Bruce/Offord Heir Hunters

Heir hunters are trained to track down the relatives of those

-who died without leaving a will.

-She dies, um, 16th April.

Their work involves expert research.

Nothing in this job gets the adrenaline going like making

enquiries.

And it's often a race against time.

Because you're in a competitive process, there's a time constraint.

But most important of all,

their work is about handing over thousands of pounds to

relatives who had no idea they were in line for a windfall.

It's sort of come out of the blue, really.

The whole thing was just so exciting and I didn't know then what

I know now about my own family.

So could the heir hunters be knocking on your door?

Coming up...

A valuable case that was to blow wide open the world of a man

who gave nothing away.

It is a bit of a pain that it has happened because what we thought

was going to be a small job is now turning out to be a larger job.

Oh, no, no!

And how a police investigation brought shocking new twists

to a forgotten case.

In early 2006, a detective sergeant in Margate contacted me

with regards to carrying out a financial investigation.

Plus, could a fortune be heading your way?

Find out how you could be entitled to inherit unclaimed estates

held by the Treasury.

It's late morning in the London office of Fraser & Fraser,

the UK's largest heir hunting firm.

PHONE RINGS

Hello, Val.

The team are busy looking at new cases that have just been

-made public.

-Got two children of the deceased.

Today, the Duchy of Lancaster has released a list of estates,

and one of them has caught the team's eye.

'At the moment, we're doing a job called Charles Bruce.'

It's a Duchy case. It came out today. He's worth about 20 grand.

Charles Edward Bruce died aged 85 at his home in Salford.

Although he lived alone,

-he was a popular figure at his local social club.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

-Cheers.

He's given many people in this club a memory and something to smile about.

Absolutely.

When we first came in the club, Charlie always...

He always sat here, at the end of this seat. Never sat anywhere else.

That's where my best friend, Charlie, always sat,

every Saturday and Sunday night.

Charlie was also fondly remembered for his musical talents,

which kept everyone in the social club entertained for hours.

He first started coming to the club with this chap here.

-Cos he played the organ here.

-So he looked out for Charlie.

And Charlie then, knowing that John Joe,

-would come in here to play the organ.

-Followed him.

Followed him in. Yes. Along with his harmonica.

So in many respects, I think

they could have been a bit of a double act.

But even though Charlie was often the centre of attention

down at the club, his friends knew very little about his private life.

We went to the house many, many a time, but he

would never let you in. You know, we had to wait outside for him.

He closed the door and said, "I won't be a minute." And he never, ever...

He was private, in that respect.

Charles died without leaving a will and had no known relatives,

so in the office,

the search for relatives to his £20,000 estate is well and truly on.

Research is being led by one of the firm's youngest case managers,

23-year-old Mike Powell.

-Send us anything for that geezer on the other side.

-Yeah.

-Mr Bruce.

The team quickly establishes Charles was a bachelor when he died, so they

extend their search to his parents in the hope of finding siblings.

They discover that his parents were Alfred and Agnes,

and it looks like Charles wasn't their only child.

As well as Charles, they had a son, Alfred, who died in infancy,

and a daughter, Dorothy.

We've not actually found a marriage for Dorothy,

so we're assuming that she died as a spinster in Manchester in 1962.

Looks like he had two siblings who died without having any kids.

So having ruled out brothers and sisters,

the team must now look to the wider family, and this means

trying to find aunts, uncles and first cousins who would be heirs.

Starting with the paternal side of the family tree, they establish

Charles's grandparents were Charles Bruce and Sarah Fearnehough.

They also discovered that as well as Alfred,

they had three other sons - Thomas, Charles and Josiah.

Their children would be Charles's cousins and, if alive,

heirs to his estate.

But early signs aren't looking good.

Picked the one with the best name to start with, Josiah.

All we've got for him

is a shipping record taken into New Zealand in 1920.

And things aren't much better with Josiah's brothers.

They haven't got middle names.

Thomas Bruce and Charles Bruce, so they're pretty common names.

