Paine/Birchall Heir Hunters

Heir hunters earn their living tracing the relatives

of people who have died without leaving a will.

The estate was in the region of £100,000.

They hand over money to family members who had no idea they were in line to inherit.

Their work involves painstaking investigation...

So these kids could all be right, all be wrong or half and half.

..and it can give people a whole new perspective on the past.

Oh, really? That is amazing, isn't it?

But, most of all, the work is giving people news of an unexpected windfall.

Could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

Coming up...

The moving story of a pioneering aviator

and the daughter who never really knew him...

He's always been a mystery to me.

The more I'm finding out about him, the more I really rather like him.

The Cambridge student who became a socialist revolutionary playwright...

He was certainly one of the most extraordinary people I've ever met.

Plus how you could be entitled to inherit unclaimed estates

held by the Treasury Solicitor.

Could a fortune be heading your way?

London, and at the offices of the country's largest heir hunting firm,

Fraser & Fraser, the team has received some surprising

new information about a case they thought was solved.

-That's good. At least we know it's...

-His date of birth.

-Yeah.

In 2010, the firm delved into the case of Diana Paine,

who was born Diana Vaughan-Fowler.

They built a detailed family tree

and believed they had found every living heir to her £22,000 estate.

But just as they were beginning to think the case was

done and dusted, they've been hit by a bolt from the blue -

a phone call from a woman called Joan Aldridge who believes

she may be Diana's cousin.

My grandparents had three sons.

One of those first two brothers was the father of Diana Paine,

and then my father was born about 12 years later than that.

It's come as a shock for boss Neil.

The administration of estates takes anywhere from nine,

ten months, up to about 18 months on English cases.

Now, some of the time we're pretty lucky and late on in the day,

once the job's been done, virtually, a beneficiary comes forward.

Fortunately for the heir hunters,

the case of Diana Paine is not fully closed,

so there's still time to investigate whether Joan is a relative that they've missed,

and whether she is entitled to a share of Diana's estate.

Diana Paine was 91 years old

when she died in Tunbridge Wells in April 2010.

She spent the last 18 years of her life with her companion Ernest Armstrong,

who she'd met through a lonely hearts advert in a magazine.

Both of us were looking for one thing and one thing only,

and that was companionship.

You can't wander round a house all day long looking at pictures -

you have to do something.

So we were very lucky. We clicked right away.

Diana had been married twice but didn't have any children,

a source of great regret to her.

Oh, she certainly would have loved to have had a family of her own, which...

Even cocker spaniels don't make up for the lack of children.

Despite her sadness at never becoming a mother,

Diana built a good life for herself,

running a chain of women's clothing boutiques.

And although she left behind £22,000,

Diana left no will to say who should get it.

I don't know why she didn't make a will.

Whether simply because she didn't have any relations as such

to whom the money would have gone.

When someone dies without leaving a will, their estate is

usually advertised on the Treasury's Bona Vacantia list.

If it's not claimed, the money can end up in the government's coffers.

Keen to prevent this happening,

Ernest contacted a firm of solicitors who, in turn,

called in the heir hunters, and case manager Dave Slee.

I took a call from a solicitor who was anxious to try

and trace heirs as quickly as possible.

It was only a fairly modest estate, but the estate was being eaten into

by costs all the time because rent was still accruing on the estate.

Working for a percentage of the estate,

Dave's team got straight on the case.

Using birth, marriage and death records,

they quickly established that neither of Diana's siblings had children.

Next they turned to her father's family, the Vaughan-Fowlers.

Because Diana's mother's maiden name was Potter,

that's a much more difficult surname to research, of course.

I decided, because time was of the essence,

we would research the Vaughan-Fowlers first.

Diana's father Alfred had two brothers, Ivor and Hugh.

And although both had long since passed away,

their descendants would be heirs to Diana's estate.

In total, Dave found eight heirs from Ivor's branch of the family,

but with Hugh, it was an altogether different story.

Hugh Vaughan-Fowler was born in 1899 in Warwick in England.

Knowing his date of birth, we started a search from 1915 onwards

to see if he married in England and Wales and that proved negative.

We then established that he actually died in 1961 at the Aero Club

in Piccadilly in central London.

What was kind of strange about that death certificate is the informant

on the death certificate didn't appear to be a family member.

So for all intents and purposes, initially it would appear,

we thought, that he died as a bachelor.

