Boilard/Reminnij Heir Hunters

Heir hunters make their living tracing families of people who have died without leaving a will.

They hand over thousands of pounds to unsuspecting relatives,

money which would otherwise go to the government.

Could they be knocking at your door?

On today's show, the team tackle a family story which begins in the Indian Raj

and reveals the unusual life of the rich and famous.

If someone's got an occupation like "gentleman" on their marriage certificate

when they're 20 years old, then someone somewhere is financing them, the idle rich.

And a man who fled the Russians, fearing his secret life would endanger his family.

George's family would have been arrested

and treated as enemies of the state.

Plus, how you may be entitled to inherit some of the unclaimed estates held by the Treasury.

Could thousands of pounds be heading your way?

Every year in Britain, thousands of people die without leaving a will.

If no obvious family can be found, their money goes straight to the government,

who last year made over £18 million from unclaimed estates.

That's where the heir hunting companies come in.

Fraser & Fraser is just one of around 30 firms who make it their business

to trace rightful heirs to unclaimed estates.

Our job is incredibly exciting. We're tracing family trees, delving back into people's history.

The company is run by Neil, Charles and Andrew Fraser.

Fraser & Fraser have handled over £100 million worth of inheritance in the last 10 years alone.

It's just gone seven o'clock, on the most important day of the week for the heir hunters.

Every Thursday, the Treasury advertises new unclaimed estates.

Company partner, Charles Fraser is trying to decide which cases on the list the team should start working.

Nothing's looking particularly exciting.

A lot of cases this morning

where a lot of the deceased appear to be living in nursing homes,

so we've got to wait until the nursing home opens, really.

The team usually begin by establishing if the deceased

owned their own house, so they can estimate the value of a case.

None of you have got anything here.

They have a team of travelling researchers, who can knock on doors

and find out more about the deceased.

But today, even this is a problem.

So the question is do I send Bob Barrett

-all the way to Wales?

-Yeah, might as well, we haven't annoyed him for ages.

With the office spreading their resources over all these small cases...

That is a grotty job to start with.

They were there a couple of months ago. We went into a home from that address...

Neil takes the opportunity to have a look at a case he's received that's not on the Treasury's list...yet.

This is a case of a Norma Grace Boilard.

It's a case which has been given to us by a friend.

They passed us the information at the same time as the information

has been handed to the Treasury solicitor. It's great for us.

It's how we prefer working.

Because it means we get to spend a decent amount of time on this case, contact all the beneficiaries

nice and slowly and not really do it at a very rushed and sometimes aggressive sort of way.

We're going to be able to work this nice and slowly.

This is a luxury, as there will be no competition

from other firms until Norma Boilard' estate is advertised.

But today looks like the perfect opportunity to get it started.

Our initial look has indicated that there is possibility of missing family.

The initial inquiry has indicated it's in excess of £30,000.

So, it's ticked both boxes, which has enabled us to start having a look at it now.

Norma Grace Boilard passed away on 20th June 2009, aged 79.

She never married nor had children.

Norma lived alone in her house in Battersea.

She died a spinster, left no will, but was surrounded by a close circle of friends.

I always thought

what a very vibrant, glamorous, elegant lady she was.

She had that personality to go with it.

She was just so bubbly.

Really, you sort of laughed with her and just enjoyed being in her company.

According to Norma, she didn't have any relatives whatsoever.

And that's why we treated her

like a relative more than a friend, because we felt sorry for her.

In the office, Neil is trying to find out exactly what happened to Norma's family.

He needs to discover who her parents were and trace the family tree back generation by generation,

searching for living relatives who can inherit.

As far as the missing family goes, it looks as though the father of the deceased is born in India.

That's going to be a missing bit of family, because we're dealing with an Indian family

who doesn't look like they ever came to the United Kingdom.

So, we may have research all over the world on this.

We're going to get on and start working now.

Norma's birth records reveal she was born in Bournemouth in 1930.

The only child of Grace Rous and Harcourt Boilard.

Her father, Harcourt, was born in India.

But her mother Grace's birth was registered in Battersea.

The couple met in England after World War I,

when he was a dashing young soldier and Grace was an opera singer with the Old Vic Opera Company.

In 1926, Harcourt whisked her away to get married in India.

Norma was born four years later and both her parents signed the birth certificate.

But Harcourt returned to India shortly after.

For this reason, research director Alan believes the maternal side,

the Rous family, should be a lot easier to find.

The good information for me on the 1911 census, it tells me that

the deceased mother's had three children,

all of which are mentioned on the census, none of them have died.

