Kettle/Sproat Heir Hunters

Robert Sproat chose to live alone in London

and now the heir hunters are unravelling the mystery

this Glaswegian author created around his own life.

He was going away to university.

That was it, off he went and we never saw him again.

On another case, the search for heirs takes the hunt to Norfolk.

It's another challenging day for the heir hunters.

Coming up, one man's bravery

in one of the most dangerous jobs of World War II.

If the one who was the lead ship, if he suddenly blew up,

you knew there was mines there, but who was it who was going to be next?

We rediscover a lost art.

Compositing was one of the main skills of the printing industry.

Without compositing, you wouldn't have anything to print.

And we'll be giving you details

of the hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of estates

that are still to be claimed.

Could the heir hunters be knocking at your door?

In Norfolk, Andrew Fraser is on his way to look at a property

that forms part of an unclaimed estate his firm is investigating.

I have been instructed by the administrating solicitors

to help them and provide them with a probate valuation

for both the contents and also the property itself.

What Andrew discovers when he gets inside

could have a huge bearing on the amount that is inherited by heirs.

We have the typical, very musty smell we get

when properties have been locked up and left for some time.

Although it's only been a few months, it is certainly quite unique.

The house, which is in a sleepy rural part of Norwich,

was home to Philip Charles Kettle for many years.

His mother and father lived opposite us

previously and Philip moved in with them.

Unfortunately, they passed away

and Philip inherited the house and lived there ever since.

Philip was always quite jolly, really pleasant to speak to.

Always quite happy. Never seemed miserable in any way.

If you were to see him walking down the road,

he'd stop and say hello to you and ask how you were.

After leaving school when he was 15,

Philip went on to work as a newspaper compositor

at local firm Eastern Counties Newspapers.

Philip's character was outward going and he had quite a bit of fun.

Sometimes he could be a little bit awkward, but can't we all?

So, yeah, we got on well with Philip

and I got on well with Philip.

Philip took early retirement and, sadly,

died on 24th of July 2013, aged just 56.

He left no known family and seemingly made no will.

Philip will definitely be missed

because you always saw him in the street.

He was such a jolly man and he would always have time to speak to you.

It's quite sad knowing that when you come out in the morning that

you're not just going to bump into him or say hello to him any more.

Heir hunter Andrew is opening that his visit to Philip's house

will help to establish the likely value of Philip's estate.

If he's lucky, a thorough search of the house could uncover

evidence of valuables or savings that might increase the case's worth

by hundreds or even thousands of pounds.

Or he could be heading for every heir hunter's worst nightmare -

the discovery of a will that renders all their efforts useless.

For now, his first job is to assess the likely value of the property.

These places deteriorate fairly quickly when they've been left empty.

Got a hole in the ceiling.

The fact is the wall has got an awful lot of dampness in there

that has caused the plaster to virtually fall off.

Andrew is coming across signs of serious long-term neglect

throughout the house.

We clearly see that the house is in need of

some quite significant repair.

It's surprising we don't have major ceilings coming down

in the kitchen area.

We can see the felt roof has got holes in it.

Together with a very overgrown garden.

He's also on the lookout for any documentation to suggest

Philip had any assets other than the house.

I've found here his latest passport, I believe.

Andrew's visit is just the latest stage

in what has been a complex investigation.

When the case first came to the company

by solicitor referral six months ago,

Fraser & Fraser case manager Ben Cornish was in charge.

When we got the case, we looked a bit further,

we found out where the deceased was living at the time of his death.

We realised that the deceased owned a property

and it was one of these cases

that we were definitely going to have a look into.

As they had Philip's last known address,

this was their first port of call.

When we start a case like this, we will contact the neighbours.

They are usually good source of information about the deceased.

We straightaway realised that the deceased lived with his parents

up until their deaths and we also gleaned from them

the fact that Philip was actually married.

So, when we found out that Philip was married,

we instantly had a look for a marriage record.

We found one. We traced this individual.

We realised that she had married for a second time. Spoke to her.

She confirmed to us that she was divorced from Philip

and that they had no children.

And as they'd been divorced,

this meant that Philip's ex-wife had no claim on his estate.

The team then had to check for the next in line to inherit.

We started to look for siblings of Philip, if there were any,

whether they were still alive or, if they had passed away,

whether they had any children.

When we find Philip's birth record, we looked for his parents' marriage.