With apparently no living heirs from Hugh,

the team thought they'd found every heir on the Vaughan-Fowler side

of the family, but the call from Joan Aldridge suggests otherwise.

I contacted Heir Hunters to tell them that my father,

Hugh Raymond Vaughan-Fowler, had in fact been married

and I was his daughter.

But if Joan is Hugh's daughter, why hadn't the heir hunters found

her when they were doing their initial research?

As Hugh's life story begins to emerge, the answer becomes clear.

Hugh Vaughan-Fowler spent the majority of his life overseas

due to his career in aviation.

Hugh Vaughan-Fowler was a skilled fighter pilot and highly-respected

RAF flying instructor who trained pilots during the First World War.

In 1921 at the age of 22,

he got a golden opportunity to work abroad and travelled out to Japan.

It was Hugh's first trip to Asia, but by no means his last.

In fact, he was to spend much of his life there,

and this may explain why the heir hunters didn't find Joan's birth.

People now are being born in this country, travelling more,

emigrating, marrying overseas, having their children overseas, returning,

going away again. So that does complicate the research.

From speaking to Joan, Dave has now learned that whilst

working in Shanghai, Hugh married a British woman, Hazel Fowler,

in January 1932.

Their daughter Joan was born in October of the same year.

Because both the marriage and the birth had taken place in China,

they hadn't shown up on UK records.

And because they didn't know Hugh had lived abroad,

the heir hunters had no reason to check overseas records.

Their problem was that my father had been born and died in England

and therefore they weren't looking for a marriage in Shanghai.

But armed with this new information,

the heir hunters have been able to check consular records abroad

and confirm that Joan is indeed an heir to Diana Paine's estate.

Our research proved that Joan

was the last surviving paternal first cousin.

It was pleasing to eventually locate Joan

and be able to prove her claim to a share in this estate.

The heir hunt is now well and truly over - hopefully, this time, for good.

But for Joan, the journey is only just beginning.

Finding out she's an heir has inspired her to forge

a stronger connection with her father,

from whom she was separated as a child.

My mother brought me back to England when I was about two years old,

and went to live with my mother's parents.

And my father didn't come with us.

Sadly, Joan's parents split up and, rather than return

to the UK, Hugh moved to India where he took a job with the air force.

My parents never got back together again,

and subsequently they divorced.

Hugh lived abroad for the rest of his life,

and sadly Joan never had the chance to develop a relationship with him.

I wish that I had known my father when I was growing up,

because I feel I've missed out on a great deal,

particularly as he seems to be a very interesting person.

It does mean a lot to me to find out about my father,

because he's always been a mystery to me.

And, as Joan is about to find out, her father was a remarkable man.

Your father could almost be called one of the prophets of Pearl Harbor.

Oh, really? That is amazing, isn't it?

In their search for relatives,

heir hunters often uncover an interesting life story.

And that's exactly what happened in the case of Bruce Birchall,

whose quiet death in 2011 gave no hint of his very eventful life.

As Bruce didn't leave a will, his estate was advertised as unclaimed

and was picked up by heir hunters, Fraser & Fraser.

Simon Mills was the case manager.

Upon starting the case we thought it would be very low value.

The only reason we ran with it at all

is because the list was very small on that day.

Bruce Birchall died on the 3rd February 2011, in Hammersmith Hospital in west London.

He was 65 years old.

To friends like Bill Hartston, he was a colourful character.

He was just certainly one of the most extraordinary people I've ever met.

He was quite unlike anything else.

I think I heard his name first about 50 years ago when we were both about

14 or 15, and we were both promising young chess players at the time.

I heard that one contestant had turned up for one round wearing only

a swimming costume. As I got to know him,

I just realised that he was a genuine eccentric, I think.

I'm sure that he only wore a swimming costume not to draw attention

to himself, but because the room was too hot

and that was the most comfortable gear he could think of.

For Bruce, chess became a passion he would pursue for the rest of his life.

He loved the challenge of the game,

the problem-solving challenge of the game, but he did involve himself very

much in chess coaching and wanted to spread this love of the game.

A highly intelligent and creative man,

Bruce was also involved in alternative theatre.

I think he was motivated by a combination of this

endless flow of ideas and wanting to use them in some way,

and this enormous desire to be himself.

Experimental theatre is perfect for someone like that.