The census has details of Norma's mother's entire family.

Grace was the daughter of John Rous and Jessie Walsh.

She had two brothers, John and Ernest.

All their descendants could be heirs to Norma Boilard's estate.

However, Ernest was born 11 years before John and Jessie's marriage.

One of the uncles appears to be of the half blood.

He's certainly born under the wrong surname.

At the moment, we're not going to research too much on him.

The other uncle, it looks like had one child, but that child died as a five-year-old.

So, it look like on the maternal side, we won't find any beneficiaries.

The only possible heirs on Norma's mother's side

would be Uncle Ernest's children, if he had any.

But they'd only inherit if there was no family on Norma's father's side.

So, Neil is forced to tackle the potentially tricky family in India.

We got Norma, the deceased. Her father is Harcourt.

Now, all we know about him is that he married the mother of our deceased out in India.

He certainly travelled to England

and he was here in round about 1929 sort of time.

We know that Grace, the mother, when she originally travelled here travelled by herself.

It's now Harcourt's records that Neil needs to find.

They are sending researcher Mike off to the British Library, where most of the colonial records are stored.

When the British were in India, when it was part of the... when it was a colony,

because it was such a large British population, they had their own churches.

In those churches people getting married, buried and christened.

It's those records that we're using.

However, with his distinctive name, Harcourt Vernon Boilard,

Neil's hoping he'll crop up somewhere in the company's own library.

What's that? The Who's Who, is it?

-It's got...

-Indian Who's Who.

Boilard... There you go, there's Harcourt.

Inspector in charge of excise in... Jalpaiguri.

Of the half dozen or so books we've got next door on India,

we've been able to find the father of the deceased referenced in that

and one indeed of the uncles of the deceased.

We've got a reference of him. So, out of half a billion people and 12 books,

we've found two of our family, which is, you know, an incredibly high strike rate, considering.

At last, a breakthrough...and against all odds.

Neil has discovered that Norma's father, Harcourt was born in 1889 in Jamalpur.

The son of Ernest Boilard and Georgianna Scott.

Their marriage certificate from 1876 lists Ernest's profession as a private gentleman.

Could this case be worth more than the £30,000 Neil first thought?

I assume if someone's got an occupation like "gentleman"

on their marriage certificate when they're 20 years old, that someone is financing them, the idle rich.

I tend to assume also that there's going to be money in the family.

They're not be employed, they're going to be the employers.

One of the few bits of information they have been able to find

is a will belonging to Norma's grandfather, Ernest Boilard who died in Calcutta in 1928.

Everyone else around has gone home.

Apart from the three of us working this case, which is quite typical.

But some names which have come up on a will back in 1928,

they now have started to make sense.

What we've done is we've identified a lady

called Gertrude Harriet Boilard in 1883, born in 1883.

She is an aunt of the deceased.

Found a marriage for her in 1904 in Bengal. From that, we've got three children.

Norma's aunt Gertrude married William Webster in 1904 in Bengal.

The couple had three sons - Glen, Frederick and Arthur.

While they were all born in India,

Arthur Webster is recorded to have died in Nottingham in 1993.

Finally, the first sign of the Boilard family in the UK.

It's a fantastic find.

What's more, Arthur was a doctor.

If he practised in England, Alan is hoping he'll appear in a medical directory in the library.

We've got a cousin of the deceased called Arthur Wright Scott Webster,

who on his death is described as a medical practitioner.

I've just checked the medical directory and sure enough, he does come up.

He's also at the same address that he died at

40 years later, 30 years later in Nottingham.

Despite Neil's fears that the Indian family would be hard to crack, after just one day, they are now

possibly on their way to finding a potential heir to Norma Boilard's estate of at least £30,000.

This case is really picking up pace.

But it's past 6 o'clock and far too late to get any further.

Still to come, Neil and his team hit the road and uncover more intriguing family secrets.

Glad you went there, because we wouldn't have got that out of the coroner otherwise. Good work.

When heir hunters investigate cases of people dying without

leaving a will, they come across fascinating stories, which otherwise would have been left untold.

George Reminnij was one such case.

He was a mysterious man without family and whose friends knew nothing about his past.

I've known George for almost 20 years

from the very first day he moved in next door.

We asked him many times where he was from, but he would never mention.

But his accent, from his accent, we thought he was from Russia.

George Reminnij had a secret.

It was only after his death that his friends came to realise

that this ordinary man had anything but an ordinary past.

George passed away in January 2008.

