Copper/Sumner Heir Hunters

Every year, around 300,000 people die in the UK without leaving a will

and with no known relatives.

In all the time I knew him, I never, apart from carers,

I never saw a visitor.

If no family members come forward,

their money will go to the Government.

And that is where the heir hunters come in.

They specialise in tracking down beneficiaries who had no idea

they are entitled to part of an estate.

I just was in shock, really. I just couldn't...

..take it all in, really. I thought this happened to other people.

They face tough competition

while working on estates worth thousands of pounds.

We think there's a property involved which is valued at around £200,000.

And they can uncover fascinating family histories and tragic secrets.

My mum chucked him out when he was younger

and he didn't want to know us.

But it also opens doors to the past and can reunite families.

-Hello.

-Come in.

Above all, it's about giving people news of an unexpected windfall.

Could the heir hunter's be knocking at your door?

Coming up:

In the race to track down heirs,

a costly mistake leads the team up the garden path.

We have to start again on the paternal side of the family.

And a legacy from a long-lost relative

leaves a beneficiary stunned.

I was absolutely amazed.

I was absolutely shocked.

Plus, how you could be entitled to inherit

unclaimed estates held by the Treasury.

Could thousands of pounds be heading your way?

It's Wednesday morning at Fraser and Fraser,

one of the largest companies in the heir hunting business.

One of the firm's youngest case managers, 23-year-old Mike Powell,

is working on a new unclaimed estate.

I've got a case that has come in from a member of the public

who lived next door to a lady.

She recently passed away.

It looks like she was just living with her brothers

and the house has been in the family for about 60 odd years.

The team believes this case could be worth in excess of £100,000

and so they will be throwing all their resources at solving it.

Rosamund Ethel Copper died in March 2013 at home in Sidcup, Kent.

She had lived in the same house for over 20 years

and was known by her middle name of Ethel.

But it was only latterly that next-door neighbours really got to know her.

Unfortunately, there are no surviving photographs of Rosamund.

The copper family were very quiet.

When we first moved in,

we didn't get to know them for a number of years.

They kept themselves to themselves for a very long time.

It was only in the latter years that we really started

to get to know, particularly Ethel.

She just used to come out and chuck a load of food out for the birds.

She was still doing that before she died.

The front garden down there was

always covered in breadcrumbs and stuff like that.

She loved her birds.

It's believed Rosamund died without leaving a will and the company

have been informed about her estate by a concerned neighbour.

The heir hunters' work can come from a variety of different sources,

including cases advertised by the Treasury Solicitor.

But these cases are hotly contested so tip-offs direct from members of the public

can give them an edge over the competition.

The only frustrating thing is, if they give it to more than one company,

then obviously it becomes competitive.

If they have given it to them before giving it to us,

obviously we are at a disadvantage because we are behind.

This is actually the second tip-off the team have received this week.

Yesterday, case manager Gareth Langford also had

a call from a concerned neighbour about another unclaimed estate.

Believing it was worth several hundred thousand pounds,

he and the team dropped everything to try and find heirs.

We have just been advised of a potential new estate.

Actually, by a member of the public.

The deceased passed away some time ago, in 2009.

The impression I'm getting is that the neighbours are concerned

that his estate is not being dealt with

and the property is obviously falling into...

It's becoming derelict.

But when they began contacting relatives, they got a nasty shock.

We are a company that specialises in tracing missing heirs and beneficiaries.

No. I don't think that was us. Did they ask you to sign anything?

Right, OK.

They are a very similar company to us and we will obviously leave it to them to deal with.

So we are about 12 months behind on this one.

The team might have missed out on yesterday's neighbour referral,

but they are hoping they will be ahead of the competition in the case of Ethel Copper.

I am waiting for David Hadley at the moment,

who I have sent down there to do some enquiries

and knock on a few doors to see if anyone actually knew the deceased.

Early indications, it looks like the family own the house.

There is always the point that a will might turn up at a later date.

Obviously, we can't go into the house and look for one,

but there may be one as this has come from a member of the public,

not from the Treasury Solicitor's office.

Heir hunter Dave Hadley is out on the road and on the case.

Dave is one of the company's travelling heir hunters,

who track down vital information on cases around the country

and if necessary travel abroad to help solve the family mysteries

surrounding unclaimed estates.