The team established that John Benjamin Kettle married

Patricia Anne Cork on 18 June 1955.

Philip was born the following year.

When we find the parents' marriage,

we look for any siblings of the deceased.

We could find none for Philip, so we knew that he was an only child.

I think we're going to look at John Benjamin Kettle and his family.

This meant that the team now had to trace any brothers or sisters

Philip's parents might have had.

Instantly, when we looked into the mother's family,

we were made aware that she was an only child, and therefore

there would be no descendants on this particular side.

The team's only hope of heirs now rested on

Philip's father's side of the family.

Philip's father was John Kettle and,

according to Philip's birth certificate,

he worked in the printing trade.

When John began his career in the newspaper business

during the late 1940s and '50s,

the printing industry was pulling itself out of post-war doldrums

and Fleet Street and newspapers across the country

were heading towards a golden age.

The power of the presses was very much in evidence,

as people picked up nearly all their knowledge of news

and current affairs from the printed page.

Both father and son worked as newspaper compositors,

producing the same paper, the Eastern Evening News.

Compositing was one of the main skills of the printing industry

because without compositing, you wouldn't have anything to print.

As a compositor, John was responsible for setting out

all the text or copy that was to be printed

using metal letters and symbols.

They were then tightly bound to create a page,

which was placed in a press

and then inked to make the necessary impression on the paper.

Usually, when you went in the printing industry,

you followed in your father's footsteps or a relation.

And that opened the door for you.

Quite a few apprenticeships, you had to pay to take the apprenticeship.

My father was a compositor and his father had to pay £100 premium

before he could even start work.

David worked side-by-side with John.

I remember John. I worked with him for quite some time.

And he was a fairly happy-go-lucky fella and he did his job

and he had with him an air of authority because of his size.

He was a decent person to work with, yes.

David also worked with Philip during the 1970s and '80s.

He followed in his father's footsteps.

He was a compositor

and he became a pagemaker like his father on the same paper.

They all worked under pressure to get the newspapers out

to a hungry public.

In those days, newspapers were almost the sole form of information.

A newsroom built up to a crescendo near to deadline time.

Everything seemed to get faster.

And with as many as 24 linotype machines all clattering away

and all the little clicks and clatters built up into a deadline,

then when the paper was put to bed, it went quiet.

John and Philip would have found themselves

working in the print industry during a boom period of the '70s and '80s.

But it was also a time of huge change.

With the advent of computing in the early '70s,

several provincial newspapers in this country

started up their own programme of computerisation.

And it seems the industry was divided

in how it received this new technology.

In the provinces, the computerisation programme

finished in the late 1980s

and there wasn't as much controversy as there was in Wapping

with the nationals.

It was a stand-up fight between the unions and management.

Despite the demise of the printing industry

as John and Philip first knew it,

those early working practices have left their own lasting impression.

There's quite a few sayings come from the printing industry.

One of them is "mind your Ps and Qs"

and this is because a P and a Q

are identical except they face different ways

and it is easy to mix them up

if your eye isn't trained to know that you looking at

a mirror image.

So, that is where that one comes from.

And another saying is "upper and lower case".

It comes from the fact that the cases,

which are stored in racks called frames,

when they were lifted out to use, they were in pairs.

One of them was the capitals and it was put up here

and that became upper case.

And the other one is the small letters and it was put here

and that became the lower case.

And that is where the term comes from.

Back on the hunt for Philip's heirs, Ben was now concentrating

the team's research on his father John's side of the family.

And there was no time to waste.

A case like this is a pressure case, as we call them,

because you know there is a major asset, there is a property.

You know that other companies may be looking into it

and they will also be trying their hardest to locate the heirs.

At Philip's house in Norwich, Andrew has found some documents.

Just looking through the papers here,

I found details in relation to asking for early retirement pensions.

This is the death certificate for Philip's father,

John Benjamin Kettle, who died in 2004.

When someone dies without leaving a will and with no known family,

their name ends up on the Treasury Solicitor's list

of unclaimed estates.

But this list reveals very little of the deceased's life.

In 2011, one name that appeared on it was Robert Sproat.

It was picked up senior case manager Kevin Edmondson

at heir hunting firm Hoopers.

At first sight, it didn't look as if this estate

was going to be of any great value, but after a bit of digging,

we found out that Robert Sproat had left about £45,000.