Bruce's last known address was a housing association

flat in west London.

The Treasury's Bona Vacantia list doesn't show the value of the estate,

but because Bruce didn't own a property, it looked unlikely to be a fortune.

Heir hunters work for a percentage of the estate,

so taking on this job was a big gamble.

We are normally very busy, so if we have a case with no obvious

value in it we'll stop and concentrate on other things.

It was quite a slow morning so we decided to pursue it.

By studying marriage and birth records, Simon first

established that Bruce was a bachelor who didn't have any children.

The next step was to find out whether he had any brothers or sisters.

We went back and looked at the electoral register for the address,

a sort of indication that the deceased might have been born in 1946.

So then we went and did a birth search.

We found a record in Nottingham, I believe it was,

that had his father down as a Birchall, obviously,

his surname, and his mother's maiden name was Vasservogel.

Bruce's father Sydney

and his mother Trude had married in Nottingham in 1943.

A search of birth records revealed that Bruce had been their only child,

so the heir hunters now had to look for uncles, aunts and cousins.

And because Trude had such an unusual name,

Simon was optimistic about his chances of finding them.

When you come across a name like Vasservogel,

the mother's maiden name, it's...

It's a blessing, really, because when you look for brothers

and sisters and the marriage, a rare name really helps you be sure

that any records that you uncover are going to be correct.

In fact, the heir hunters couldn't find records of any other Vasservogels in the UK.

Determined not to give up, they extended their search abroad.

When we uncovered the name Vasservogel we thought that it's

highly likely there's a German link, at least German-speaking link.

We could find no record of her birth as Vasservogel over here,

so once we'd found the death record it said that Trude was born in Vienna.

Armed with this new information, the heir hunters were able to find

out more about Bruce's mother's side of the family.

The grandfather on the maternal side was called Otto.

Otto Vasservogel married an Elsa Himmler.

They had two children, Trude, who was the mother of the deceased,

and her brother Kurt.

Kurt was Trude's younger brother.

If he had any living descendants,

they would be heirs to Bruce's estate.

It was a significant breakthrough for the heir hunters,

but tracking down Kurt's family was to prove far from simple.

He was in the American army,

which indicated that they'd all emigrated to America.

The records are a lot more sparse, there's not much for us to check,

certainly from here in the UK,

and it becomes very frustrating and can really slow the research down.

Simon and his team trawled the internet looking for any

snippet of information on Bruce's Uncle Kurt.

Finally, they came up trumps.

We'd uncovered a newspaper article which gave us

a little bit of information about him.

It mentioned that he adopted two children in Germany in the '50s,

and then he retired back to America, in Florida.

This was the breakthrough they'd been hoping for.

As Bruce's first cousins,

Kurt's adopted children would be heirs to his estate.

Having made some progress on the maternal side of the family,

the team now turned their attention to his father Sydney's family.

In 1911 census provided a vital clue.

It showed that the father of the deceased was living with

his parents, Thomas and Elizabeth, and also his brothers, Harold and Thomas.

Sydney was the youngest of the three brothers.

If either Harold or Thomas had any living descendants,

they would be heirs to Bruce's estate.

We were lucky that one of the uncles of the deceased was

a Thomas Hubert Birchall, which are a nice combination of names,

so we got on and tried to work him up.

A search of marriage and birth records revealed that Thomas married

a woman called Florence Starkey in 1928, and they'd had one child.

Bruce's first cousin, Hillary. The team had found its first heir.

Bruce was my baby cousin, and I knew him very well when he was growing up.

And when he went to university, I knew him up till then.

But after that, I didn't really have anything directly to do with him,

although his parents did keep me

very well informed as to what he was doing.

According to Hillary, Bruce was the black sheep of the family who

turned his back on his middle class roots to embrace the radical

counterculture of his youth.

In the '60s and '70s we were having a very conventional, professional life.

Bruce was not.

He decided to take an alternative route

and he became an extreme socialist.

Bruce wanted to spread the word about his socialist beliefs

in as many ways as possible.

In 1969 he made headlines when he became a prominent

member of the London Street Commune, a militant group of squatters

which famously took over an empty mansion in central London.

Playwright David Edgar knew Bruce at the time.

The big thing that I know Bruce was involved in was

the squatting of 144 Piccadilly.

This five-storey disused house on the edge of Hyde Park was

taken over for three weeks by around 100 young people

in an occupation that was to become known as Hippydilly.