It's their job to sign up newly discovered heirs before any rivals

so that the team is ensured payment from an agreed percentage of any legacy.

We got the information from a concerned neighbour.

He is concerned because the house is now empty.

It has already been burgled. The garden is over growing.

He feels that nobody is doing anything about it.

So I've been asked to come down and do some local enquiries.

Dave will be knocking on doors in the neighbourhood

where Rosamund lived to try and find out if anyone has

any information on her family which could lead to potential heirs.

Back in the office, the team is getting to grips with the basics of the family tree.

Research reveals she was one of seven children,

born to Henry Peter Copper and Charlotte Ellen Broome.

We're just making sure we have picked up all of the children

that are on the 11 census.

We're trying to identify which ones are deceased.

The team quickly establish that one sister died in infancy

while Rosamund, her sister Dorothy and brothers, John and Samuel,

all died without marrying or having children.

Two brothers, Harry and Arthur, married, but neither her children.

As none of Rosamund's siblings are alive or had children,

the team must look to her parents' siblings

to see if Rosamund had any surviving cousins.

One of the paternal uncles of the deceased,

he married in 1901 in Bromley.

I have found them on the 11 census.

He has got two children.

The hunt is on in earnest to crack the case

and sign up any beneficiaries before any rival firms can beat them to it.

The team knows that Rosamund's mother, Charlotte Broome,

was one of nine children born to Charles Broome, a gardener, and Emily Adams.

It's down to rising research star, Emily, to trace them.

I have just found a marriage for a maternal aunt,

Bessie Margaret Broome.

She was born in 1890 but she marries in 1945.

So we can already know that she's not going to have issue from that marriage.

I've just double checked, obviously.

But there's confirmed no issue. I have got a death for her in 1971.

So that stem is dead already.

Every time Emily can establish that an aunt or uncle has died

without having children, she can eliminate a stem of the family tree,

which narrows down her search.

Emily is getting excited. She is killing people!

But there is barely a moment for Emily to celebrate

her research technique as there is no time to waste.

We have got 10 on one side and nine on the other side.

So let's just hope they don't all have the same amount of children.

With such a large family, the team know they are going to have their

work cut out, both in the office and on the road to track them all down.

-It looks like both sides are going to be huge.

-Really?

-One side is 10 and one side is nine.

-Right. OK.

While Emily is working on the maternal side,

the paternal side is causing headaches all round.

The team is struggling to find the family on any records

and Mike is beginning to think the problem lies with the family name.

They were all born a Copper, but the family name seems to be Cooper.

So I think they have changed their name at some point from Cooper to Copper for some unknown reason.

We have double checked and there is only one Henry P. Cooper

who matches the date of birth and date of death that we have got.

There is no birth of a Henry Copper, so we are safely assuming

that the surname is actually Cooper not Copper.

The team has taken a huge gamble, assuming the name has changed

or been written down incorrectly in records.

Following the name Cooper is a risk

but it is all part of the heir hunting game.

But even the surname Cooper is not without its problems.

At the moment, I am still trying to identify all the births on the Cooper side.

We have only got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Eight children at the moment identified.

And on the 11 census there are 10 who are still alive

and three that have died.

So we are still trying to work out which one is which.

And with many thousands of Coopers to sift through, Dan is going to need a bit of luck

to find the right surname in that particular haystack.

Meanwhile, travelling researcher Dave Hadley is dispatched

to a local graveyard to try and find the family

and verify the surname of Rosamund's mother, Charlotte.

It's vital that the team confirms the correct name

before they spend any more valuable time

on what could be a wild goose chase, researching the wrong family.

I've had a look at the headstones over there and there is a Hopper.

But not a Copper.

I mean, I'm thinking if the last brother was buried about two years ago,

the headstone is going to be fairly new.

But I've had a look at the new ones and I cant see anything with Copper on it.

So no Copper or Cooper. Could this be another frustrating dead end?

Found it.

Charlotte Ellen Copper.

It could be right, actually, because it shows the death of May 12, 1976,

which would be about right from the information I got from the neighbour.

The team's gamble has not paid off.

It seems the family were called Copper after all

and the research they've done into the name Cooper needs to go in the bin.

Dave calls in his findings.

-Hello, Dave.

-Hi, Mike.

Right, Copper is the name of this case, not Cooper.

Dave's research is backed up by birth certificate which the team has just received.