Obviously, this was worthwhile investigating and so,

we started the work of trying to trace his heirs.

And an initial exploration on the internet brought to light

some immediate insight into Robert's story.

We found a copy of a newspaper article online

which mentioned that he had died from a fall

and that there had been a coroner's inquest.

The coroner ruled that Robert had died from an accidental head injury,

thought to have been sustained when he fell while in his flat.

At the time of his death,

Robert lived in North London in sheltered accommodation.

Marva was a fellow resident.

I remember Robert.

He was a very private person, tall, slim.

Always clean and well-dressed.

He wore his hair quite long but tidily.

And when you'd pass him in the passage,

he would just give a wave and say, "Hello, how are you?"

From what I remember of Robert,

he was a very highly intelligent person.

And it seems he wasn't an easy man to get close to.

He never sort of mixed with the tenants.

For example, he never came into the lounge to have a cup of coffee.

I never saw visitors visiting him.

He was just a lonely person.

Robert might have been an enigma to his neighbours,

but the heir hunters' research was revealing more about this quiet man.

The article also mentioned that he was from Glasgow

and that he was a published author.

The team discovered that in the 1980s, Robert had written two books.

One, Chinese Whispers, was a novel about Genghis Khan.

And the other, published in 1986, was a memorably entitled

collection of short stories called Stunning The Punters.

It was made up of nine different characters,

each with their own story to tell.

And little did Robert know, but his book would change the life

of at least one person, actor George Dillon.

It was 1988. I was an unemployed actor.

I'd been unemployed for about a year.

And I was looking for material to do a one-man show

to give myself a showcase, to get an agent.

And I had two stories already.

I had one by Steven Berkoff and one by Dostoyevsky.

But I needed a third.

And I was looking at books returned today in the library

for short stories

and my eye fell on this title which said "Stunning The Punters".

Brilliant! Brilliant title.

I took the book off the shelf and looked at the cover

and it was this cartoon of skinheads,

which was brilliant, cos at the time I had a shaven head.

So, I opened it up and I read the first line of the title story

and it said...

-GRAVELLY VOICE:

-"It's a rough old estate."

Good first line.

Turned to the last line, the last two lines, and it was...

"Really strange.

"By pretending something's never been said,

"you can end up screaming it."

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

Flicked through the story, it was all written in the first person.

It was about skinheads. And it was just amazing.

So, that became the title story and the linchpin

of my first one-man show, Stunning The Punters And Other Stories.

"Ten points!" I says to Spike.

George continued to bring Robert's character to life

for the next seven years.

Only get the maximum for a pram...

if the baby's still in it.

Until he finally met the author at a performance in London.

He was strange. He was a strange man.

He was flamboyant, in one sense.

I have the impression that he was actually quite a private man

and quite a troubled man.

I mean, he was intriguing. I wish I had got to know him better.

Actor George isn't the only one

who wishes he knew more about the author.

The heir hunters' internet research

might have revealed some insight into Robert's career,

but when it came to his family,

Kevin and the team needed to dig a bit deeper.

The next step was to obtain a copy of Robert Sproat's death certificate

and when we had this, we had his date of birth confirmed

and his place of birth and it was 14 April 1944 in Glasgow.

We then went on to obtain a copy of the birth certificate

and this gave us the names of his parents -

Alexander John Sproat and Elspeth Anne Sproat, formerly Forsyth.

Having confirmed his parents, there was another immediate priority.

We had to, first of all,

ensure that he didn't have very close relations - a wife or children.

We searched the records in England, Scotland and Wales

for any possible marriage of Robert Sproat

and we didn't find any record of marriage.

Not only had Robert never married or had children,

birth records showed that he was an only child.

This meant the team had to expand the search

to look for aunts, uncles and cousins

on both his father's and mother's side.

Looking into Robert's mother's side of the family,

we first of all obtained Elspeth Forsyth's birth certificate.

This confirmed her parents' names and we quickly found them

on the 1911 census and we found that they'd had seven children.

We continued our searches after the 1911 census

and found that there were three more children born after Elspeth.

The discovery that Robert's mother had nine brothers and sisters

meant that this could be a huge family tree

and entail enormous amounts of research.

However, luckily for the team, they were able to narrow it down.

We quite quickly found out that six of them had died without issue.

We did, however, find out that sister Helen had married.

Although they'd discovered that she had died in 1975,

she had two children.

The team were then able to contact her daughter, also called Helen.

For Robert's cousin,

the news that she was an heir came totally out of the blue.

I got back from holiday on Valentine's Day

and there was this handwritten note through the door

saying my maiden name had been Thomas, which was very strange,

so I just thought it was a bit of a wind-up,

somebody looking for money or something.

So, I just ignored it.

And the next day,

I had a letter which had all the details right in it.

So, I'd spoken to my son and he said, "Don't sign anything!"

And then I started to...

And I couldn't think who it was at all.

I did wonder did my mother have some kind of secret life

before she met my dad?

That was very strange cos it just wouldn't have happened.

After discovering other cousins had also received similar letters,

the family hit on the truth.

We worked out it must be Rob Sproat.

Then the penny dropped and I thought,

well, that was quite sad, then, that we'd all missed

not being able to go to his funeral or anything.

But sadness at not being able to pay her respects

was mixed with happier memories.

A big joker. He loved The Goons and he would have all...

Especially Peter Sellers. He was a master of Peter Sellers.

And he and my dad would sort of bang off each other all the time.

SHE LAUGHS

They would go through some of The Goons more memorable moments

and when we went down to Wales to visit,

he would come with us if we went somewhere like Tenby.

He was quite a joker.

And, yeah, he was good company then.

At 18, Robert won a scholarship

to read Natural Sciences at Cambridge University.

We were all incredibly impressed,

but he was very bad at communicating.

His mother always sent him off to Cambridge

with a stamped addressed letter to post when he arrived

so that she would know he'd got there safely.

He did send her birthday cards and Christmas cards

and he did send her the books when he wrote them, but otherwise,

he was very bad at keeping in touch,

which was sad for his mum.

And it seems his study of the sciences quickly took a back-seat.

He got in with all the people that enjoyed doing all the arty things,

so he didn't bother going to lectures and things

and only lasted a year, which was a bit sad,

having got the scholarship in the first place.

When Robert went on to become a published author,

it was a chance for the family to catch up with something of his life,

if only from a distance.

I've enjoyed reading the books.

So, the family knew about them.

And I did write to him through the publishers.

I did say how much I'd enjoyed them

and there's some very funny things in them as well as the sad bits.

It struck me that the personalities of all the male characters

seemed to reflect the personalities of all my mum and Mum's sisters!

Which was quite funny.

But I didn't get a reply.

Altogether, the team are able to uncover eight beneficiaries

on Robert's mother's side of the family, including Helen.

But they still has to unlock his father's side.

Every year in Britain, thousands of people

get a surprise knock on the door from the heir hunters.

It's really nice to know there was someone else in the family out there.

Probably would have liked to have met but never did.

Being told of an unexpected inheritance

can be very welcome news.

If I get £50, I can go out for good meal and have a drink on Richard.

And it can provide a priceless opportunity

to connect with long-lost family members.

It's lovely to think he's brought us all back together

and I hope he's got comfort.

But there are still thousands of unsolved cases

on the Treasury Solicitor's Bona Vacantia list,

where heirs needs to be found.

Could you be one of them?

Today, we've got details of two estates on the list

that are yet to be claimed.

The first case is...

Otherwise known as Rex or Roy Patterson.

Reginald was a widower, who died on...

..aged 91.

He was born on...

And it is not known when he came to the UK.

The name Patterson is of Scottish and Irish descent,

meaning 'son of Patrick'.

Could there still be family links to Reginald

in either Scotland or Ireland?

Is this name familiar to you?

Do you have any ideas that could be the key to unlocking this estate?

Next, 71-year-old...

Died on...

He was a bachelor and had been born in Glasgow on...

Peacock is a surname which first appears in Anglo-Saxon Durham

in the fifth century.

It was a name to describe someone who was concerned with their looks.

What brought Daniel to Lincolnshire is unknown.

Could he still have relatives back in Scotland?

Does his name mean anything to you?

Could you be the beneficiary they're looking for?

If you think you may be related to either of these people,

you would need to make a claim on their estate

via the Treasury Solicitor's office.

The important point about making a claim

to the Treasury Solicitor's Department

is to make sure you provide all the evidence we need -

the birth certificates, the death certificates -

then all should be fine.

If not, or if you're unhappy with the way we deal with the matter,

then by all means, raise that and we'll consider things afresh.

Once again, the names of the cases we are trying to solve

with your help today are

Reginald John Charles Patterson

and Daniel James Peacock.

Perhaps you could be the next of kin.

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

Heir hunter Ben Cornish and the team at Fraser & Fraser

have been tracking down heirs to the estate

of former newspaper printing man Philip Kettle.

Having established that he had no siblings

and his mother was an only child,

they have narrowed the search down to his father's side of the family.

So, when we were looking into the Kettle family tree,

we found out that the deceased's father had three siblings.

They were all older.

An older sister called Doris,

brother called Ronald who died in infancy,

and a brother called Derek.

Philip's uncle Derek was born in 1925.

He'd grown up in the years between the world wars

and was just old enough to see service in World War II.

Aged 18, he became part of the crew of HMS Cynthia, a minesweeper.

Minesweepers are the unsung heroes of the Second World War at sea.

They are out there every single day, all day, all night,

clearing mines, keeping the swept channels open

so that Britain can continue to operate in the Second World War.

Without minesweepers, Britain will lose the war.

Sea mines have long been as a basic system of fighting in the ocean,

both as a weapon of attack and as a defence around coastlines.

Sea mines are a very simple defensive system

and they come in three basic varieties in the Second World War.

There's a classic round mine with horns on it

which you detonate by striking it.

They're more just under the water, so they hit the ship.

Then there are acoustic mines, which are set off by

the pressure of a vessel passing over the top of them.

And finally, there are magnetic mines, which detonated by

the magnetic signature of an iron or steel vessel.

Like Philip's uncle Derek,

fisherman Charlie Harris served on a minesweeper.

Well, it was very, very dangerous

because these mines were dropped by aircraft or E-boats or whatever

during the day or night.

And you went out,

you knew the convoy routes cos they were buoyed.

They were like roads. You knew what roads you had to go down.

There would be four of you in line. You just used to go this -

one, one, one, one -

so you were covering an area like that, so you were sweeping.

You'd cover some many miles for that area

for the convoy to come steaming down.

But you didn't know where them mines were.

And you shot the gear, just blow them up or sweep them,

and you had to take a chance.

But if the one who was the lead ship, if anything,

if he suddenly blew up, you knew there was mines there,

but who was going to be next?

You didn't know.

Derek served on the HMS Cynthia, an American-built minesweeper

which joined the war in Europe at the end of 1943.

Approximately six months later, in June 1944,

Derek and his ship would have been part of

the biggest mine-clearing exercise in history.

He was involved in getting the troop ships across the Channel

for the D-Day landings on the Normandy beaches.

The Germans had laid immense fields

of contact, pressure and magnetic mines

to basically block of that coast, so there was a critical task.

They passed through a narrow gap in a minefield that had been swept

and marked out by the minesweepers.

So, you have to find them, sink them, mark the channel

and make sure everybody else can follow you.

It's very slow, it's not dramatic, it's not dynamic,

but it's very dangerous.

Nobody went down below. Only the engineers, who had to be down there.

I mean, everybody was on the deck all the time.

You only went below when you had to because you thought,

well, if anything happened, just have a chance to get away.

It's often forgotten that minesweeping at sea

is a problem of scale.

In the Channel, there were probably 100,000 mines

in between Britain and France,

so the D-Day minesweeping operation, it is not finding a few mines,

it is clearing a path through a barbed-wire forest of mines.

The need to be absolutely professional and committed,

start to finish, really is sapping.

It's going to take a lot out of people.

HMS Cynthia and her crew, including Derek,

continued to keep the path across the Channel clear of mines

as Allied troops and supplies followed the initial invasion force

across France and into Germany.

At the end of the war, there was another crucial task.

Her last big mission is to escort the King of Norway back to Oslo.

This means clearing a way

through the biggest German minefield of the lot in the Kattegat,

and it is very important the King of Norway

doesn't get wet on his way home.

So, this is a real high-water mark.

The Second World War in Europe ended in May 1945.

A lot of the navy is demobilised, but the minesweeper crews carry on.

They're still going in 1946, 1947,

because the sea lanes have to be reopened

the great ports have to be cleared, trade has to resume.

The North Sea has to be made safe.

The enemy is still out there.

The enemy is inert and he will still blow you up.

The most powerful memory of all

is when the war finished, that you survived.

That you were one of the ones who came out.

Anyone who went through five, six years of the actual war

never came out the same as they went in.

Derek survived the war and died in 2002.

When Ben discovered this,

it left only one of Philip's aunts to investigate.

Doris, his sister.

And we found a marriage for her,

found out that she had several children.

Philip's aunt Doris had four children.

One son died in 2011, but he left three daughters

who are also heirs.

Another of Doris's sons, Philip's cousin David, spent a lot

of time with Philip's family in his childhood, but later lost touch.

Like many of the relatives, he lives in Norwich.

Although I've not seen Philip for ten years, obviously, he is my cousin,

member of the family, and, yes, it did come as a complete shock,

to be absolutely honest.

The man was only 56 years old and

didn't really expect him to go so quick, at such a young age.

While I think Philip was a very quiet

and reserved man who did enjoy his own company,

I got on with him quite well. We used to go to the football occasionally.

He always had a slight smile on his face, especially after a nice pint.

Quiet but a fun-loving lad.

Philip was very close to his parents.

His mother died in 2002 and it seems life changed for Philip

when his father died.

When John passed away, it really did hit him hard

and I think he rather withdrew into his shell, unfortunately.

When something like that happens, yes, certainly,

it just put everything really into perspective on things.

I've given one or two things a little bit more perhaps serious

thought than I did prior to this.

For the heir hunters,

the one remaining question was the value of Philip's estate.

In Norwich, Andrew Fraser has been looking at his property

and contents to try and get a complete picture of its worth.

These Toby Jugs were at one time very fashionable

and a huge collector's item.

They're all Royal Dalton.

This is from 1987. This one's a 1958.

It seems there are several collections in the house,

each of which has to be photographed so that they can be assessed

and valued by experts.

But Andrew's search for assets isn't over yet.

I've found that in February of this year, 2013, some four months

before he died, he actually received a payment from one of his pensions.

Any money still held in Philip's bank account, along with other

assets that may be discovered, will be added to the value of the estate.

For today, though, Andrew's work is done

and it's been a successful visit.

A few weeks later, he and the team have estimated the estate is

worth around £150,000 to be shared between eight of Philip's cousins.

It's a good result for the team.

To solve this case is quite bittersweet, really.

It's quite sad that Philip died so young.

It's sad the fact that family were relatively quite close to him

but he just moved away, like families do,

and they just lose contact after a while.

But, you know, the saving grace is that some of the family

heirlooms that Philip had are now with family.

Following Andrew's visit to the property,

David has now also had the chance to go to Philip's house

and collect some of the belongings that are part of the inheritance.

I went down there with my sister and I got some of the Toby Jugs,

about 12 of them, actually.

We also found some plates that we took away

and, more importantly, a lot of photographs, family photographs,

some of which I'd not ever seen before.

At least now, when we look at them,

we can always remember the good times with Philip, John and Pat.

Senior manager Kevin Edmondson and the team at Hoopers traced the

ever-growing family tree of Robert Sproat, who died in London in 2011.

He'd published a book of short stories in the 1980s called

Stunning The Punters, one of which was adapted for the stage

by actor George Dillon.

He remembers the night Robert came to see his performance.

He was sitting there and I felt a little bit

resentful of the other people being there

because I wanted to meet him and talk to him

and I didn't really get much chance to talk to him.

He was quite reserved, as eccentric as I suspected from his photo.

And possibly quite troubled.

Despite their brief acquaintance,

George has a surprising keepsake from the author.

When I was thinking of doing Stunning The Punters

and contacted Robert about it, he sent me a copy of his next book.

It hadn't yet been published

and he wrote a dedication in the front of it.

And this is what he wrote.

"Dear George Dillon, this comes out officially on March 21st.

"Good luck with your project, Robert Sproat, March 9th, 1988."

This was an amazing act of generosity on his part and... Yeah.

Looking at it now, it's...

It's quite moving.

Having found heirs on his mother's side of the family,

the team were on the hunt to find any uncles, aunts and cousins

of Robert's who could be in line to inherit on his father's side.

We obtained a copy of Robert's birth certificate

and this showed that his father was a flight sergeant in the RAF.

The Royal Air Force was formed in 1918, so it was still

a relatively young service by the time of Robert's birth in 1944.

And for Robert's father, John Alexander, being a flight sergeant

in the midst of World War II was not a job for the faint-hearted.

Bomber Command, for example, was the most dangerous job in the

Forces at all during the war with half of their people killed in total.

Airfields, pre-Blitz, really, were being bombed on a daily basis,

so it was manic and it was scary.

John Alexander's role would have carried with it tremendous

responsibility.

A flight sergeant is a hugely important individual on the squadron.

The warrant officer is the man who is Mr Cool, he runs the place.

But the flight sergeant is the man who goes around

and makes sure it's done.

At that time, there was a particular

need to knock new recruits into shape.

A drill instructor on recruit training,

corporal or sergeant, but mostly the corporals in the '40s,

they lived in the barracks with the troops.

And their job, really, was to teach them to wash, shave,

press their kit, clean their stuff, look after their bedding,

look after all of their kit, to drill them, to be their counsellor,

to be their mother and also, to be their avenging angel should

they not perform to the required standards.

The sergeant would be a big stick over the corporals

and the flight sergeant would be a bigger stick, so when he turned up,

the same thing, the standards were expected to be better.

And Robert's father would have understood

the importance of a drill.

Military doesn't do people wandering about.

So, they need to know how to get from A to B properly.

But it's also to teach them to obey commands.

They stand there and you will tell them what to do

and they do it without question.

Not used enough, in my opinion.

And there's one timeless characteristic that shines through.

All drill instructors have to be strict.

The flight sergeant on the squadron would be ultra-strict.

If a recruit ever had to go see the flight sergeant

then it really only meant, you know, one or two, three things, really.

He was either leaving or he was in serious trouble.

He doesn't go to the flight sergeant for a pat on the head, generally.

But could the power and discipline Robert's father

used at work have spilled over into his home life?

A drill instructor, yeah, you become a certain kind of person

and that person applies standards.

And you notice things that are wrong, always.

And I am still the same now.

I've stopped moaning about creases in my shirts

because otherwise I have to iron them myself!

So, I don't do that any more. But you notice that.

You notice someone with a double crease in their shirt.

You'll notice dust behind the door. It's still something that I notice.

And bugs me.

Robert's cousin and heir Helen recalls her impression of Robert's

drill instructor father.

I do remember he was very, very strict with Rob.

It always struck me that he

treated Rob like one of his recruits and, of course,

they were living in married quarters,

so they had to be very careful with all the furniture and fittings

and things and Rob liked to fall off chairs and do daft things like that.

And his dad would get very annoyed.

Back in the office,

the heir hunters needed to unravel

Flight Sergeant John's family background.

The next step was to find Robert's father's birth certificate,

and we found that he was born on September 30th, 1912,

in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire.

This confirmed his parents' names.

We then looked on the 1911 census record

and found that they had had three older children.

At that date, John Alexander's mother was only 31 years of age,

so we thought it would be quite possible that she

would have had further children.

And so, we undertook searches after the 1911 census

and found that there were three more children born after John Alexander.

This means he was one of a family of seven children.

This meant that the heir hunters

now had six branches on the tree to explore.

We found out that one of his sisters died as a child.

This meant there were five branches of the family to investigate.

And we found that all the remaining five did have children.

One of the branches was his sister, Ellen Rebecca Sproat,

who married a Mr Darmody and had six children.

The eldest child was called Rosalind.

Robert's cousin Rosalind is one of five heirs

born to Robert's aunt Helen.

I received a phone call one day to tell me that he'd died.

It was a shock and I was upset, I must admit.

The last time I saw Robert, he must have been about 17.

He was going away to university, so we all went to say goodbye

and wish him well.

And that was it. Off he went and we never saw him again

or heard from him.

I felt sad when I found out that he hadn't married,

he had no children, so I don't really know

what sort of life he had.

I don't know whether he was outgoing or very lonely.

These are the things you think about.

And it would be nice to know if he was happy in his life.

I was very proud to think that he'd had books published.

That's not an easy thing to do.

And I think he must been satisfied with his life.

He was quite creative. Now I'll have to get the books.

I'll have to have some reading.

SHE LAUGHS

Rosalind is one of 25 heirs to Robert's estate -

17 on his father's side

and eight on his mother's.

Any money that we get from the inheritance, it would be lovely

and I think we'd probably buy a new three-piece suite.

I could do with one of those.

I've had an idea that the rest of us on our side of the family

would like to have a nice big family get-together

just to have a sort of belated wake.

It would be nice to do something in Rob's memory.