He had lived in Cardiff since the 1950s and worked in a delicatessen.

He never married or had children.

George had been in the same house for 20 years and lived a frugal lifestyle.

Because of this, he left a valuable property and cash savings.

His total estate was worth around £330,000.

Because George had left no will, his name appeared on the Treasury's list

of unclaimed estates in November 2008.

The case was picked up by Peter Birchwood of Celtic Research.

He runs the company from home in Wales, together with his stepson Hector, who is based in London.

They will research cases anywhere in the world, but their core team consists

of regional case managers based in Essex, Liverpool and Cardiff.

To research a name such as Reminnij, Peter suspected he might need help from one of his foreign agents.

But first of all, he contacted his company's man in Cardiff.

As soon as I got the information about the case

and that it was down around Cardiff, I asked Phil to go over there, do his best to find out anything

at all about the deceased from the neighbours and the friends

and also to just pick up a death certificate.

So we might have an indication when and where the deceased was born.

Phil works for Celtic Research on a case by case basis

and has set up an office in his shed in his back garden.

He was only too happy to take on the investigation into George Reminnij's estate.

Initially with George we didn't know much.

From the death certificate we knew he'd been a storekeeper, born in the Ukraine and he had died in Cardiff.

Next, Phil made contact with neighbours and colleagues of the deceased,

looking for further information about George's background.

One of the people he found was Asha Makwana,

who had lived next door to George for over 20 years.

He was like a father figure to us and a grandfather figure for my children.

He had his own little world, him and his plants and his house and sometimes he used to grow

coriander for me in his allotment and bring it over and rosemary and stuff like that.

Growing his own vegetables in a meticulously-kept allotment

and getting around on his bicycle, George was a self-sufficient man.

I used to say, "George, when are you going retire?"

He said, "Oh, I'm retired, but I still like to work." He always liked to work.

But George's past was a mystery...

We always asked him about his family, but he never wanted to speak about his family.

He'd change the subject straight away and just say, "I came here in the war and that's it."

You know, nothing else from George.

But that's George all right, because he will only say what he wants to say.

He wouldn't make anybody else push him with anything.

Delving further, Phil made contact with more of George's neighbours,

friends and colleagues and started to piece together his history.

There's no next of kin or any close relatives living anywhere in the country.

He had served in the war.

He'd worked as a labourer, but he kept it very private.

Phil now discovered far from being Russian, George was born in the Ukraine.

And as he delved into his past, he realised that George's early life

was dominated by the turmoil of Stalin's Soviet Union.

George was born in 1924, the same year that Stalin took command

of the Soviet Union, which most of Ukraine was part of at that time.

In the 1920s, Ukraine strived and had the desire

to have its own independent state.

The Soviet authorities obviously

appreciated that without Ukraine, the Soviet Union couldn't exist,

because Ukraine, at that time, was regarded as being the bread basket of Europe.

The Ukraine was a key asset the Soviet Union could not afford to lose

and Stalin was determined to crush the independence movement.

Stalin employed...thugs, for want of a better word,

who would go round villages

and ensure that everybody had delivered up all forms of grain

and then shortly afterwards, all food stuffs were being collected

and deposited in these grain stores and exported or left there to rot.

Stalin was denying Ukrainian farmers access to any of their own produce

and was systematically starving the population.

It was an act of barbarism, which is known in the Ukraine as the Holodomor

There were what we regard as hot spots

of the Holodomor.

The area where George came from,

that was extremely badly affected by the Holodomor.

The Holodomor reached its peak in 1933, when young George would have been eight years old.

In this year, 25,000 people died every day.

A large part of the population in central and eastern Ukraine was simply annihilated.

As many as 7 to 10 million people were simply starved to death.

And that all happened over a period of approximately 12 to 18 months.

The horrors of the starvation would have been seen by children like George on a daily basis.

Maria Volkova, who was just six at the time, lived in the same area as George's family.

-TRANSLATION:

-One time I ask my mother for something to eat and she told me she didn't have anything.

She said, "You have to go outside and eat the leaves."

And I did. We couldn't eat them.

They were so bitter.

The famine claimed young victims first.

Amongst the school children in George's home town, conditions were desperate.

-TRANSLATION:

-In my village there were 28 children

that attended school in the spring of 1933.

Later that year, there were only 12 of my class mate left.

The rest had all died from famine.

Memories of such a devastating time would have stayed with George for the rest of his life.

As the investigation continued, Phil began to unravel George Reminnij's mysterious past

and why he kept it secret from everyone who knew him.