It was a symbol of the squatting movement, whose members believed

it was immoral for properties to lie empty while people were living on

the streets, and who also wanted to build a new communal way of living.

While it's very easy now to look on that and look on it as being mad

and indeed, possibly bad and dangerous to know,

actually it was very important and challenging.

The people in the late '60s and early '70s who said, "We've got to find

"a new way of living," were, to a certain extent, an anticipation

of the movements for gay rights, for women's liberation,

for all kinds of other things.

The discovery of Bruce's unconventional lifestyle

reaffirmed the heir hunters' belief that his estate was,

in all probability, worth very little.

Nevertheless, the heir hunters helped the family submit their claim

to the Treasury solicitor,

hoping they may be able to recoup some of their costs.

It was quite a surprise to everybody

when the letter came in and said the estate was in the region of £100,000.

For somebody that doesn't own their own property,

that's a lot of money to have in the bank.

He's obviously saved a lot of money.

And as Bruce's remarkable life story continues to unfold,

there are plenty more surprises in store.

Despite the efforts of the heir hunters,

there are still thousands of unclaimed estates in the UK.

In Scotland, these are dealt with by the Queen's and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer,

or QLTR, and in England and Wales estates are handled by the Treasury's Bona Vacantia Division.

The Bona Vacantia unclaimed list is a list of estates

going back from 1997, which haven't actually been solved.

We've had ministered those estates

but they are still available to claim.

Today, we are focusing on two cases from the QLTR that remain unsolved.

Could you be the beneficiary the heir hunters have been looking for?

Andrew Black died in hospital in Dunfermline on 14th June 2005.

He was 62 years old.

Andrew lived at Thornton at Kirkcaldy, Fife

and his estate is worth just under £3,500. Did you know Andrew?

Are you one of his missing relatives?

Next is the £4,000 estate of Helen Haldane Boyd from Glasgow.

Helen died in the Southern General Hospital on the 1st December 2005,

aged 67. Were you a friend of Helen?

Do you have any information that could help

in the search for her relatives?

Both Andrew and Helen's estates remain unclaimed and

if no-one comes forward, their money will go to the Scottish Government.

Here are those names once again.

If you are one of their long-lost relatives,

you could have a windfall coming your way.

In London, the heir hunters were looking into the case

of Bruce Birchall who had died in 2011 without leaving a will.

His estate was worth a whopping £100,000,

which came as a shock to case manager Simon Mills.

When we started looking, we honestly thought it would be very, very low value.

A housing association property, lived on his own,

no sign that he ever had any money.

It goes to show that when you discount something initially,

there could still be a lot of value in an estate.

Bruce Birchall came from an affluent middle-class family

and won a place at Peterhouse College, Cambridge,

where he made a name for himself in avant-garde student theatre.

Bill Hartston was at Cambridge at the same time as Bruce.

I went to a production of one of his plays.

I think it was certainly the most impressive thing I saw on stage in Cambridge.

It was just him, just the way he thought the thing should be done.

It was quite extraordinary.

Bruce staged a production of a notorious 1964 play called

Marat/Sade, set in a mental asylum during the French Revolution.

It was put on by Bruce in the bathhouse of Peterhouse

in Cambridge with a cast of very dangerous-looking lunatics.

I am sure that the authorities at Peterhouse would not have

lent their bathhouse to such a production

if they had known quite how outrageous it was going to be.

This controversial production was an early sign

of the far from conventional character Bruce was to become.

Shortly after he left Cambridge, I met him purely by chance.

He said then that he was involved in experimental theatre.

Of course, I wasn't surprised and always thought the theatre was the right place for him

but I've always had this ambivalent attitude towards him,

that on the one hand, I have immense admiration for what he was doing,

and on the other hand, I didn't want to get too close.

This was counter-culture and I was very staid

and a good, honest member of culture as it was.

The search for beneficiaries to Bruce's £100,000 estate

was being run by case manager Simon Mills.

Early signs were not good because Bruce was an only child

who had never married or had children of his own.

But when Simon and his team looked at Bruce's parents,

they found Bruce's mother, Trude, had a brother, Kurt,

who had moved abroad and adopted two children.

These were Bruce's first cousins and would-be heirs to his estate.

The team was having better luck with the paternal side of Bruce's family.

