldier

they told him he should say who the money's going to go to.

Well, obviously he didn't follow that too well.

Stuart's trip to Eastbourne has been in vain.

It's been extremely interesting but unfortunately there's been

nothing in the box to help the office at all.

I'm now taking it up to London where they can have a look through it.

It's the latest development in a case that has been full of twists and turns.

Did we actually find any military records for him?

Oh, it was just the Commonwealth War Graves.

And with such a high-value estate at stake,

senior manager Ryan Gregory has been fighting to stay one step ahead

of rival firms.

Given that it's such a competitive industry these days,

every decision you take is key in terms of trying to get a result

before or a better result than the competition.

When the case first came in,

Ryan and senior researcher Camilla began by establishing

some basic facts about James.

As you can see from James' birth certificate,

his father is listed as George Douglas Knowles

and his mother is Gertrude Knowles, formerly Newsome.

The registration district is Eastbourne.

We realised that James never married or had any children.

From our initial research it looked like he never had

any brothers or sisters.

With no sign of any siblings,

the team ploughed all their research into the wider family,

hoping they would find cousins.

Initially, we started looking into George Douglas Knowles.

Thankfully, George Douglas Knowles was not an overly common name,

so we were able to look and find him on census records

and find a birth record for him as well, whereas for Gertrude,

we were struggling initially simply

because although she used the name Gertrude

on her son's birth certificate,

she was actually born as Annie Gertrude,

which was initially off-putting for us

because she didn't use Annie at all.

But having eventually found a birth record for James' mother Gertrude,

the team's research was suddenly derailed.

Although we assumed that both parents had passed away,

seeing as they were both born in the 1890s,

unfortunately we couldn't find death records

for either George or Gertrude.

We did various searches for Annie Gertrude, Gertrude Annie,

Gertrude on its own, Annie on its own, and we were really struggling.

It was a major problem.

If we can't find the death certificates for one of

or both of the parents.

It kind of overshadows the rest of the research.

Did parents together have any more children?

Did one of the parents have a child or children with someone else?

I mean, it is just a massive question mark.

If James had a sibling,

they would inherit his entire estate,

so searching for cousins was now a huge risk for the team.

There would be potentially a half-blood brother or sister

who would be the closest next of kin.

This, for us, would have been a disaster and would have

rendered the rest of the research kind of useless.

But with a £250,000 case at stake,

Ryan felt he had to take that chance.

We have to carry on with the search.

We can't spend too much time focusing on one element.

We're hoping that we could extend the family tree and speak to someone

who would be able to give us the key bits of information we need to

kind of close that line of inquiry.

It was now full steam ahead with the search for cousins

and first the team had to look for James' parents' siblings.

To find out how many brothers and sisters George and Gertrude had,

we looked at the 1911 census for both families

for both the Knowles and the Newsomes.

We found that, I believe, there were eight children on the

Knowles family tree.

Two of George's siblings had died as infants but that still left

multiple branches of the family to explore.

So, as you can see, the paternal side is very large

for James Douglas Knowles.

There were six top stem,

so five aunts and uncles of the deceased,

six including the deceased's father,

and they all seem to have quite a few children themselves.

Things were no easier across the office where James' mother's name

was causing a major headache.

Gertrude's surname was Newsome.

Now, a lot of these surnames with an E on the end

historically have been slightly amended or changed

or mistranscribed throughout history with the records.

And Newsome is one of those,

so we have Newsome with an E on the end,

Newsome without an E on the end.

This means we have to double up on searches,

gives us more possibilities to search for.

With rival firms also chasing this high-value case,

the team couldn't afford any mistakes.

It can be quite tiring, it can be quite stressful at times as well,

trying to find the beneficiaries but also to be against the clock.

Those pressures can sometimes mean you might miss something because you

don't know what the competitors that you're racing against are doing.

There's so many unknowns.

But Camilla was starting to make serious progress on the Knowles side

of the family.

She discovered that one of George's brothers was Charles

and she'd been able to trace his descendants.

..who had three children who would be cousins of the deceased

and they had each another two

and they are all beneficiaries to this estate.

All Camilla had to do now was contact them.

So, the first phone call to a potential beneficiary on a case

is always an important one.

This is Camilla Price calling from a firm of heir hunters.