It looks like they were actually called Copper.

The name change was just a bit of a coincidence.

It seems all that work was for nothing.

That means we have to start again on the paternal side of the family.

We did take a bit of a leap of faith doing it.

It is something that we do and if it doesn't work out,

then that is one of the risks of the job.

The job of the heir hunter is to find entitled relatives.

But more often than not, their work also reveals

remarkable stories about the person who has died.

That was just what they found when the heir hunters started working

the case of Geoffrey Sumner, which appeared on the list

of unclaimed estates issued by the Treasury Solicitor.

Experienced senior case manager Dave Slee took up the search for heirs.

A search which had a very promising start.

The internet was a great help to us.

It gave a lot of information about Geoffrey's background,

especially his occupation.

He was a chief political journalist with the BBC.

I was also able to establish that Geoffrey owned property

in the Blackheath area of London, which is an exclusive area.

So we knew that this state probably had a lot of value.

With the property worth an estimated half a million pounds,

this was a valuable case and with that comes

a lot of competition from rival firms to find heirs.

So the pressure was on to solve this case as quickly as possible.

68-year-old Geoffrey Sumner died unexpectedly and alone

on April 23, 2012, at his home in Blackheath, London.

His friend and fellow journalist, Nick Jones,

had known him for 30 years and was due to meet up with him.

I used to go out for a walk with Geoff about once a month

or once every two months.

We had fixed up a walk on the South Downs.

Geoff told me he was sorry but he had got a virus

and a bad cough and he couldn't go.

Then I got a call from the police to say they had gone to his home.

He had called an ambulance, but when they got there, it was too late.

I think the sadness for me was that having known Geoff's history,

I think it was pretty tragic that he died on his own.

That he had to call the ambulance

and there was no-one there at the end.

Nick has very fond memories of his old friend.

Geoff was one of those friends that one can have in life

who was very solid and reliable.

He never got very close to me.

He never asked me many questions. But I think he liked friendship.

He liked going out on walks or going for lunch somewhere.

He was never happier than with a glass of red wine in his hand.

With no will or known close relatives, it was up to the

heir hunters to try and find out more about Geoffrey and his family.

Geoffrey was born in 1944.

His parents were married some 10 years prior to that.

So what we undertake is, we do a sweep of birth searching

from the marriage in 1934 up until Geoffrey's birth in 1944

and go past that for 20 years.

We did not find any brothers and sisters.

One of the first things that became clear was that Geoffrey had

had a long and distinguished career as a journalist and broadcaster.

This had taken him from a cub reporter on local newspapers

to shaping the news stories in a BBC radio newsroom in the 1970s,

to running some of the corporation's most important political programmes in the 1990s.

Geoff had moved to Westminster, to the BBC at Westminster,

where I had become a political correspondent.

Geoff's job was editing the Parliamentary programmes

like 'Yesterday in Parliament', 'Today in Parliament', 'Westminster Live'.

But we got the chance to work together

because Geoff was editor for a time

of a weekly programme called 'Scrutiny'.

I was the presenter.

This was, I think, perhaps one of the most rewarding passages in my career

because Geoff was a brilliant editor.

But in spite of the close friendship he shared with Nick,

Geoffrey was not an easy man to know.

He was somebody who was very self-contained

because it wasn't as though I was ever invited to his flat.

I mean, I invited him to my home but I was never invited back.

So I always got the impression there was a bit of a barrier there.

He didn't want to get close to anybody.

A clue to Geoffrey's self-contained nature might have been hidden in his past.

What we found out was that Geoffrey was raised by a paternal aunt.

His father's sister.

Research uncovered an early tragedy

that had struck at the heart of Geoffrey's small family.

His mother suffered from MS and died when he was just eight.

Two years later, his father died of kidney failure,

leaving Geoffrey an orphan by the age of 10.

Geoffrey's birth certificate gave no indication

to the fact that he was legally adopted away.

You normally have an amendment at the end of the certificate.

So we presumed that he either went into foster care

or was raised by a family member, which transpired was indeed the case.

He was raised by one of his father's sisters. His paternal aunt.

Geoffrey's Aunt Rosina and her husband came to live

at the Sumner family home in Surrey to look after their orphaned nephew.

But with both parents dead and no siblings,

heir hunter Dave had to look to the wider family

and it quickly became clear that the team was taking on a huge task.