'At the moment, we've picked up a death for Charles Bruce,

'possibly in Ashton, and we're just looking at a marriage'

in Salford for him possible,

so I'm going to see whether that picks anything up, really.

The estate of Charles Bruce was advertised by the Duchy

of Lancaster, one of several public bodies the heir hunters look

-to for work.

-We get our cases from a variety of different sources.

The public sources are, of course, the Treasury Solicitor,

the QLTR, Queen's

and Lord Treasurer's Remembrancer department up in Scotland

or the two duchies, the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster.

When any of these organisations advertises a case, heir-hunting

firms around the UK compete to be the first to find and sign up heirs.

No-one actually got any search back on this at all.

If the team are successful, they'll be paid a percentage of this

estate, which will be agreed with any heirs they find.

With a large team of researchers to pay and no

guarantees of finding heirs before their rivals, it's risky work.

And on the Bruce case,

the team cannot find records of paternal uncles Thomas and Charles.

Can't find anything.

I'm looking for a war death but there doesn't seem to be one

and there's no death,

so I don't know what happens to him at this moment in time.

The team continue plugging away but, despite their best efforts,

-they're struggling to make progress.

-'It's just been frustrating, really.'

We haven't managed to find anything.

There's a couple of marriages we've looked at that turned out

they haven't been right.

Every minute counts when you're up against competitors.

We're just proving everything wrong at the moment, which is

all well and good, but we're not actually proving anything right!

So...

It's just a case of carrying on until we actually find something.

But for today, time has run out and the team head home,

hoping for a better day tomorrow.

The following morning, the team reconvene and,

whilst progress is still slow on the paternal side of the family,

things are looking more positive on Charles's mother Agnes's

side of the family.

Initial research looked like there might only be a few

beneficiaries on the Owens side of the family.

In fact, it seems Agnes was from a very large family.

When we looked at the census yesterday, there were 12 children.

This is bad news.

A large family means costly research,

which raises the stakes for the team.

Trying to think what other ones we've got now.

Charles's mother, Agnes, was the first daughter of Robert Owens

and Jane Ann Spencer and they went on to have another 11 children.

Any children of Agnes's siblings will be Charles's cousins

and heirs to the estate.

But as the team look closer, they realise research might not

be as extensive as they originally feared.

Eight had actually died before the '11 census.

We've since worked out that another two have died without issue.

And only our deceased mother and uncle actually had issue,

so we've only got the one stem that we're actually

working at the moment, of John Henry Owens.

This is good news for the team, who only have to find John Henry Owens.

It's not too terrible.

Hopefully, we'll be able to rectify it and sort it out all today.

But the team are in a race against time because any

of their rival heir-hunting firms could also be working this case.

And that's where the company's travelling researchers come in.

The company employ a UK-wide network of travelling researchers

who play a vital role in helping them get ahead of the competition.

They'll do anything from picking up certificates to doing

door-to-door enquiries and, ultimately, signing up heirs.

Retired detective Charlie Lemon is the company's man in the North West.

So I've had a call from the office this morning,

just to tell me about the new case that they've got.

Charlie will be poised to visit any heirs the team in the office

can find.

But in London, there's been a development

and it's not what the team were hoping to hear.

Got the certificates back in today for the job of Charles Bruce

and on the maternal side, we put in a spinster death

for Mary Owens and, unfortunately, that's come back wrong.

She's actually a married lady,

so we're back to the drawing board with Mary.

The team were hoping they'd only have to research one

stem of the huge maternal family.

Yeah. It is a bit of a pain that it has happened

because what we thought was going to be a small job is now turning

out to be a rather larger job.

Now it's massive,

and the bachelor who he said was a bachelor isn't a bachelor.

-He was married.

-With kids?

-And the spinster death was wrong.

The team now have three times more work to do on the maternal

side of the case, and with no heirs yet found,

there are no guarantees of being paid.

We're now looking at quite a lot larger job. Um...

That's all we've got at the moment.

Sometimes new information can come to light on an estate

that the heir hunters thought was done and dusted.