You're hoping that you're going to have a good,

positive conversation with the beneficiary

and hopefully kind of get some

more information from them on the family tree.

So, yeah, it's a kind of key, pivotal moment in any case, really.

OK, that's great. Thank you so much for taking your time to speak to me.

In Herne Bay, news of a surprise windfall was about to reach Pauline,

who's father Peter was James' cousin.

I discovered I was an heir by finding out from my sister.

And she telephoned me and said I've heard from a firm

of heir hunters and I was quite shocked because I didn't

realise that there was anybody in the family

that we could inherit from any more.

Pauline had done her own research into the family but had never known

-about James.

-I knew about George, his father,

because my dad had said that George had gone missing when I queried

anything to do with the family, so I assumed that he died during the war.

Never realised that he'd moved to London and eventually moved

to the south coast and was bringing up a family there.

Although Pauline never met James,

she spent a lot of time thinking about her mystery benefactor.

It feels rather strange to be a beneficiary of an estate

that where you didn't know the person.

I'd like to think that he looked like his uncles.

He was probably a nice man, generous, but cautious.

But in the office, Pauline's inheritance

was suddenly in jeopardy.

So, we thought we'd done a good job,

we were successful with signing the majority of the beneficiaries,

we'd spent weeks and weeks of actually quite intensive

research in the team trying to find everyone

and then we got a bit of a bombshell.

They'd received an e-mail from one of the heirs,

who'd been going through old family photos.

There's a few pictures actually of James with someone else

that looks of a similar age to him, maybe a bit older,

and they're, you know,

they're wearing similar clothes and they're in the same garden,

so it's kind of raised a concern with us,

what if James had a brother?

It was exactly the news the team had been dreading and it threatened to

destroy all their hard work.

If his brother was still alive,

all of the previous weeks' worth of research, the representative visits,

the time in the office, the money spent on the case,

it could have all been for nothing.

Every year in Britain,

thousands of people get a surprise knock on the door

from the Heir Hunters.

That's good news for you, you can order the Ferrari.

Well, hang on a minute, we haven't found the will yet!

As well as handing over life-changing sums of money,

the Heir Hunters' work can bring long-lost relatives back together.

-I'm so lucky...

-Yeah.

-..because I've met up with all of you.

But thousands of estates have eluded the Heir Hunters

and remain unsolved.

Today, we've got details of two estates that are yet to be claimed.

Could you be the person the Heir Hunters have been looking for?

First is the case of Bridget Gamble, also known as Bridie,

who died on 16th of March, 2013, in Stoke-on-Trent.

It's believed Bridie had three brothers,

one of whom was called Maurice Higgins.

Is there a chance you're related to Bridie Gamble

or do you know someone who could be?

Next is the case of Gwyn Warwick Aldred,

who was born on 6th of June, 1927, in Herne Hill, London,

and died on 3rd of February, 1994, in Croydon.

Gwyn's mother had the unusual surname of Cheeseman

and the family are believed to have links to Lancashire.

Are you an Aldred or a Cheeseman?

If so, you could be in line for a surprise windfall.

If I get everything sent to you as soon as,

are you free to go straightaway?

On the £250,000 estate of war veteran James Knowles,

the team at Finders thought they were home and dry.

We've put a lot of energy into it.

We would be using the whole team to research bits and pieces

of the family.

The team had found more than 50 heirs,

including first cousin, once removed, Pauline.

It's quite a surprise but it was a very nice surprise.

But a photo of James with a possible brother had thrown the whole case

into disarray.

And if we did find a half-blood sibling

or even descendants of a half-blood sibling,

then they could disinherit everybody else we'd already found.

The team had known there was a risk James had a sibling,

as they'd been unable to find a record of his parents' deaths.

Literally at this stage we were completely panicked that all of the

research that we had done,

all of the money and the time that we'd spent on the case was going

to completely go out the window.

Part of the problem was that although James had been born

in Eastbourne,

his parents originally came from the Matlock area, 250 miles north.

It's never great for us to figure out that someone

has moved around a lot, in terms of the research.

It makes our life a lot more difficult if we're trying to

pinpoint exactly what's happened to them.

The reason for George and Gertrude's move lay in their choice of career.

In 1911 James' father George Douglas Knowles

was working in a hotel in London

and Gertrude was also working as a hotel chambermaid.

It seemed George and Gertrude had sought work in Britain's

fast-growing hotel industry.

The early part of the 19th century, it was all stagecoaches,

but when the railways arrived

they needed bigger hotels so the people who got off the trains

would have somewhere to stay.

One such hotel was the Palace Hotel in Buxton,

owned by the Duke of Devonshire,

and it seems that George and Gertrude may have met

whilst working there in 1910.

The staff had their own quarters.

They were usually split between men and women.

But the staff did get together on occasions.

By the early 20th century,

London's hotel scene was booming and by 1911 George and Gertrude had both

moved to the city to work at the Devonshire Hotel in Bishopsgate.

Britain was the capital of the world, the most important country,

and so consequently the hotel industry did expand

an enormous amount and

the hotels were basically on seasons.

So that you had a season in London,

and you had another season when you had the spas,

and then people used to go down to the seaside in August.

By 1923,

George and Gertrude had married and moved to the Chatsworth Hotel

in Eastbourne and James was born five years later.

But the Heir Hunters didn't know where they'd gone next.

As the hotel industry boomed,

I imagine they went where it was vital for them to go.

With the net cast wide,

the team finally discovered that George and Gertrude

had ended up back in London.

So, once we had located Gertrude Annie Knowles'

death certificate in Chelsea,

we were then able to place George in Chelsea as well.

But the big question was -

did they have another child who could stand to inherit the lot

and could he be the boy in the photograph?

With information that the boy may have been called Alec,

they began the search.

The one that caught our attention was this certificate here.

It's Alec Hayes Newsome and his mother is Gertrude Newsome,

which would tie in with being the same mother of James.

So, in which case this would mean that Alec is a half-blood brother of James.

With no father listed on the birth certificate,

Alec Newsome's birth was illegitimate,

something that would have been common in the hotel industry.

The team were confident Alec was James' half-sibling,

but was he still alive?

Like James, Alec had also fought in the war,

serving with the Royal Navy on board a ship called HMS Fiji.

In the case of HMS Fiji, it was offering air cover,

anti-aircraft support, to the main fleet engagement.

In 1941, Fiji and her crew were sent to the Aegean Sea

to take part in the Battle of Crete,

in which British forces were trying to defend the islands.

One of the problems that both the ships that were involved

providing that cover was that ammunition was remarkably low.

Fiji found herself under sustained attack and could only hold out

for so long.

It went down...

under the bombardment from the air that it was trying to protect

the rest of the fleet from.

Fiji had a crew of 754 and when she went down

a total of 241 men lost their lives.

Sadly, Alec Newsome was among them.

It was another dramatic development for Ryan and his team.

He hadn't married by that time, so we could rule a line under

that line of inquiry and luckily for us it means that

the other number of beneficiaries we had located were still entitled

to inherit from this estate.

Their hard work had paid off.

Thank you!

And the 55 heirs they'd found were set to share James'

estimated £250,000 estate.

But in the last few days, there's been one more remarkable twist.

Now, we've just had some more recent information in from the solicitor

dealing with the administration and it appears the estate value

has actually risen from our estimate of 250,000 to in the region

of around £800,000.

It's a surprising turn of events and great news for all the heirs.

But for Pauline, becoming an heir is about more than just the money.

Today, she's come to meet Ryan and Camilla to find out more about her

family tree and the man she's inherited from.

The main person concerned is James,

because we knew nothing about him whatsoever.

I only knew about his father.

And that was very, very small amount of information given to me.

So, hopefully, I'll find out a bit more about him, too.

Hi, Pauline, I'm Camilla.

Hi, Camilla, pleased to meet you.

-Do you want to come through?

-Thank you.

-It's a very large tree, as you can see.

-It is.

-It's extremely...

Did you know that your family was this big?

-No.

-No?

-Not as many people as I would have imagined at all.

And the team are also able to show Pauline James' box of possessions,

which has made its way back to the office.

Potentially, it might be a medal for Alec,

-because it has Gertrude's name.

-Her name. That's right.

-As if it'd been sent to her.

-Although, it's Knowles.

She was at that address when he was killed, wasn't she?

-Mm.

-So, potentially, it was Alec's medal.

And this was 1939 to 1945, obviously the Second World War.

Wasn't that the year that...

-Oh, yes.

-..that Alec was killed?

-Yeah.

But it's nice to know that James and Alec grew up together

and they had a relationship and he wasn't giving that

-to someone else, you know.

-And they were happy, yes, yes.

Pauline also has something to share with Ryan and Camilla.

She's brought a photograph of staff outside the Palace Hotel in Buxton,

where George and Gertrude met.

I think that might be Gertrude.

OK. And is that from looking at other photographs

-and kind of matching up?

-Yes, yes.

It's the way that she presents herself.

And the way that her fringe goes to one side.

We weren't exactly sure which one was George Douglas.

It could well be him.

Because he looks like a Knowles.

And remarkably, Pauline has her own connection to the very same hotel.

And strangely enough, I trained as a hotel receptionist there.

-Did you?

-In the 1960s.

-Oh, wow.

-So...

I know the Palace Hotel quite well.

It's the end of a journey of discovery for Pauline

and it all began with a call from the Heir Hunters.

It was such an interesting experience.

I'm so pleased I came and found out all about my family.

There's lots of missing information that has now become clear,

so that's a really, really nice day.

The team at Fraser & Fraser were busy working on the case of

-Rosina Skudder.

-Right, this tree's massive.

Rosina, who was born with dwarfism, was a popular figure

in her South London neighbourhood.

Everybody noticed her, even down at the bus stops and that,

they knew Rosie, you know, and even in the cab office.

You couldn't not know her, if you know what I mean.

Rosina grew up in an era where much less was understood

about people with dwarfism.

Around the time Rosina was born,

the understanding of dwarfism was pretty narrow.

Medical opinion was one of taking care of, perhaps hiding away.

People's exposure to people with dwarfism would have been

that in freak shows.

Basically, they would have been highlighted for having

the physical disability.

In the office, research into Rosina's family tree had snowballed,

and the team had their work cut out

trying to find all her living relatives.

The difficulties in this one, it was more the quantity of

beneficiaries that were entitled.

The stem of Rosina's uncle Samuel had led to six heirs.

One of whom was Ian Skudder

and he was about to get the surprise of his life.

When we received the letter, it was total shock with us.

The wires to my sisters and my cousins were live.

You know, we never spoke to them for months and months,

then all of a sudden, everyone's speaking to each other!

They had no idea she existed, which we find astonishing.

Monetary wise, it's irrelevant to me.

It's just I would like to know more about the family,

how she was brought up and how her life was.

It feels sad in some ways that here we are,

she's died and we know nothing about her.

In the office, the team had now broken the back of the research.

We are into 33 beneficiaries so far.

There's obviously scope for more,

as we're still carrying out little bits of research

and the parts of the family that haven't responded to us.

But one major question remained,

would there be anything for them to inherit?

We had no idea when we were going into the estate

whether it was worth any money.

We just took a bit of a punt really.

Now though, there were rumours that Rosina had been in showbiz and this

was confirmed by her neighbour Margaret.

She gave us a bit of information that she used to be some sort

of jazz singer.

If there was a film on, like a musical or something,

and they played the tunes she used to sit and sing,

she had a lovely voice.

It turned out that in the 1950s,

Rosina had been a star on the London Jazz scene.

Very, very sad to hear of Rosina's passing.

Trombonist John Howlett was one of Rosina's band mates.

The very first time I set eyes on her,

she was actually sitting at the cash desk

at the point of entry of the Ken Colyer Club.

She used to sing with the Ken Colyer Band.

Two or three numbers a night and these were the days

of the jazz all-nighters.

Singing with Ken Colyer's band put Rosina at the forefront

of British jazz.

Ken Colyer was the leader of the

New Orleans revival movement in the UK.

He had been to New Orleans in 1953, and when he came back,

he launched a movement that was all about authenticity,

discovering the black American jazz from the Deep South.

Rosina, it turns out, was right in the thick of it,

playing with the country's most renowned musicians.

One of the things that Ken Colyer did was to establish a place

to play in London - the 51 Club in Great Newport Street,

a basement, an ideal jazz club.

And Rosina was one of the characters who was a regular there,

but who then became a singer with the band on an occasional basis.

Rosina's remarkable voice was captured in this rare live recording.

# I spent all my money

# I didn't care... #

It was such a big voice, came out of such a little person.

It was quite a, basically, a deep voice.

This is what astounded people, I think.

It's really tough for any singer to make it this world,

with a jazz group that are very clear about what they're trying

to do in recreating authentic New Orleans sound,

and Rosina had something very special that sounded

just like the great blues singers of the '20s.

With such a rare talent,

Rosina soon found herself mixing with jazz's leading lights.

Another singer who started her career in that same club

was Cleo Laine, because on Saturday nights,

the John Dankworth Seven used to play there,

and Cleo, the epitome of cool,

the epitome of perfect pitch and everything else, sang there.

It strikes me that the bohemian atmosphere of the time,

of the jazz scene at the time, would have been fabulous for Rosina,

because she just would have slotted in perfectly.

The difference didn't matter, in fact, it was celebrated.

And it was all about how you could express yourself,

how good you sounded.

Never complained about her disability.

She just took it in her stride.

It only became evident when we had to get in and out

of vehicles and things like that or up onto a high stage

which had no steps up to it.

On stage at the Ken Colyer club,

Rosina's performances were a hit with the crowd.

The audience is crammed into a very small space in the front of me,

and the band would have been trying to project over that audience,

which is not very much lower than their own head height.

Imagine Rosina coming onto the stage

with the front line arrayed around her.

If she sings at her natural height,

she's going to be singing straight to the midriffs

of the crowd in front of her.

So she'd be up, she'd be on a chair or a packing case.

She would be singing out across the crowd.

The most incredible thing about the recordings that she made here,

is the fact that you hear her acoustically.

She'd be using the lungs, projecting the voice.

And what you hear is not what you might imagine the voice

of a three foot tall person would sound like.

You hear a big, developed voice.

RECORDING OF JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

But sadly, Rosina's rise to singing fame was suddenly curtailed.

Both the 51 closed, which meant there wasn't anywhere for the people

who were regulars there to continue meeting,

and the music that was being played there fell away.

With the onset of Beatlemania, jazz became yesterday's news,

and after a stint with a band called the Leather Town Jazzmen,

Rosina took a job answering the phones at the Whitehall Theatre.

John bumped into her there in the late 1980s.

She said, "John! Where have you been?"

I said, "Where have you been?"

And she said, "Well, I'd be working in the Whitehall Theatre.

"They've got a swivel chair for me, like an office chair.

"And I sit on it I whirl myself round and round and round,

"without getting giddy,

"until I'm level with the paying customers

"and then I dish out the tickets."

In fact, that was the very last time I actually saw Rosina.

We travelled on the bus together, but she got off before me.

We waved and we said, "Oh, keep in touch!"

And we said yes and, as so often happens...we didn't

and I regret it now.

-Can you print a clean Skudder tree for me, please?

-Yeah.

The question for the Heir Hunters was whether Rosina's jazz career

meant she'd left a sizeable inheritance.

I just want to check with you two things...

And finally, information came in

about the funds Rosina had left behind.

It was a surprise to us that she seemed to have

five different bank accounts, all with the same bank,

with varying amounts in them,

which I think amounted to a total of about £45,000.

It was great news for the team and meant their gamble had paid off.

When a case turns out to be successful,

it's always a nice feeling,

especially for me, when I took the gamble in the first place to try

and contact so many beneficiaries.

If it was all for a couple of hundred pounds or something,

then it would have been a bit of a disaster.

But when there's a lot of beneficiaries

and the estate's quite sizeable,

it makes life a lot easier.

For heir Ian, though, finding out about Rosina has revived memories

of his own family's musical talents.

Well, my father was Rosina's cousin.

Obviously, there was a link with the musical side of it.

At the time, my mother used to play the piano and in fact,

her father was a Doctor of Music and he used to teach music.

I have my father's banjo.

The original one he went round...

..the campaigns in North Africa and Italy

and I still have them up in the loft here, so...

Oh, here it is. Yeah.

This one has been several thousand miles and played to several thousand

people over the years.

It's incredible how old it is now.

Becoming heirs has brought Ian's family together.

It's opened up all sorts of doors within the family.

We've never spoke before and now we're speaking to all the cousins,

so it's really, really interesting.

But for everyone who knew Rosina,

the greatest legacy she could leave behind was her prodigious talent.

She was a great little soul, great little singer

and I'm sure she's very much missed by the jazz fraternity

of the '50s and '60s.