Research indicated that the deceased's father,

of the Sumner family, had seven brothers and sisters.

And on the mother's family, which were named Slattery, there were six brothers and sisters.

With so many potential heirs to trace,

the pressure is on the team to find heirs ahead of their rivals,

particularly as the stakes had just got higher.

Initially, we only knew about one property that Geoffrey owned

and what transpires is, in fact, he owned two properties in Blackheath.

The team had an early breakthrough.

They managed to trace Pamela, the daughter of Geoffrey's mother's sister and so his first cousin.

Pamela knew very little about Geoffrey,

so the news of his death and her potential inheritance was like a bolt out of the blue.

I was absolutely amazed.

I was absolutely shocked, as you would be, really.

I just couldn't take it all in, really.

I thought this happened to other people.

Although I was pleased, I was obviously very sad to hear about Geoffrey

and sorry that he didn't know us and we didn't know him.

Sadly, Pamela has no direct memories of Geoffrey.

I never met Geoffrey.

However, I do have a vague recollection of my mother

saying, "Poor little Geoffrey" and I can only assume

that is when his mother died when he was eight-years-old.

Finding Pamela enabled the heir hunters to get in touch

with her sister, Patricia, which quickly gave them

two heirs signed up to a contract which gave the heir hunters

an agreed percentage of their legacy.

Although this was a good start to the case, there was still

a huge challenge ahead to track down all of Geoffrey's potential heirs.

Dave was now focused on another branch of the maternal family,

Pamela's uncle, Patrick, and he had hit a snag.

We had a problem with one of the maternal stems, Patrick Slattery.

We know he was born in Southwark but we could find no record

pertaining to his marriage or his death in this country.

As he delved deeper, Dave discovered that there was a shocking

tragedy that had consumed the family in the 1960s.

Geoffrey's uncle Patrick had been born in London.

He had married Geoffrey's aunt, an Irish woman named Clara,

and had moved to Belfast where they had four children.

Geoffrey's first cousins and potential heirs.

Patrick made a career for himself as a cook in the Merchant Navy

and landed a job on a 1,000 ton coaster ship called the Ardgarry.

The Ardgarry was only five years old.

She was of that generation of ships that was coming through in the late

1950s, which offered much better living conditions for her crew.

As a coaster vessel and with a crew of 12,

the Ardgarry made short voyages picking up and delivering cargo.

In September 1962, the Ardgarry was on its way from Swansea with a cargo of coal.

Obviously, coal export was big business for South Wales at that time.

It was on its way to Rouen in northern France.

But what should have been a routine trip

quickly turned into a maritime disaster.

The weather conditions were absolutely appalling.

There was a very violent storm. The waves were 30 feet high. Visibility was very poor.

There is very little information on what actually happened to it.

There was no distress signal which suggests that whatever happened happened very quickly.

The only report at the time was from a Dutch coaster which

reported in a rather garbled form that it had seen a ship capsize.

Geoffrey's whole family was affected by the disaster.

They tried to launch the lifeboat time and time again

but it was being thrown back. It was dreadful.

I am told the villagers had hurricane lamps and blankets

and they were standing on the cliff.

It upsets me a bit.

Hoping for survivors.

But sadly, that wasn't to be.

Geoffrey's uncle Patrick was one of 12 crew who perished when the Ardgarry sank,

devastating his wife and four children.

It was a terrible, terrible time for them.

Our auntie went blind with the shock.

The shipping company

and also the Seamen's Union made no contact with them.

They had no financial assistance at all. The whole thing is dreadful.

And to have no support.

Financially.

It's really quite appalling.

Eventually, Patrick's wife regained her sight

and the family emigrated to Canada where they had relatives

and they built a new life for themselves,

making every effort to put the past behind them.

But that wasn't the end of Patrick's story.

Miraculously, 40 years later,

information was received by my cousins in Canada

that a diving team at the Lizard in Cornwall

had come across a wreck that maybe the Ardgarry that was lost in 1962.

The diving team brought up the ship's bell

in order to prove beyond doubt that the newly discovered wreck

was indeed the long lost Ardgarry.

It was covered in barnacles, apparently.

And they cleaned the bell.

And it said the Ardgarry.

Which was just like a miracle.

My cousin got on a plane in Canada that night

and came over and met up with people from the diving team.

And eventually, he was able to touch the bell

and he said it was just a wonderful feeling

to be reunited with his father after all those years.

He just felt close to him again and it was meant to be.

And he obviously felt peace at last, as did all my cousins.

With the search for heirs for Geoffrey's £1,000,000 estate

going global, and the pressure on to track down beneficiaries

before the competition, heir hunter Dave is up against it.

There were a number of cousins who we interviewed who were

completely unaware of Geoffrey's existence.

Heir hunters trace thousands of rightful beneficiaries every year

but not all cases can be cracked.

There are over 10,000 estates on the Treasury's Bona Vacantia list,

that have eluded the heir hunters and remain unsolved.

Unclaimed cases can be

referred to us by many people.

Erm, these can be, for example,

local authorities who've arranged the funeral,

it can be friends of the deceased, erm,

it can also be private firms of solicitors, hospitals.

So, really, anyone can refer an estate to us if they know of one.

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

solved by the heir hunters.

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

First, it's the case of Anne Margaret Whitwam,

who died on the 30th of November, 2001,

in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

Anne was also born in Huddersfield, on the 26th of February, 1949

and never married.

Her mother's maiden name was Lancaster.

With so little information to go on,

tracing Anne's relatives has so far proved impossible.

Could you be a relative of Anne's, entitled to a share of her estate?

Or do you know anything which could shed some light on her family.

Next, do you have any clues that could crack open

the case of Ralph Yates?

Ralph was a bachelor, born on the fourth of June, 1917,

on the Channel Island of Jersey.

He died nearly 90 years later on the first of January, 2007,

in Guildford, Surrey.

Yates is an ancient Anglo-Saxon name,

mainly associated with the West Country.

Could any of his relatives have been based

there before moving to the Channel Islands?

If so, could there be a direct connection to him

still living there.

Did you know Ralph or do you have any information about his family?

Both Anne and Ralph'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 Anne Whitwam or Ralph Yates.

Perhaps you could be their next of kin.

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

Having wasted time looking for heirs with the name Cooper,

it's back to the drawing board for heir hunters

looking into the paternal side of the estate of Rosamund Copper.

Although there is no photograph of Rosamund,

research showed that she'd lived in the same house for most of her life.

It was the family home and in her later life,

Rosamund lived there with her brothers, John and Samuel,

until they passed away and she was alone.

They were just very quiet,

we just used to see them in the

garden, they used to do the hedge.

Erm, we just used to say hello to them in passing, really.

Rosamund, who was also known as Ethel,

spent her whole life living in the family home with her brothers.

When we really got to know them, there was

two brothers and Ethel and she used to look after the family.

Apparently another brother,

who lived there, was injured in the war and as the mother got

older she Ethel left her job to look after the family.

Her brothers died, leaving Ethel alone.

But she was determined not to be a burden on anyone,

even towards the end of her life.

She needed some help and we helped her get a new cooker

and a new phone.

And she was very grateful...

..and she was...you know, she didn't want to impose on anybody.

That was the problem, she didn't want to, you know, she had to

ask for help but she didn't really want to.

But she was a lovely lady, really, very quiet, unassuming.

While the team is back to square one on the paternal side,

researcher Emily has made progress with the maternal tree.

This is a stem of the Charles John Broom, an uncle of the deceased.

He marries A Grace Mary Gaypher in 1901, in Bromley, erm,

I've got them on the '11 census and they've got two children

and there's also another child born in 1914, as well.

All in Bromley, so all sticking to area, which is a good thing.

I think a lot of the heirs will probably be just down the road,

really, from where the deceased died.

With so many branches of the family tree to follow,

the case has become a major challenge for the team.

The families are so big, erm,

Emily and Dan are still trying to work out the other side.

Cos we can't seem to find a birth under Copper.

But I think they've found a war record, which indicates

who his parents are and he's in the right age and he's in the right area.

Finally, the team appears to have made a breakthrough.

There's a first cousin who who's living in Orkney

and he's got a phone number,

so I'm going to get Michael to phone him

and see if he can confirm that his Uncle Henry married

Charlotte Broom and had Rosamund, our deceased.

But, obviously, if he didn't then we know it's wrong

but hopefully he'll be able to confirm, either way,

whether or not it's right and then we can carry on working it.

If he can confirm that he is part of our family, then, obviously,

that makes him an heir and his siblings

and all of the other cousins that he's got.