His father, Sydney, had two brothers, Thomas and Harold.

Each of them married and had one daughter.

These two women are Bruce's first cousins and heirs to his estate.

One of them, Hillary,

has mixed feelings about her benefactor's alternative lifestyle.

He certainly felt alienated from society

and wanted to change society, I feel,

but the way he went about doing it, actually didn't get him anywhere

because people just thought he was being the black sheep of the family.

So far as we knew, he never got what we would call a conventional job,

so we felt that he was lazy.

But unbeknown to his family,

Bruce had led a very full and exciting life.

Playwright David Edgar got to know Bruce through the experimental

theatre movement of the late '60s and early '70s.

Bruce was a revolutionary on the anarchic wing of the revolution.

And he believed that theatre should be used to bring that about

and what you should do is talk to workers and struggle

and you should make plays that reflected what they said to you

and would encourage other workers to join them.

Bruce wrote dozens of short,

highly politicised plays which were performed,

not in traditional theatres, but in clubs, community centres,

workplaces and even on the streets.

They were very small-scale agitprop pieces in which contemporary,

very contemporary economic and social issues would be presented,

often in a cartoon way, so, you know, you would do the miners' strike

as an episode of the Generation Game and that was what Bruce believed in.

The alternative theatre movement blossomed against a backdrop

of increasing political and social unrest.

The Vietnam war was raging.

Nixon was President of the United States.

There were riots across American cities.

In this country there were a student sit-ins in the late '60s.

And then in the early '70s,

there was an extraordinary upsurge of industrial militancy.

Everybody was on strike and the lights were constantly going out.

Trains, docks, postman,

many, many sectors were in really revolt against the Government.

Although the political situation began to improve in the late 1970s

and early '80s, Bruce stayed loyal to the cause.

In 1982, he set-up the Liverpool Lunchtime Theatre Group

with playwright Paul Goetzee.

Liverpool is a very radical, anarchic city, politically.

Bruce was attracted by that

and he thought he could make something of it. He went where radical politics was.

And as his new colleagues found out,

Bruce had lost none of his revolutionary zeal.

Bruce always wrote a certain kind of play,

he had a definite style and it wasn't to everybody's taste.

He wanted to preach and teach and boost the morale of people

who felt they were being completely oppressed.

His decades-long involvement with the theatre is a side of her cousin

that Hillary knows little about.

Keen to learn more she has come to meet his former colleague, Paul,

in London's West End.

-Hello.

-Hi, Hillary. How are you doing?

-Shall we go in?

Bruce and Paul were among four playwrights who set up

the Liverpool Lunchtime Theatre, a fringe group that started life

putting on short plays in pubs and clubs.

Bruce was instrumental in helping it grow.

-He got us funding, because he's very clever, very sharp.

-Absolutely.

Oh, yes. He was very clever.

So without him we wouldn't have had the same rigorous approach

to funding because we were a bit lackadaisical.

He kept us on the right lines.

Although Bruce only had one drama staged by the group, he actually

wrote hundreds of plays, all true to his radical political ideals.

He was very prolific.

-Short, were they?

-Short and punchy and to the point.

They were devoted to a certain cause

and they were to boost the morale of the people involved in that cause.

-Did he only write plays for his cause?

-Pretty much.

Bruce had a very strong agenda

and that is quite difficult for a writer,

because it means everything is subsumed to that agenda

and you don't think, "My characters are complex," because that is

deflecting from the cause or from the aim you are aiming at.

I wish I had seen some of these plays!

It does seem to me

that Bruce did stick to his guns over his ideology

and his anti-capitalism, but although he was very intelligent,

I don't think he was really clever in the way he went about it.

I think he could have been much more influential if he had been slightly

more conventional and still got his thoughts and ideas across to people.

I do agree with what you're saying

and I think it is wise sometimes to play the game,

but I think there are certain people on the planet who can't

and they do feel it is a betrayal.

And I think with Bruce it was a betrayal.

I think if he did go that way, he would have felt

he was betraying the cause, whatever it was he believed in.

Towards the end of the meeting, Hillary takes a moment to reflect on

what she's learned about the cousin she once regarded

as the black sheep of the family.

As a family, we always felt that he never had a proper job,

which it sounds like he didn't, and he'd never made enough money

to live on. Maybe he didn't but he was very industrious.

It sounds as if he wrote hundreds of plays.