In 2012, heir hunter Peter Birchwood received some shocking

details about the estate of the man called Kenneth Offord,

a case which he'd last looked at seven years earlier in 2005.

'What I discovered after communicating with a solicitor'

was that Kenneth Offord had been the victim of a cruel crime.

The revelations meant that a case Peter and his team thought was

closed would have to be reopened and reinvestigated.

Kenneth Gordon Offord died aged 79 at home in Welling in Kent.

He never married or had children

but he was well known around the local area.

Neighbour Mary Withan remembers him as a man of routine,

passing her window every day.

As soon as the sun was out, Ken would be in his shorts. Yes.

You know, we knew summer was coming.

He was quite a nice person, friendly, clean,

but we never heard him ever speak about a wife or anything.

Kenneth was a regular at the local cafe but in October 2003,

Mary suddenly noticed she hadn't seen Kenneth for a while.

It must have been about just over a week when we missed him

because the owner said to me, "You live near him,

"would you go round and find out what is wrong?"

So I did and I went up and banged on his door,

but there was no answer,

so I knocked next door and they banged

and went round the house to see the son and then we phoned the police

and they broke in and he was on the floor.

Kenneth hadn't left a will and no-one knew of any relatives,

so his case was published on the Bona Vacantia list

of unclaimed estates and picked up by Peter Birchwood.

He runs probate genealogy firm, Celtic Research,

with son Hector, and they have offices across the UK, headed up

by case managers Saul Marks

and father-and-son team Phil and Donovan.

The deceased died 23rd October, 2003.

The Treasury advertised it round about March of 2005

and we started working on it.

They had the value then which was around about £9,000

and that was the beginning of it.

Although £9,000 wasn't a huge estate,

Peter decided it was a case worth working.

The information we had about the deceased Kenneth Offord was

that he'd been a draughtsman and that he died in Welling, Kent,

and, apart from that, we didn't have any real

information about his life and times.

Peter set about looking for Kenneth's relatives.

The first thing that we normally do is to check to see

if our deceased person had married or if he'd had any children

and in this particular instance, there were no children.

In fact, Kenneth had died a bachelor, so next,

Peter and the team had to find out if he had any siblings.

He discovered that Kenneth's parents

were Arthur Offord and Alice Amelia Barnett

and they'd had two more children - Kenneth's brothers.

But one had died in infancy and the other without having children,

which meant Peter now needed to look at the wider family tree.

We did eventually find that some of them had died

without having married, others had married and had children.

We followed down to find what happened to those children.

Peter needed to look to Kenneth's grandparents to see

if his mother or father had siblings.

Any children from these aunts

and uncles would be Kenneth's cousins and heirs to his estate.

Kenneth's paternal grandparents

were Mary Anne Prince and Arthur Offord.

The couple lived in the East End of London where Arthur

worked as a crane driver in the Royal London Docks.

It was a hugely busy time for the area

and Arthur's job was a prestigious one.

Crane drivers are very important in the hierarchy of dockworkers

because if you bear in mind, dock labour is done on piece rates,

so the quicker you move a cargo, the more you get paid,

but there's a bottleneck in the handling of cargo

and that's the crane, because you have to lift a lot of cargo

out of the ship, put it on the quayside.

So if your crane driver is fast, you're going

to move more cargo, you're going to get paid more,

so a good crane driver is very much sought-after by the gangs.

Because of the way the dock labour was organised,

permanent jobs were highly prized

and would have meant a good salary and excellent job security.

The best cargoes to handle, for example, were motorcars going for

export, but dockers and crane drivers had their own favourite cargoes.

Things that they really hated were sacks of flour

and sacks of sugar because they were actually quite difficult

and hard to move and cargoes that they liked were frozen meat,

for example, because it's easier to handle and cases of oranges

because they're very easy to pack.

Most dockworkers lived very close to the docks

so the London Dock, for example,

London dockers tended to live

in the Wapping, Stepney, Bethnal Green area.

And we're talking about areas

that are very traditional working-class areas

with narrow streets, back-to-back houses quite often.

That proximity has major impact when it comes to the Second World War.

It was because of the bombing by the Germans that

many of the people who'd grown up in London's East End started

moving out to the relative safety of places like Kent and Essex.

You see this gradual drift of people away from the East End, firstly,

because of the bombing and then much later because they are looking

for jobs, so they're actually moving away from the East End.

Like many dockworkers, the Offords left the East End of London

during the war and settled in Kent and Essex.

It was in this region

that the team began finding heirs to Kenneth's estate.

We found that Kenneth Offord was survived

by a number of first cousins.

They'd be children of his aunts

and uncles or first cousins once removed, which would

be grandchildren and from that information we started

contacting people and getting in a position to prove their claim.

It wasn't long before he was satisfied

he had located all the heirs to Kenneth's £9,000 estate

and he proceeded with the paperwork.

Once we had found the heirs, put forward the claim

and the Treasury had released the assets, then the solicitor

distributed the assets to the heirs and we put away the case.

As far as Peter and the team were concerned, it was case closed.

Or was it?

All was quiet for a number of years

until, in 2012, I got a letter from the solicitor who'd done

administration of the estate to say that he had been

contacted about information that there were other assets.

The assets in question amounted to a staggering £109,000,

more than 12 times the original value of the estate.

But where had the money come from and why wasn't it

part of the original estate?

Well, when the truth emerged,

it put a shocking new slant on the whole case.

Bob Wood is a financial investigator based with Kent

and Essex police and in 2006, three years after Kenneth's death,

he had begun investigating a gang of rogue builders.

In early 2006, a detective sergeant in Margate contacted me

with regards to carrying out a financial

investigation into William Smith and a number of others that

had been arrested down there as rogue builders.

Builder William Smith, working with others including accomplice

Timothy Killick, had been targeting elderly and vulnerable victims

and conning them into paying extortionate sums of money

for work that was often unnecessary.

We were looking at them for a conspiracy to defraud,

money-laundering.

In effect, they generally cold-called the elderly

and the vulnerable.

But the gang of cowboy builders had been caught

and Bob's team had begun unravelling their terrible web of crime.

They had seven victims, elderly and vulnerable victims, down there.

We needed to carry out an investigation, financially,

to establish whether we've got the proceedings for confiscation

and also obviously to seek some compensation for the victims.

We found that all those accounts had moved money through it from victims.

As a result of identifying the transactions within the accounts,

we identified a possible 124 victims.

Sadly, Kenneth Offord was one of the victims and in his case,

they even persuaded him to sign over the deeds to his house.

They would cold-call the victim,

usually saying that they were working in the area and had noticed

a tile on the roof loose -

did they want them to look at them at that time?

Once on the roof, things would become more complex, more expensive,

and often they would be pressurised into having work done,

often the whole roof being replaced, when it wasn't necessary.

Fortunately, the gang got their comeuppance

and was jailed for their crime in 2008.

William Smith initially got sentenced to eight years, I think

it was eight years, four months.

Killick got four and half years inside.

William Smith had that reduced to seven years, six months,

and he, in fact, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud.

Police now began the process of returning the money that had

been stolen and when they searched for relatives of Kenneth Offord,

they uncovered information that had a dramatic effect on the work

that Peter Birchwood had done.

It was a case that we had to restart from scratch,

but it was obviously worthwhile.

It was a case that really could mean an awful lot

to the members of the family.

Heir hunters trace thousands of rightful beneficiaries every year,

but not all cases can be cracked.

There are thousands of estates on the Treasury's Bona Vacantia list

that have eluded the heir hunters and remain unsolved.

When the Bona Vacantia division passes money to the Treasury,

it puts the case on its unclaimed list

and it stays on there for 12 years to be claimed.

If someone makes a valid claim within that period,

then the money's paid back.

Today we're focusing on two cases that are yet to be

solved by the heir hunters.

Could you be the beneficiary they're looking for?

Could you be about to inherit some money from a long-lost relative?

First is the case of Winifred Joan Barr

who died on 15th September 1987 in Winchester, Hampshire.

Winifred married Ernest Harold Barr in Greenford, Middlesex, in 1941.

Her maiden name was Charlesworth.

Winifred is believed to have died a widow without any children.

Records reveal she was born in Wigston, Lancashire, in 1912

to John Charlesworth and Hannah Howe.

It's believed Winifred moved to Australia and worked as a nurse

and family help before returning to the UK in 1931.

Information dated from 1931 suggests the deceased had a brother

living in Mansfield and a brother living in Brighton

and a sister living in Essex.

Despite all this information, there's been

no success in tracing beneficiaries to her estate.

Do you know anything which could shed some light on her family?

Next, did you know Dorothy Rita Adie?

She died on 10th February 2000 in Chichester, West Sussex.

Dorothy was born on 13th March 1924 and her maiden name was Fox.

Information we have suggests Dorothy might have been

born in the London Borough of Hounslow.

Both Winifred and Dorothy's estates remain unclaimed

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

The money raised by the Bona Vacantia division is passed

annually to the Treasury and it goes into the Consolidated Fund,

therefore to benefit the country as a whole.

Do you have any clues that could help solve

the cases of Winifred Joan Barr or Dorothy Rita Adie?

Perhaps you could be the next of kin.

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

At the offices of Fraser & Fraser,

the team are working on the £20,000 case of Charles Bruce,

a retired forklift truck driver who died aged 85 at home in Salford.

With case manager Mike Powell at the helm,

the team in the office are trying to crack the maternal

side of the family which needs a lot more research than

they'd originally thought.

The one stem we thought we had kind of ballooned out

and we now have about five stems.

The paternal side of the family has also thrown up some surprises.

Charles's father Alfred had three brothers, one of them,

Josiah, is listed on the shipping records,

which show that in 1920, aged just 19,

he made the epic 30-day voyage to New Zealand.

It would seem he was one of thousands to emigrate at that time.

A young man like Josiah Bruce would have likely been

motivated to travel to New Zealand for several reasons.

The first of which was that, in 1920,

just two years after the Great War, Salford, the Manchester area,

was blighted by high unemployment levels as well as a great deal of poverty.

And so it is really not surprising that he would have tried to

look further afield to improve his fortunes in that period.

Since the 19th century,

New Zealand had opened its doors to skilled labourers from the UK

but after the Great War in 1920 work had dried up.

This is probably the worst time that Josiah Bruce could have

emigrated to New Zealand.

He would have been promised work and housing

and so on and so forth through the propaganda of the period

but unfortunately when he arrived in 1921 the economy nosedived in New Zealand.

If we try to imagine Josiah Bruce and what made him take this decision,

then the sort of character we come across is someone

who was of pioneering spirit, with a great sense of adventure,

a sense of wanderlust to explore the world beyond Salford, Manchester.

Josiah's move to New Zealand means the team will need to contact

their agent over there to trace any heirs.

Fortunately, the rest of the family stayed closer to home.

The team have established that another of the brothers,

Thomas, died without having children.

The final brother, Charles, did go on to have a family.

Uncle Charles has married

and we managed to trace two great-grandchildren of the marriage.

This would be our deceased first cousins twice removed.

Once they make contact with the beneficiaries,

the heir hunters will agree a percentage of the estate

and assist them to make a successful claim to the duchy.

We've been to see a couple of people already who we believe

are beneficiaries on that line and they have given us more information.

Hopefully today we will find more and sign more people up.

The team are also making good progress on the maternal side.

The team have discovered that two of Agnes' brothers,

John and Charles, married and had children.

Marian is John's daughter

and researching her stem has thrown up a few surprises.

Charles' first cousin Marian had an illegitimate daughter

who was brought up by her sister

and she went on to have three more children with a Chinese sailor.

Marian married sailor Gam Fok in August 1948 in Liverpool

but their marriage was short-lived.

Sadly, after Marian's husband returned to sea,

the enormous task of looking after six children became too much

and Marian took her own life. It is a tragic twist to the story.

The team have been able to chase Marian's children,

including the daughter who was born illegitimately.

We've got an address for her and Charlie is going to go and see her.

With travelling researcher Charlie out on the road

visiting potential heirs, the team are confident they have now

cracked the case and found a total of 25 heirs to this £20,000 estate.

Case manager Mike Powell is pleased with the result.

The case went pretty well.

We've managed to locate all the beneficiaries who are in the UK.

There's about 25. It was a bit more than we initially expected.

We are still searching for people in New Zealand, which is going to

take a bit longer but everything else seems to be pretty much completed.

But what will the response of the heir be?

One of those heirs found by the company is Tracey.

She is a granddaughter of Marian, who was Charles' first cousin.

But she has never known the full extent of her family tree.

I have always wondered how big the family is.

The main portion of the family I know is the aunts and the cousins.

Past that I have no idea other than I have Marian Owens

and his name was Gam Fok, my mother's father.

But I don't know a lot about his side of the family,

only from the mum's side.

Tracey hopes that becoming an heir,

she will be able to reconnect with new members of her family.

It is always sad when somebody dies, obviously,

but as I never knew Charles personally it doesn't affect me

in an emotional way but it is still never nice to know somebody has died.

But if I do manage to inherit something from Charles,

then hopefully he will be proud it went to his family members.

And that the social club where Charles spent so many hours,

his memory will live on for a very long time.

If all the world was made of Charlie Bruces,

it would be the most wonderful place to live in.

In 2005, Peter Birchwood from Celtic Research had traced heirs

to the £9,000 estate of Kenneth Offord

and believed the case was closed.

But, unbeknown to him,

Kent and Essex Police had discovered that, before he died,

Kenneth had been the victim of a fraud and that police now

had an additional £109,000 to give back to his relatives.

Investigating officer Bob Wood began the search for Kenneth's relatives,

completely unaware that, seven years earlier,

Peter Birchwood had done exactly the same thing.

We did identify a sister-in-law and she couldn't help us

with any information about the family.

So really at that particular point we had came up against a brick wall

when it came to family.

But using a genealogy website, Bob was able to make a breakthrough.

I decided to put Kenneth Offord's name into an ancestry database

and a Kenneth Offord came up in a family tree of a young lady in Essex.

I believe her name was Francis, as the surname.

I thought that she was a young person so I started to

look for someone that is older called Francis in the village area

and found Clifford Francis and then found that he was on the same tree.

So I felt it a safe bet that he was a relative of Mr Offord.

Bob's hunch paid off.

Clifford was a first cousin of Kenneth

but hadn't seen him for over 60 years.

It was difficult to keep track of all the members of family

because there were grandparents dying, there were family members

like my mother's brothers and sisters, they died.

Children who were my cousins grew up, got married,

moved away and we just lost touch.

But the discovery of Clifford was a complete bolt out of the blue

for heir hunter Peter Birchwood.

When he searched for Kenneth's relatives seven years earlier,

he found no record of Clifford.

The news meant he would have to reopen the case.

Clifford, himself an amateur genealogist, has started

his own research into his family tree and had posted it online,

which is how Bob found him in the first place.

But when Peter first researched the Offord family,

he had to do it the old-fashioned way.

In 2005, you had to go through the books of Births, Marriages And Deaths.

You had to go page by page.

Nowadays, of course, we've got the databases that are on the internet

that we can do the research in a slightly easier fashion.

For reasons which would soon become clear,

Peter found no trace of Clifford when searching through the records.

Clifford had been the child of his mother's first marriage

but his mother then remarried and Mr Webb took his stepfather's name

but not by adoption or by change of name. Therefore we didn't find him.

So although born a Webb, Clifford now used the surname Francis

but had not officially changed it so he could not be traced

using the records, which explained why the heir hunters hadn't found him.

Clifford's mother was Ethel Offord.

The sister of Kenneth's father Arthur.

In the 1940s, Ethel had an illustrious career

working for one of British fashion's best-known names.

My mother, when she was 15,

she worked for Austin Reed as a shirt machinist.

She did progress through her life as a shirt machinist

till she became a sample hand

and she used to make the shirt up from scratch, from cutting it out,

stitching it together in a fairly quick time, within a few hours.

Clifford's mum, Ethel, was a star machinist in the company

and rose through the ranks to become a sample hand machinist, which meant

that she would design shirts and present new designs to purchasers.

A rare responsibility in those days.

The first shop was in Fenchurch Street in the City of London

and it was opened in 1900.

The first day's takings

were three pounds five shillings and seven pence.

The market that he was aiming at was the very large

numbers of young men going into the city on the trains

to work in offices and they needed a constant supply of clean shirts

and collars to wear because conditions were very grimy then.

And it was nothing for a shop to sell 300 dozen collars a week.

That's 3,600 collars a week.

That continued right up to after the Second World War.

They did manufacture shirts under their own brand name.

They had a particular brand called Summit.

That actually became unpopular because they said Summit was

a better name and Summit shirts were best...

Partly because it sounded rather German.

During the First and Second World Wars, Austin Reed played

a valuable role in providing uniforms for the soldiers.

But it was also asked to design

and create a very special outfit for a very important man.

They made Winston Churchill's all-in-one suit that he could

pop on in the dark in ten seconds or something

and they traded on that to quite an extent.

Churchill needed suits he could change into quickly in case

he was called to the Cabinet War Room in the middle of the night.

And he had several versions of these suits made,

including a silk and a velvet one.

They did also make individual garments to order.

Somebody could come in and place an order for a particular

kind of garment and they would make it from scratch at their Dalston

factory which is probably where Ethel worked.

The main business for machinists who worked

directly for the company was in alterations for customers.

She would have worked long, hard days sewing and sewing

and making alterations.

She would have been unlikely to have been in many of the shops

unless possibly during the Second World War,

of course the men were off fighting for their country.

Having established that Ethel had a son, Clifford,

who he hadn't originally found,

Peter decided it was best to relook at the whole case.

I went through the whole of the investigation process

to go through family trees on both sides of the family

and we now know that we have got all of the family members checked out,

we know where everybody is.

Now that Peter knows there are 17 heirs,

the additional £109,000 can be distributed among them.

For Peter, it has ultimately been a rewarding case.

The Offord case is obviously fascinating now.

The back story of it with the swindlers and the stolen house

and the police riding along on their motorbikes to arrest

the villains, it is all fascinating,

it is great story and it brings the family into the picture

because now we can tell them what happened and tell them

how unfortunate Kenneth Offord was to lose his house like that

but we can tell them, look, at least it's being repaired in the way

that his family can benefit from what the police have done.

For Clifford, the experience of becoming an heir has made him

reflect on why he lost touch with Kenneth's branch of the family.

My grandmother, which was also his grandmother and grandfather,

they had about nine children and they all lived

and were born in the East End of London

and when the Second World War came along, during the Blitz,

their homes were destroyed by bombing and they moved out.

And Ken's parents went to Kent, others, my mother and father,

they came to Essex.

Clifford has begun the process of reuniting with his family

and he and his wife have revisited the Royal Docks

where his grandfather was once a crane driver.

It has changed an awful lot.

I can remember

when I was about 12 years old the way into the docks

was through a barrier at each end of the docks

and when you went down into the docks there were all

the ships docked each side with the cranes off-loading.

But it has changed beyond what it used to be back in...

Well, I'm going back to 19... 1955.

There is still evidence here of what it was like.

It was all basically wharfs and docks.

In the future, he also hopes to meet up with other family members.

It is all part of the legacy left behind by his long lost cousin, Kenneth Offord.

I was upset to hear of his death.

And the fact that the money that may or may not be coming to me,

and I don't know how much that will be, that was secondary really

to the fact that it started the ball rolling on me

rediscovering cousins who I hadn't known for many years.

And that is more precious to me

than any money I'm ever likely to receive.