Hello there, sir. I'm very sorry to trouble you.

It's nothing untoward. I'm currently trying...

Mike manages to get a potential cousin on the phone.

Would that be yourself?

OK, brilliant. Now, I wonder if you

know much about your aunties and uncles.

It's great news! The team have finally found a Copper.

A first cousin to Rosamund

and a major leap forward in tracing the wider family tree.

And, while Mike calls potential heirs in one

part of the country, he's sent travelling researcher, Dave Hadley,

to visit more cousins they've uncovered with their research.

Right, well, I've just arrived at the address of Mr David Cooke,

at least, I hope it's his address.

And I'm going to go and knock on the door and see

if he's willing to speak to me.

First up is the son of Rosamund's first cousin, on her mother's side.

-Mr David Cooke?

-Yes.

-David Hadley.

-Nice to meet you.

-And you.

Now, we're dealing with a case at the moment where a lady

passed away and we believe that she's related to you

through your mother's line of the family.

-Can you tell me your mother's full name?

-Bessie Violet Cooke.

David confirms the research

and he is definitely an heir.

I've been and see the house today

and spoken to neighbours.

It's at a very early stage at the moment and anything can happen.

So, I always say this to people, you know, don't...

Don't get excited.

Don't get too excited and don't book the world cruise just yet.

No, no, no chance!

Until you know how much it is. Thank you ever so much.

Dave wastes no time in letting the office know the good news.

Spoken to David Cooke.

He wants to discuss it with his brother, Ronald,

but I don't see any problems.

I'm pretty sure. I'm confident that he's going to sign

the agreement, send it through to us.

It seems Dave's on a roll and is off to the next address.

He's been pointed in the direction of the heir's workplace,

where beneficiary Barbara, from the deceased mother's side of the family

is keen to help Dave fill in some of the missing pieces of this puzzle.

I've got your dad as William

but you say it's not.

It's Irvin Charles William Brecon. He was always known as Bill.

My grandad called him Billy-Boy from the day he was born.

-Your grandmother was Lillian Annie Broom.

-Yes.

Dad was Charles John Broom.

And that's where we get the connection

because the person that's died was a child of his sister.

-In effect, she would have been a cousin of your grandfather.

-Right.

We don't know, for sure, that she hasn't left a will.

-Right, OK.

-We do know that she was living on her own

and she'd never married, didn't have any children

and all of her siblings had all passed away before her.

I hope it's a nice amount for you.

Yes, yeah, that would be lovely.

Right, I have just finished the interview with Barbara Holmes.

Possible heir and really nice lady, actually.

Good interview, gave me quite a bit of information,

filled in a few holes as well.

I've left the agreement with her.

She's got five siblings,

so she wants to discuss it with all of them before they decide what they

want to do but I'm fairly confident that she'll sign the agreement.

So, erm, it's been a really successful day.

A few days later, the team in the office have also come up trumps

and have managed to complete the family tree

and sign up all 25 heirs.

They've agreed to pay the company a percentage of their individual

legacies from Rosamund's estimated £100,000 estate.

A good case, coming from a tip off,

where we've been able to sign all the beneficiaries on a

reasonably valuable estate, prior to anyone else becoming aware of it.

So, for us, we're very pleased.

From their offices in London,

the heir hunters were racing against time to beat the competition to find

heirs to the estate of retired BBC journalist Geoffrey Sumner.

They believe the estate to be worth, in excess of, £1,000,000.

Bearing in mind that we knew that this estate had value,

we had staff researching both sides of the family tree simultaneously.

Geoffrey's father had been one of seven children

and his mother one of six.

So, tracing all the potential heirs to Geoffrey's estate was

a painstaking and time-consuming business.

Having solved the mystery of Geoffrey's Uncle Patrick and traced

his children to Canada, research on the maternal side was now complete.

On the paternal side, they were making good progress too.

They'd found six first cousins but, as they did so,

something mysterious began to emerge.

What surprised me was that there were a number of cousins who

we interviewed who were completely unaware of Geoffrey's existence.

Now, I put that down to the fact that he was raised by a paternal aunt

and, therefore, the maternal family had very little,

if any, contact with him.

For a man who spent his life meticulously communicating

breaking news stories, his own personal story was a mystery.

We all knew, at work, that he had this terrible, tragic childhood

and, I think, because of that people were prepared to go along with

Geoffrey if he was in one of his...a bit cussed

when it came to dealing with people who'd asked him silly questions.

Because that was the point, you see.

He was somebody who was well read himself.

He had come up the hard way

and I think he expected other people to respect that.

But it seems that Geoffrey found a way to make up for any

shortfalls in his private life.

When he was at Westminster,

he began to work very closely with his teams of journalists.

There would be outings, there would be a trip, perhaps, on the Thames.

This was during a break in work, of course.

And Geoff would be so warm and embracing to the younger

members of the team and ensure that they enjoyed themselves.

And I always thought that here was someone who was able to have

acquired, at long last, a bit of a family.

One of the cousins on the paternal side was Joan.

She was the daughter of Rosina, the aunt who'd raised Geoffrey

and having been contacted by the heir hunters, she was able to

shed some light on what had driven her cousin away from the family.

I knew Geoffrey, yes.

I met him as a child and after his parents died,

erm, my mother took over as foster parent.

I did see him quite often but not as often as I'd like

because I lived in London and worked in London and he lived in Surrey.

Geoffrey enjoyed collecting butterflies and reading.

He seemed quite advanced in his reading literature and so on.

In fact, the young Geoffrey was advanced enough to win

a scholarship to the local grammar school at the age of 11.

Education, when Geoffrey was at school in the 1950s, had

improved significantly, thanks to a change in the law, a decade earlier.

What the 1944 Education Act

did was to make sure that each

Local Education Authority provided secondary education for everyone.

Prior to 1944, most people,

the vast majority of people left school at 14.

All school children had to sit the 11-plus aptitude test.

Those who passed went on to grammar schools

and those who didn't went to a secondary modern school.

For a bright boy like Geoffrey it was essential that he

got into grammar school.

It opened up a whole new world of learning.

Grammar schools really focused on intellectually rigorous

academic subjects, erm, such as the teaching of history,

modern languages, the classics, advanced mathematics.

It seemed that Geoffrey thrived at school

but then something happened which could explain why

he closed the door on his family in later life.

My mother told me

the story that she had been called in

by the headmaster of the school he was at to say that he

reckoned, at 16, Geoffrey would be university material.

My mother replied that he was to leave at 16

because I was made to leave at 14.

Having to leave school at 16 was a bitter blow for Geoffrey, whose

dreams of attending university

and having a high-flying career appeared to be in tatters.

And it seemed Geoffrey never forgave his aunt for

so cruelly cutting short the blossoming of his academic career.

His bitterness appeared to have spread to the wider family, even to

his cousin, Joan, who visited him as a child and wrote to him

in the '70s as an adult, in the hope of re-establishing their connection.

I just wanted to hear how he was

but he never replied.

In spite of the early blow to his education,

Geoffrey was determined to make something of himself

and after leaving school he got a job as a junior reporter that

would set him on the path of a glittering career in journalism.

But, finally, 40 years later, he was able to follow his heart

and go to university.

It was actually a great honour,

to be honest. To be able to,

in particular, to supervise his PHD.

Because at that level you, actually,

very, very quickly get into,

erm, really intense intellectual discussions.

And with a student as smart as Geoffrey,

it was just a real honour.

For Geoff, this was such an important finale, really,

if you like, to his career.

That he'd actually found a vehicle to use all of his knowledge

and actually produce something himself.

Something that was going to assessed, properly, by a university

and I think it was, he was a changed man as a result of it.

All in all the heir hunters have managed to track down 24 heirs

to Geoffrey's estate,

who are dotted around the world.

From Canada, New Zealand and to Scotland.

And, as the final settlement is still being worked out,

Dave reflects on one of the rewarding aspects of his job.

It is satisfying to be able to put all the pieces together...

of the jigsaw and be able to inform family members of information

they would never have known without us.

Although Geoffrey spent his adult life denying his family,

his cousins Pamela and her sister Patricia, who never met him,

are now benefiting from his estate.

They've come to where he lived, to pay their respects

and to show that he'll always have a place in their hearts.

It's opposite where he used to live

and where he found great happiness when he was studying.

Erm, there are other trees of remembrance here

and his is going to be a white rose tree,

which will stand up perfectly and will be a place where the

relatives will now know that Geoffrey has been laid to rest.