And he was very happy to help other people to get what they wanted,

even if he didn't get what he wanted. So my opinion of him has changed,

since learning all this.

Perhaps I should give him more credit than I did when he was alive.

Given Bruce's unconventional lifestyle,

it remains a mystery how he came to leave a £100,000 legacy.

Thanks to the heir hunters, it will now be shared

between his living relatives but for Hillary, it's not about the money.

I wish he'd actually made a will and given it to whoever he really

wanted to have it, because I don't think he intended it to come to me.

For her, the journey to find out more about Bruce's hidden past

is far from over.

It's very interesting to talk to somebody who did know Bruce

when he was an adult, which I didn't, and somebody who knew

the sort of work that he was doing and I find that very interesting.

What I would really like to know is what happened to him after Paul knew him,

because there is quite a lot of years when he didn't know him

and I didn't and I would like to know what happened in between.

In Surrey, Joan Aldridge is getting to grips with the news that she

is an heir to an estate of a woman called Diana Paine who died in 2010.

I was amazed to hear that I might be in line to inherit some money

because I didn't even know this Diana Paine, that she existed.

Diana was 91 years of age when she died in Tunbridge Wells.

She had lived an exciting life,

surrounded by people who loved her like her companion Ernest Armstrong.

She was always game to do anything at all.

After leaving school, Diana had worked as a shorthand typist

but when war broke out,

she volunteered to work as a driver for the National Fire Service.

She was very proud. She had a status as an officer in the Fire Service.

And she really enjoyed it very much. She enjoyed driving quite a lot.

It was during the war that Diana met her second husband,

Harry Paine, with whom she lived happily for 40 years.

Sadly, he died many years before her,

but Diana wasn't lonely in her later life.

I was very lucky in finding Diana.

It was just that we enjoyed being with each other all the time.

We didn't have to think, "What about a round-the-world cruise?"

That didn't come into it at all.

We didn't have to have very expensive things to enjoy life together.

Diana's father Alfred had two brothers.

One of them, Hugh, had a daughter, Joan, who was born abroad

and so hadn't shown up in the heir hunters' initial search.

Joan is Diana's first cousin

and an heir to her £22,000 estate.

But for her, the inheritance comes as a distant second to the chance

to find out more about the father she was separated from us a child.

I have very little recollection of him

because when he visited several times, I was too little to remember

that and I really have no feeling as to what sort of man he was at all.

Joan's parents lived together in China until she was two years old.

Frightened by the prospect of war in the Far East, her mother, Hazel,

brought Joan back to England, to live with her own parents,

Joan's grandparents.

But Joan's father, Hugh, did not join his family.

Instead, he headed for India where he made his life.

He did visit us, where I was living with my grandparents

in Cobham, Surrey, and then he seemed to disappear.

I suppose it was the war.

It was only later when I was at school, and he contacted me

and wanted to meet me. Watched me jumping a pony

at a local gymkhana and took me out to dinner and things like that.

And after that, I really lost contact with him on the whole, I think.

The only thing he ever gave me once was a Parker 51 pen

which didn't work in aeroplanes so he gave it to me.

Hugh died in 1961 on a rare visit to London.

And it was only then that Joan began to find out about

her father's fascinating life as a pioneer of aviation.

I think I learnt more about my father after he died

because in a number of the papers, and magazines, there were a lot

of tributes to him from a lot of very important people in the flying world.

I found it very interesting, and I really got to like him

immensely, even though I didn't know him.

I felt then much more rapport with him

because I thought, what a character he must have been.

I really, really wished I had known him better.

Hugh Vaughan-Fowler began his career as a probationary Flying Officer

in the Royal Naval Air Service.

The year was 1917, and aviation was in its infancy.

When he joined up,

it was only 14 years after the Wright brothers had learned to fly.

It was the new technology of the time.

If you were a young man looking for something new, something

adventurous, then that was the kind of thing that you might want to do.

Clearly he did want to go flying and he proved to be very good at it.

Hugh's exceptional talent and his love of flying helped him

carve out a career in aviation which took him all over the world.

But it was perhaps his inclusion in the Sempill Mission to Japan

that was to become the defining moment of his career.

The Sempill Mission arose in 1920, '21,

when the Japanese embassy

applied to the government to have

an official mission to teach them how to have a Naval Air Service.