It's highly likely that that information

would have been picked up on by the Soviet Embassy in London,

quickly passed on to Moscow. And George's family in Ukraine

would no doubt have been arrested and treated as enemies of the state.

For every case that's cracked,

there are still thousands on the Treasury's list that remain a mystery.

The deceaseds' assets are kept for up to 30 years

in the hope that eventually someone will remember and come forward to claim their inheritance.

And with the estates valued as anything from 5,000 to millions

of pounds, the rightful heirs are out there, somewhere.

Today, we've got two cases that the heir hunters have been unable to solve so far.

Could you know the answer?

Maybe you're in line for a payout.

Anthony Regan died in London on May 16th, 2005. Did you know Anthony?

Or perhaps you might be part of his estranged family.

Could your information lead to the heirs?

Doreen Mary Perry, nee Clark, a widow from Maldon in Essex, died on January 30th, 2008.

So far, all efforts to trace her relatives have drawn a blank.

Are you a family friend or perhaps believe you could be related?

Could either of these two estates be meant for you, rather than the government?

On the case of George Reminnij, Phil from Celtic Research had been making

inquiries with the deceased's friends and neighbours in Cardiff.

After just a few days' investigation, he had established that

heirs to George's estate were most likely to be found in the Ukraine.

To track them down, Phil would need help.

At this point I passed the information on to the office

and they get, as quickly as possible,

get the information over to our agents in Germany, who cover Europe.

Thanks to Phil's excellent detective work in Wales, an agent could be sent directly to George's home town.

Without the indication of the town he came from,

with a name like Reminnij, which is almost as common as Jones in Wales, it would have been almost impossible.

In the Ukraine, the agent made a surprising discovery.

It looked as if George might have a sister...

and if that could be confirmed, she would be the sole heir to £330,000.

In Ukrainian terms, this would make her the equivalent of a millionaire and could put her in danger.

The team at Celtic Research had to protect her identity

and tread very carefully as they proceeded with the case.

The agent who had been sent to the Ukraine soon reported back to Peter in Wales.

The research on the Reminnij case did...

did enable us via our German associate to find the sister of the deceased.

The agent established that George Reminnij was born in 1924.

His parents, who originally came from Yugoslavia, had two children - George and his younger sister.

This confirmed without a doubt that she was the closest living relative and therefore, the only heir.

This amount of money will completely change her life forever.

Before the money is paid out, George's sister has asked Celtic Research

to deal with the estate in the UK on her behalf.

Phil and his wife are given access to George's house in Cardiff.

They have taken George's neighbour and friend, Asha, with them.

-Horrible weather, isn't it?

-It is horrible.

They are looking through George's personal effects,

searching for items worth sending to the Ukraine.

-OK, is that George?

-It could be George when he was younger.

-OK.

-I knew him when he was a little bit older. You know, he was 61, 62.

-Right, so there we go.

-There we are.

That's more like George. That's George, yeah, definitely.

So far, they had only pieced together one part of George's mysterious past.

They knew he had lived through an atrocious famine in the Ukraine during his childhood.

But he had a sister who survived it too.

What could have pulled them apart and led George to start a new life in Wales?

OK, here he's got a cutting of Stalin...

-In his coffin.

-Lying in state.

The last view of Stalin as he lies in state.

The most revealing piece in the puzzle of George's life story was tucked in amongst his papers.

-That's when he was young, is it?

-Yes.

-Oh, right.

It's an army identity card, which shockingly reveals that he served in the German army.

Is this the secret George was hiding for so long?

How did his childhood under Stalin lead to his fighting for the Nazis?

From the documents that we've seen

that were collected from George's house,

it's clear that George did fight in German uniform.

There are many, many ways in which he may have found himself

in that position.

There was no love lost between Ukrainians and Stalin in the years running up to World War II.

After the invasion of the Soviet Union,

George was one of thousands of Ukrainians to cooperate with the Nazis.

The Germans obviously understood that Ukrainians were extremely anti-Soviet

and they utilised that burning desire for Ukrainians to push back

the, its old adversary if you like, or its old enemy,

being Stalin and the Communist Soviet Union.

George was haunted by the memory of his life under Stalin's regime.

Articles reporting Stalin's death were found amongst his possessions.

There's probably no doubt in his mind that

Stalin was responsible for the death of his own family members.

He probably waited for Stalin to die.

Fighting Stalin, George was on the losing side of the war.

In the aftermath, soldiers who had fought for the Germans were persecuted in Soviet Ukraine.

The mere fact that he fought

against the Red Army,

he would have most certainly faced execution.

George arrived in Wales in 1948 and lodged with the owners of a deli in the city centre, who gave him a job.

He worked hard, never relying on anyone for help and carefully saving his money.

For George Reminnij, the former Nazi officer, Wales was a safe haven.

In Cardiff he completely reinvented himself.

George made good friends, but most of them didn't even know which country he was from.

Because when it came to his past, he had no choice but to keep it to himself.

If he made it public that he fought in German uniform

during the Second World War

a local newspaper may have got hold of the story.

It's highly likely that that information

would have been picked up on by the Soviet Embassy in London,

quickly passed on to Moscow and George's family in Ukraine

would, no doubt, have been arrested and treated as enemies of the state.

Making the choice to escape the Ukraine for the safety of Wales cannot have been easy.

To save his life, George had to cut all ties with friends and family.

And starting afresh in a country that had just gone through the Blitz, he could certainly not risk

anyone finding out that he had fought for the enemy.

For Peter Birchwood, this was a fascinating case.

But a report back from the Ukraine did put another sad twist on George's story.

The heir to George Reminnij, his sister,

had thought him dead at the time of the close of the war.

And was shocked to find that he'd survived and had somehow got himself

to Wales, where she had never had any idea that he could ever go to.

George's hard-earned savings will now go to his sister,

a life-changing sum that might go some way to compensate for the fact she thought he was dead.

Thanks to Phil's research, George's life story is finally out in the open.

And more importantly, George's sister can find out all about his life in Cardiff.

I just wish I actually had met him and knew him, rather than

me delving into his family afterwards.

But at least, we're going to be able to pass this sort of thing on to his sister.

I'm happy we found such a close relative still alive.

It's day two on the investigation into Norma Boilard's estate.

In a week when the cases advertised by the Treasury's solicitor offered slim pickings.

None of you have got anything here.

The case was referred to Fraser & Fraser by a friend of the deceased.

And from his research so far, it looks to Neil like it could be worth at least £300,000.

Possibly a lot more as she comes from a wealthy family.

I assume that if someone has got an occupation like "gentlemen"

on their marriage certificate when they're 20 years old, that someone, somewhere is financing them.

The idle rich. Also there's going to be a bit of money in the family.

So, they're not going to be the employed, they're employers.

With the other cases started on Thursday coming to an end, Neil can

now begin to use some more of the team in tracking down Norma's heirs.

I've sent out my first traveller and that's Paul.

Paul has gone to pick up a death certificate

over here for someone we found late yesterday, an Arthur Webster.

Arthur was born in India in and around 1910.

We think he passed away in Nottingham in '93.

From his base in Birmingham, Paul Matthews is on his way

to the Nottingham register office to get the death certificate of Norma's cousin Arthur, a doctor.

OK. That's great. Thank you very much indeed.

What Neil is hoping for is that the informant on Arthur Webster's death certificate will be a family member

and potentially the first heir to Norma Boilard's estate.

Hello? Right, I've got that death.

It's not all what you wanted, I don't think.

What he wanted was a good informant on there.

We haven't got one because there's a coroner's inquest, so there's no informant.

The reason we travelled to Nottingham

to pick it up is because we were hoping for a decent informant.

The informant is what we would describe as nondescript.

It means his relationship to the deceased is not son, daughter, wife, husband, something like that...

..instead of it being the coroner.

The reason the coroner informed on it is because Arthur has unfortunately committed suicide.

Because someone commits suicide, that gets passed to the coroner.

He has to do an inquest. It doesn't necessarily mean there's a post-mortem or anything,

but there's an inquest and the coroner has files for that.

To get access to a coroner's report, the team might have to wait for up to a week.

But Paul has already made one journey to Nottingham and wants to make the most of it.

He gets on the phone to the coroner.

It doesn't take long before he gets his hands on the report.

It seems the search for Norma Boilard's heirs is back on track.

We're not overly concerned with the actual circumstances of how he passed away.

-Yes.

-We're more concerned if there's any mention of any relatives who may have been present or involved.

Right, well what we find here is the people that gave evidence as witnesses at the inquest.

-Could I spend just five minutes going through that?

-Of course you can.

Paul's instincts as an ex-policeman are kicking in.

The inquest report is the team's only lead in Nottingham

and he wants to leave no stone unturned in his search for relatives of Arthur Webster.

After just 10 minutes, in amongst the paperwork is exactly what Paul is looking for.

Details of one of Arthur Webster's children.

The coroners have rushed this inquest report through

and whereas they said that there was nothing on there,

I'm now going through the file and we've found a daughter.

Oh, you've got a daughter. Great.

Thanks to Paul's perseverance at the coroner's, the team have got details

of their first heir to Norma Boilard's estate.

It's a daughter of Arthur Webster.

She is in the UK at the time of her father's death in 1993

and there's every chance she is still at the same address.

It's the first beneficiary on the Boilard case.

I'm bloody glad you went there, because we wouldn't have got that out of the coroner otherwise.

-Good work.

-Cheers, mate. Bye. Bye.

Well, the boss is very happy because we've had a very, very good result.

When everything else failed, just trying the long shot, coming along here.

Going through the file, the coroner's department is absolutely superb.

They're only letting us obviously see what's not sensitive,

but by reading this file, it's turned up trumps for us, so it's spot on. Very, very good.

Paul heads back to Birmingham knowing that the information he has given to Neil

led to a major break on the Boilard case and led them to an heir.

Neil has dispatched Bob Barrett, the company's man in Surrey, to pay the heir a visit.

Alan and Neil have also been working hard on the family tree.

And made further advances on the previously impenetrable Boilard side of the family.

Alan has uncovered another potential heir - Myra, a cousin once removed from the deceased.

-There's Myra.

-Oh, she got married?

They obviously like Indian weddings.

She's got about three middle names. Myra NDM.

Myra fits into a different stem of the Boilard family.

That of Norma's aunt, Nesta.

Nesta had three children.

Her eldest daughter Phyllis was born in India,

but travelled back to England after independence.

And with her, was little Myra, aged 11.

Neil has been able to trace Myra to Devon and he's got her on the phone.

Hello, is that Mrs Lang? Hello, I'm terribly sorry to disturb you, I'm trying to speak to a Myra Lang,

who would've been born around 1935, give or take a few years.

The daughter of a Phyllis, the maiden name would have been Rogers.

So I thought, "That's very odd."

I said, "How do you know my name?"

He said, "Well you were born in India...

"and you were 11 when you arrived in England with your mother."

I thought, "How does he know all this?

"What's he on about?"

Let me explain what this is about - We are genealogists and probate researchers and we specialise

in tracing family trees and locating missing beneficiaries when people die

without leaving valid wills or known next of kin.

After the initial shock and a more thorough explanation of the situation,

Myra's signed an agreement with Frasers.

And she was very excited to find out more about the case.

It's not about the money, you know.

You know, not the inheritance so much, it's getting to know people that I didn't know were there.

I'd love to see if I could get in touch with family, you know.

Because my children want to know as well.

They're excited because on my mother's side I can't tell them anything.

Their father's side, they know quite a lot.

Surprisingly, the only person Myra did know well in the family was Harcourt,

the deceased Norma Boilard's father.

Harcourt was my grand uncle. My mother's uncle.

But he was only about 12 years older than her so, that's why they were such friends.

Harcourt lived in Darjeeling, which was near to Myra's school.

She would often go with her mother to stay with him for the weekend.

He had a black spaniel, Nelly.

And she had puppies once and of course I'd go and try and pick up these puppies

and he used to say, "Myra, don't because Nelly will snarl at you!"

And she did, of course!

But, yes, he was, he was a lovely chap, really.

Myra had a closer relationship with Harcourt than his own daughter Norma ever did.

I'm sure that Norma would have liked to have had her mother and father around her all the time.

But because her father had to stay in India and her mother couldn't stay out with him,

she was parted from her father, who I believe she had a lot of affection for and he did for her.

We know that she had lots of Christmas cards sent over the years and lots of letters

that were very endearing and very affectionate in the way they were written.

She must have, really, been broken-hearted that they couldn't all be together.

Myra saw Harcourt regularly in the early 1940s

at a time when his daughter, Norma, was about 10 and living in England.

Well, I didn't know the wife or the daughter.

Because I don't think they were ever with him in India.

They might have been, but not as far as I know.

I think he spent a little while in England to start with when they first got married.

And...then he went to India and I think he stayed there

most of the time and certainly right through the war, I think.

Neil has yet to discover the true value of this case.

But the story of the Boilard family has had a poignant end.

Myra's been able to fill us in with great information really.

About Harcourt, the deceased's father.

Myra in later life would have been a very, very good ally to Norma.

She would have been able to fill her in with a lot more details than could ever be written down on a postcard.

So, it's just such a shame they never met.

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