With designs on becoming a great naval power,

Japan asked Britain to send over a crack team of pilots to teach them

how to fly fighter planes, build aircraft carriers

and drop torpedoes from the air.

They chose Britain because Britain was the most efficient

and effective naval air power at the time.

It was a controversial request.

Although the Japanese had been Britain's allies

in the First World War, some government officials

were wary of helping them strengthen their military power.

The Admiralty felt that anything which would provide

a challenging sea power in the Pacific was not to be recommended.

The Air Ministry was all for furthering British aviation

interests so it looked on the idea more keenly.

So they decided have a compromise.

Instead of an official mission, they would have a civilian mission.

Hugh was one of 29 ex-RAF pilots hand picked to travel to Japan

by the mission leader Colonel William Forbes-Sempill.

It was a fantastic opportunity for a young aviator whose flying skills

had not been in demand in Britain

since the end of the First World War.

Hugh Raymond Vaughan-Fowler was chosen for his expertise

as a fighter pilot.

He was teaching the Japanese first of all to fly

and then he was teaching them fighter pilot tactics,

like how to come out of the sun,

how to approach an aircraft from a vulnerable point underneath

and behind and he found that the Japanese were very bold about this.

They weren't at all worried or afraid.

He was very impressed by that.

Although Joan has found out a little bit about her father's work,

she knows next to nothing about his involvement with Sempill.

Today, she is heading to Somerset to meet a Fleet Air Arm Museum director Graham Mottram,

to find out about the role he played in this controversial mission.

Here, for instance is the Admiral 504 training aircraft

that they were flying and your father would have flown these

teaching Japanese guys how to fly.

That's interesting.

It was important enough for the Prince Regent of Japan to visit

and be introduced to this group who were helping

right at the beginning of Japanese naval aviation.

-My father got the Order of the Rising Sun or something?

-Yes, he did.

At the end of the mission, Hugh returned to Britain

and re-enlisted in Britain in the RAF as an officer.

He wrote about his time in Japan

and his observations proved chillingly prophetic.

What he did quite soon after he came back,

which is quite remarkable for a man of 24, 25,

was he wrote two papers about the threat on Japan

to the Far East and the British Empire.

Did he really?

He didn't quite say it but if you read between the lines,

your father could almost be called one of the prophets of Pearl Harbor.

Oh, really? That is amazing, isn't it?

Because he actually analysed the Japanese economy,

how it was outstripping its natural resources,

how it was outstripping its gross national product,

in building more warships than the US and the Royal Navy together.

And said, basically, "Before very long,

"Japan is going to have to go for territorial expansion,

"otherwise it can't support itself and it is likely to

"go for territorial expansion by military means."

In 1931, seven years after Hugh had predicted it,

Japan launched its first invasion of China.

At the height of its power in 1942, the Japanese empire ruled

over a land area of 2.85 million square miles -

the size of Australia.

He wasn't pulling any punches.

Here is a man in uniform, the Royal Air Force, saying, "If we are

"not careful, it will swallow up the British Empire in the Far East."

-Gosh, that is absolutely amazing, isn't it?

-And he particularly

points out Singapore, because Singapore was one of the greatest

disasters of British military history.

By the time the Second World War broke out, Hugh had moved to India

and was appointed Chief Aerodrome Officer by the Indian government.

He later founded a magazine called Indian Skyways,

and became a highly respected aviation journalist.

I sense that he was a man who didn't curb his tongue too often.

That is the feeling I got from what I've read.

One of the things that comes out of his time in India is

he was regularly falling out with the Director of Civil Aviation

-and having his passport impounded.

-Oh, right, that's a good one!

Your father, in his journal,

said something like the Hindustan aircraft company isn't

building any aircraft, it is costing N-thousand rupees,

and what is the Director of Aviation doing about it?

What the Director of Aviation did about it was to send the police

round and say, "Where is your passport, Mr Vaughan-Fowler?"

-That is lovely, I like that!

-So, yes, quite a character.

For Joan, it has been an extremely rewarding trip.

After the meeting,

she takes a moment to reflect on what she has learned

about the truly extraordinary father she never really knew.

This report about the Japanese makes me really proud of him.

I have even more respect for him

than I had before and I thought he was a fairly exceptional person

before, but now I think he is a very exceptional person.

I'm so proud of the fact that he is my father.

If you would like advice about building a family tree

or making a will, go to...

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd