Richards/Hunt Heir Hunters

Alistair Richards was Cornish through and through...

He was just a lovely man.

..but the heir hunters are in Hertfordshire,

in search of a missing link to his estate.

It's an area where the children were born. To me,

that looks pretty strong as a correct address.

Well, the neighbours have told me

that she works part-time and may be back in about half an hour.

And, on another case,

drawing up a tree means a family's long-forgotten secrets are revealed.

The census showed us that the deceased's father had many siblings

and when we tried to find their birth records we found out

that one of them was the illegitimate daughter of the paternal grandmother.

It's all in a day's work for the heir hunters.

Coming up -

the heir hunters' work leads us

to the hardships of the Victorian workhouse...

Victorian life could be so challenging that, if you're poor,

pregnant and alone in the 1870s, the prospect of a clean bed,

a reliable meal and a roof over your head could begin

to look like quite an attractive option.

..and a Roman Catholic priest's legacy takes us back

to Manchester when it was known as the Cottonopolis.

1913 was the peak of the industry.

There were about 624,000 people employed and at that point

it was producing eight billion yards of fabric.

And we'll be giving you details

of some 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 the London offices of heir-hunting company Finders,

Senior Case Manager Ryan Gregory and the team are hard at work.

I'm just back from a two-week break, back in the office today.

We've opened a new case in the last few days so I'm just taking

a bit of time to get my head around the names involved,

what research needs to be done and where we need to go from here.

This is the case of a gentleman called Alistair Newton Richards.

He was from St Austell in Cornwall.

The only information that we've been provided is that he died in May 2012,

he was a bachelor without issue.

We've been told that he didn't have any brothers and sisters.

One thing that the team do know is Alistair Richards' last address.

He lived in this stone-built terraced cottage in the village

of St Dennis, at the heart of the beautiful Cornish countryside.

Alistair lived by himself but was obviously highly sociable.

I remember him as a bubbly person,

a very smart dresser. He joined in

everything in the village and he was very clever.

He could put his hand to anything, really. Really talented.

Well, his baking mostly was his talent and he did work

a while for the baker's that is no longer here in the village.

Then he would enter into the shows that we had

and win prizes for his knitting and his baking.

I've been working here at the chip shop for 33 years now.

Alistair was a very regular customer.

A few years ago, he started coming in every evening -

you could time your watch by him.

He would have his meal, then we were sharing jokes and news

and he enjoyed that.

And, as is so often the case in a small community,

the church was at the heart of Alistair's life.

Mostly, we got friendly through the church.

We'd have fun, he'd see the funny side of everything, and we used to

talk about anything and I could say anything to him, so I miss that.

He was just a lovely man.

Yes, that's how I'll always remember him. Yes.

Sadly, Alistair passed away on 3rd May 2012.

He was 59 years old and left no will.

The heir hunters have been given his case by a firm of local solicitors.

They were informed of Alistair's death by a cousin

on his mother's side, Douglas Rider.

Alistair and I were pretty close when we were growing up.

He lived in St Dennis and I lived in Wadebridge,

which is a distance of 15 miles apart, but during the summer

I used to go over and just visit him.

Alistair idolised my daughters and used to teach them to cook as well.

He made my youngest daughter's wedding cake.

He did a fantastic job -

I didn't think a professional could have done it better.

The way I like to remember Alistair is he was kind to other people

and helpful.

After Alistair died, Douglas was able to tell the solicitors

all he could about Alistair's mother's side of the family.

I've got a cousin which lives in Southend

and a cousin who lives in Amesbury in Wiltshire

and also there was a Karen Ferguson, which I hadn't seen for...years,

somewhere, but I didn't know where.

Since taking on the case,

Ryan has known of the names that Douglas provided

but he and his team still have to start their heir hunt from scratch.

And even, you know, if you're given information -

whatever the source is - we like to verify it and independently

go through the records and just cross-reference everything.

Ryan's team have quickly managed to establish that Alistair

never married nor had any children,

so they must now deal with finding any potential siblings

and start building the family trees.

This is the fun bit, trying to figure out how much paper

you think you might need on one side of the family.

I'm hoping that two A3 sheets might be enough.

By studying Alistair's birth certificate,

Ryan easily traces the parents - James Alfred Richards

and Margery Watters, who both died many years ago.

Ryan finds no details of any further children

so he moves up the family tree to see if he can find

the aunts and uncles who could be parents of possible beneficiaries.

What I want to focus on today

is the deceased's maternal side of the family.

His mum was called Margery Watters

and it's that Watters family that I'm going to be having a look into.

He soon establishes that Margery's parents were Fred Watters

and Alice Mennear and they married in St Austell in 1904.

By checking the 1911 census and the birth indexes, Ryan discovers

that Alistair's mother Margery was one of eight children.

Four passed away in childhood and another brother, William,

died a bachelor in 1986.

Margery's sister Ivy had one son,

Douglas, who brought the case

to the solicitors. Her other sister,

Mabel, had three children.

It hasn't taken us too long to rule out beneficiaries

on two of the lines. There's another line which does have one heir.

I've verified his claim but the main line of the family

that we're interested in at the moment is that of Mabel Watters.

She married Francis Perryman.

The solicitors are in touch with two of Mabel's children

but there is a granddaughter of Mabel that we need to try and trace.

When he first received this case, Ryan was given the name

Karen Ferguson by Alistair's cousin Douglas, who knew of her existence

but not where she lived.

Through the records, Ryan discovers that Karen married

in Hertfordshire in 1982 and has two children

but, in order to find her, he's getting help

from another colleague, Amy Moyes.

Her name is quite common,

or it is now that she's married into a Ferguson family,

so I've got her name, her husband, she has a couple of children,

so I'm just going to have a look on some of our databases in-house.

Quite often, we'll use social media as one of the many methods

we have to try and locate someone, particularly if we've got a teenager

or one of the heirs has teenage children.

As Amy continues her hunt, Ryan turns his attention

to Alistair's father's side of the family.

The paternal side isn't finished at the moment,

there's still a few people that I need to have a look into.

It looks as though there's four active stems on the paternal side,

not counting the deceased's father,

so there's three aunts and one uncle who have living descendants.

One of those is completed already.

The stem of Richard Richards, we need to try and find heirs on.

Alistair's father, James Richards,

was one of eight children born to Samuel and Catherine.

Like many living in the area,

including Alistair's maternal grandfather, Fred Watters,

James and his brother Richard were employed as clay labourers

in the china clay pits.

China clay initially started its life

in the United Kingdom as THE ingredient to produce porcelain.

As time progressed,

it was found that clay could be used to improve the whiteness

and the smoothness of paper,

it could be used in the manufacturing of paint, rubber,

plastics, sealants, adhesives, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.

So, probably every day, unwittingly,

we either touch or even consume china clay.

As the china clay industry took off, the need for a workforce grew

and a community of small villages emerged around the pits.

The industry has been in Cornwall since 1746, so over 260 years,

and it initially was very modest.

In the year 1800, only 2,000 tonnes were produced

but by 1900 half a million tonnes was being produced.

It was at the turn of the 20th century that Alistair's

maternal grandfather, Fred Watters, was working in the pits,

when it would have been incredibly hard work.

Alistair's grandfather would have come up when everything was

basically handled with a shovel and even the rock was hand-trammed.

It was basically all manual labour.

By the late 1920s, when Alistair's father started work

in the clay pits, working practices had changed.

Really, within the space of a decade almost, we went from

hands-on manual labour to the beginning of mechanisation.

St Dennis is one of 12 clay villages and the so-called clay villages

grew up around the industry and there's a huge sense of community.

The most Cornish of Cornish people will be found

in what we will call Clay Country.

As Ryan gets to work tracking down Alistair's father's family,

Amy has made some headway with her investigation

into Karen Ferguson, the missing heir on Alistair's mother's side.

There is a possible Hertfordshire address for her.

-That would be a recently married daughter.

-Yeah,

maybe she's married, yeah.

We have several databases in-house.

They cross-reference electoral rolls with other sorts of information

and so I used two of those combined to double-check.

It gave me a hit on dates of birth, both for the missing heir

and for her daughter, and the area...

it's an area where the children were born

and the missing heir also married in that area so, to me,

that looks pretty strong as a correct address. Unfortunately,

it's ex-directory - no telephone number.

As Karen can't be reached by phone,

the team send someone to visit her in person.

Hi, Peter?

I was just wondering if you would be free to do a visit today.

Peter George is one of the company's travelling researchers

out on the road.

It's his job to make enquiries, collect certificates

and, crucially, visit and sign up heirs.

Ryan is sending Peter to the address that Amy has tracked down

in the hope of finding Karen.

But as he arrives at the given address...

Well, there's a car there so I may be lucky.

..he still doesn't know for sure if Karen Ferguson lives here.

If no-one is in then his visit could be in vain

and the team at the office would again be under pressure

to track her down.

DOG BARKS

When there's no response at the house, Peter goes next door

to see if he can glean any information from the neighbours.

OK. Will she be back soon, do you think, or...?

There is a car in the drive...

The neighbour confirms that Karen does live here.

Well, the neighbours have told me that she works part-time

and may be back in about half an hour, so...

It's probably worth hanging about but I'll report back

to the office anyway.

And Peter settles down for a key part of his job -

waiting.

Sometimes, the search for heirs can turn up fascinating tales

of long-forgotten family histories

and our next case does just that.

The estate of William Hunt was taken on by Fraser & Fraser's

case manager Ben Cornish back in 2013, when it was advertised on

the Duchy of Lancaster's unclaimed estates list.

The Duchy of Lancaster is very similar to

the Bona Vacantia department of the Treasury Solicitor

but its cases relate solely to people who have passed away

in the County of Lancashire.

When the estate was advertised by the Duchy of Lancaster,

we were given a date, the place of death and the value of the estate.

With the estate valued at an estimated £26,000,

Ben knew that he needed to work fast.

So, armed with William Hunt's date and place of death,

he began his research.

So, this is the death certificate of William Hunt.

It shows his occupation as Roman Catholic priest

and his last known address.

It gives us information such as place of birth,

which is good, so we can find a birth record

for them to be able to do the further genealogy,

and the fact that it mentions that he's a Roman Catholic priest

suggests to us that he wasn't married so we don't have to then

look for records of a William Hunt

potentially marrying somewhere in Manchester.

Father William Hunt passed away on 8th November 2005

in Longsight, Manchester.

He was born just down the road in Salford in 1926.

His lifelong friend, Canon Kevin O'Connor, knew him simply as Bill.

Bill was a very pleasant character

but he was also quite a shy man

and a very quiet individual.

Even from being a youngster, Bill was a devout young man

and displayed all the signs of being serious about

wanting to study for the priesthood.

Bill was quite academic and for that reason

was sent to study at the seminary at the English College in Rome.

William spent six years training at the seminary in Rome

and was ordained into the priesthood in 1951.

On returning to Manchester, he became an assistant priest,

which is when parishioner Jim Rowan first encountered him.

When I first met Father Hunt, I was greatly impressed

by his whole bearing. He was obviously a gentleman.

I would say that Father Hunt's faith was him, basically,

because he was completely selfless.

William served 17 years as assistant priest in three parishes

and finally achieved his dream in 1970,

when he became parish priest of St Anne's Church

in the Manchester district of Ancoats.

Father Hunt epitomised for me what a priest should be -

he was dedicated, he was always available

and, with all the strains and stresses of being a parish priest,

he was always approachable.

You know, and I think that's his testimony.

He was very happy as a priest,

always, and content with what he was doing.

He was a lovely character, Bill.

For heir hunter Ben Cornish, discovering that William Hunt

was a priest placed a seed of doubt in his mind.

When I discovered that the deceased was a priest,

it was a little unusual because I've always been

under the impression that when a Roman Catholic priest passes away,

whatever estate he would have would go back into the Church

so I was a little bit surprised that this was an actual case.

But Ben soon established that the priest's estate would only have gone

to the Church if he had made them the beneficiaries in a will,

and Father Hunt never made a will, so Ben moved forward

with his enquiries, in the knowledge that this was indeed

an intestacy case.

This is the family tree of William Hunt.

We can see here that he's born on 3rd July 1926 in Salford.

We would have initially looked for that birth record

and from that birth record we would have noted his full name

and his mother's maiden name.

When we have that birth record,

we would then look for his parents' marriage.

Now, his parents are William Hunt and Mary Walsh

and they married in 1924 in Barton-upon-Irwell.

As we knew that William Hunt was a Roman Catholic priest,

we assumed that he wasn't married

but that had to be confirmed later on

so we would think there are no...

There's no spouse, there's no children

so we would look for any siblings

from the point of when his parents married forward.

We found two - Joseph Hunt, born in 1928, and Mary A Hunt, born in 1930.

We soon discovered that both Joseph and Mary had passed away in infancy.

His brother Joseph died at the age of seven

and his sister Mary died just days after her birth.

This meant that Ben would now have to search for heirs

through any siblings of Father William's parents,

William Hunt and Mary Walsh.

When we discovered there were no near kin, my heart did sink a bit

because the name Hunt is a very difficult name to research.

It's one of the most common names. And the other name was Walsh,

which equally - although not as common as Hunt -

is still quite a common name.

We had to find the deceased's parents' birth certificates.

Now, on the marriage certificate of the deceased's parents,

we would have their approximate ages and who their fathers were,

so that is something that we will use,

that information we will use to try and find their birth records.

Once we found the father of the deceased's birth certificate,

we were then able to establish who his parents were

and from that point we can see whether there are any brothers

and sisters of the deceased's father.

These descendants would be the heirs under intestacy.

Michael Hunt and Catherine Martin

were the parents of William's father, also called William.

He was the youngest of 11 children in the family.

Ben had found their details on the 1901 Census

but on closer inspection he discovered something quite unexpected.

The census showed was that the deceased's father

had many siblings, and when we tried to find their birth records

we found out that one of them was the illegitimate daughter

of the paternal grandmother.

She was Mary Jane Martin.

Mary Jane Martin was registered as being born to Catherine Martin,

in Barton-upon-Irwell workhouse in 1876.

A workhouse was not the start in life that anyone would have wanted

but it was also not quite as bad an option for a pregnant mother

as it might appear.

It's very easy to think about our own sentiments

about going in to a workhouse and feeling

oppressed, ashamed, lacking in privacy,

but Victorian life could be so challenging that, if you're poor,

pregnant and alone in the 1870s, the prospect of a clean bed,

a reliable meal - albeit not a very tasty one - and a roof

over your head could begin to look like quite an attractive option.

From the mid-19th century, campaigners

including Florence Nightingale pushed for the inclusion

of medical care within workhouses.

Considered by some to be the tentative beginnings of the NHS,

it took many years to implement across the country,

but in 1876,

when a heavily pregnant Catherine Martin

entered Barton-upon-Irwell workhouse,

she knew that she and her baby would be looked after.

Entry to a workhouse specifically for maternity purposes

could make sense, because to have an unattended birth

is very dangerous, but also knowing that you would be attended

by a medical practitioner and that there was a certain set

of structures around you to support you at this particular crisis moment

might have appeared not the worst option that you could encounter.

There was an additional reason for maybe taking the workhouse option

when giving birth.

All medical practitioners in the workhouse were male

and in the mid to late 19th century there was much scaremongering

about the capabilities of female midwives.

Female midwives didn't technically have any training structure

or programme at that time, so it could be the case that

female midwives might solely have been trained on the job, which

was not necessarily a bad form of training - hands-on

practical training can be very useful - but it might be the case

that they hadn't undergone necessarily a course in anatomy,

undertaken any exams or received any organised programme of instruction.

Male midwives would probably have undergone proper medical training.

In order to secure a post as a workhouse medical officer,

you had to have a certain number of certificates to your name,

it could be an array of them but you had to have at least

two forms of qualification to be a workhouse medical officer.

William's grandmother Catherine survived the workhouse

and, for Ben, knowing that the daughter Mary was only half-blood

meant she and her family were not heirs,

as all nine other children were full-blood siblings of William Hunt, Senior.

Once we realised that the deceased's father had so many siblings,

we needed a lot of researchers to try and find what happened to them,

to try and find records for them.

We subsequently found out quite early on that they'd married

into the families of Walker and Chapman,

which are equally as hard names to research.

So Ben and his team had their work cut out

tracing the descendants of all nine of William Hunt, Senior's siblings.

Every year in Britain, thousands of people

get a surprise knock on the door from the heir hunters

but there are still thousands of unsolved cases

on the Treasury Solicitor's Bona Vacantia list,

where heirs need 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 Albert Bidjikian,

who died in Redcliffe, Bristol, on 4th December 2002, aged 70.

He was born on 8th March 1932 in Khartoum

in what was then known as Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.

He was a bachelor.

Next, Joan Pollard,

who died aged 73 in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, on 20th September 2000.

She was also born in Chesterfield on 1st August 1927

and she lived her life as a single woman.

It's not known if she had any children.

Do you remember Joan Pollard?

Do you know anyone that could help solve the cases

of Albert Bidjikian or Joan Pollard?

Perhaps you could be the next of kin -

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

In Hertfordshire, travelling researcher Peter George

is hot on the trail of one of the key heirs

to Alistair Richard's estate.

He's been waiting for two hours outside what he hopes is

Karen Ferguson's house and has just seen someone come home.

Hello, Mrs Ferguson?

Yeah, my name's Peter George.

I represent a company called Finders who are probate genealogists.

Oh, right.

It's an estate we're working on, a man called Alistair Richards.

It's Peter's job to inform potential heirs of a relative's death

but also to confirm their relationship to the deceased

and to encourage them to sign documentation that allows

the heir hunters to help them make their claim on the estate.

Heir-hunting companies make their money by taking a percentage

of the estate from any heirs they find and sign up,

so it's a crucial visit.

From what I understand, your mother was a first cousin of the deceased.

-Is that...

-Yeah.

-Would that be right?

So, if we go back a generation to her parents...

-Mmm.

-Do you know the details of that? Do you know any details there?

So my grandmother had two...

..two sisters and a brother

-and it's one of her sisters was Alistair's mother.

-OK.

Well, he died in May 2012.

Oh, blimey, that long ago?

The timing of Alistair's death comes as a huge surprise to Karen

but once she has time to take it in

and has talked through the paperwork with Peter

she eventually agrees to sign up with the firm.

-Well, nice meeting you, Karen.

-Yes, you too.

-Thanks very much.

-You too, thank you.

-You'll hear from office shortly no doubt.

-All right, lovely.

-Thanks very much.

-Thank you.

-Bye-bye.

You don't think that a long-lost relative is going to...

suddenly pop up into your life.

To receive some money that I didn't know I was going to get is...

you know, is lovely, but at the same time it's bittersweet

because I didn't know the man and it was a shame that he didn't

leave a will and had no children to leave his money to.

It's been a successful day for the team.

But three days later Ryan makes a discovery that threatens

to turn the whole case on its head.

Since we were looking through the certificates that came in,

we've actually established that the deceased appeared to have had

a half-blood sister.

What we like to do is, when we're doing the searches,

to rule out any closer kin,

we do like to do a search for any illegitimate children to the mother.

We know that either parent was just married just the once,

to one another, but we did a Watters birth search

and then we came across this half-blood sister

called Angela Joan Watters, born in 1936,

which was sometime before Margery, the mother,

actually married James, the deceased's father.

Alistair's parents, James Alfred Richards and Margery Watters,

were married in 1951 and Alistair was born in 1953.

His half-sister Angela Joan was born 16 years before him.

We know she was born in 1936 so there's a possibility that

she could still be alive.

Either that or she may have married and had children

so, if any of those instances are found to be true,

then anybody on that bit of the family tree

would take precedence over the other people that we've found,

so basically it's a priority for us now to find out what happened

to the half-blood sister and check whether she had any children.

Ryan is under pressure to find out what has happened

to Alistair's half-sister, Angela.

If she's alive, almost everything that has been done to date,

both in the office and out on the road,

will have been an expensive waste of time.

He calls on a colleague to help search out any useful documentation.

They need to search for any births, deaths or marriages that include

the name Angela Joan Watters.

Luckily, Watters is a fairly unusual surname.

I've searched a couple of our databases, it looks as though

Angela Joan Watters may have died a spinster in 2004.

The death certificate they've found matches the date and place of birth

but the surname is missing a T.

Erm, it looks as though the death may have been registered

under the surname Waters so, I mean, it can happen sometimes if you've got

a surname, you know, for instance, with two Ts in the middle.

The date of birth matches, the area is different.

The family are from the West Country and she appears to have died

in Surrey but everything else looks good.

But Ryan's investigations are not yet over.

Although it looks as though Angela died a spinster,

we just want to double-check all the information that we have,

go back through the residential directories that we have, make sure

that there's no children living with her

or anybody else that may have a claim.

Ryan's colleague Amy Littlechild is quick to find an answer.

Erm, I've checked the residential directories and I've found

-her address.

-OK.

-It looks like she was there from 1983

up to when she passed away in 2004. The only person who looks as if...

there was living there throughout that time was this lady

but she dies in 1995, Gwendolyn.

Ryan can now be sure that Alistair's half-sister Angela had no children

so there are no heirs to be found on her stem of the family tree.

It looks unlikely that we'll send anybody out on this case today,

just for the fact that it looks pretty conclusive that Angela

passed away a spinster without issue so there's no need to do

any additional research into the close next of kin.

This is great news,

as now all the team's previous research still stands

and the 19 beneficiaries are still entitled to their share

of Alistair's £55,000 estate.

But for Karen it's about much more than the money.

What's interesting is both of my uncles

I had lost contact with for 25 years, so as this has happened

they have been in touch, they've managed to find me,

so now we are reunited, which is lovely,

and I haven't seen my cousins for... the same amount of time.

Yeah, so, you know, that's really positive.

Putting this fractured family back in touch

is a key part of the heir hunters' work,

and for Alistair's cousin and beneficiary Douglas

this has been a time to remember his relative and friend.

Alistair was unique cos he helped other people.

Very kind and helpful

and also he could do anything for anybody at any time.

And he would.

In London, Ben Cornish and his team at heir-hunting firm

Fraser & Fraser were busy trying to track down

heirs to the estate of Father William Hunt.

They've discovered that Father Hunt's dad, William,

was one of 11 children -

nine of which were full-blood relatives,

so any of their descendants could be beneficiaries.

But Ben's job was also made more complicated because Father Hunt

died back in 2005, eight years before the estate was released.

So, as this estate was advertised

some years after the deceased actually passed away,

we went looking at the research and tried to find next of kin,

found out that some of the individuals had passed away

after the deceased, meaning that there would be

vested interests in this matter.

A vested interest is where a beneficiary who was still alive

when Father Hunt died has since passed away.

With there being so many vested interests within this case,

we either have to try and find the executors of that individual's estate

if he'd passed away testate and, if not, we'd have to try and find

their next of kin and if something had happened to them, you know,

the chain would have to go on, so it makes our work a little bit harder.

In total, Ben traced 39 heirs on the paternal side of the tree.

One of these was William's cousin once removed, Eric Roughley.

The family I come from is usually, I consider, quite small.

My mother had one brother,

James, which she never spoke to him at all. They had a family row

before I was born, something to do with my grandmother

but she never actually said what.

My father had a brother called Peter who died in 1965.

He had no children so there was just myself, my sister and my parents.

Eric now lives in the Merseyside town of Southport

but was brought up in Manchester.

He didn't know William Hunt but he had come across the surname before.

Where we grew up, there's quite a lot of people called Hunt

and...that was friends with me mother

and sometimes she used to say, "You're related to these people."

They were sometimes mentioned as cousins or something like that.

She never actually said how we were related except,

you know, quite distant.

They all seemed quite old to me as a child

so I didn't really talk to them much but just to say hello to.

Because I come from such a large family,

I know all about me family,

that I can't believe that somebody could come from such a small family

and not know about other relatives that might be out there.

Totally unaware of the size of his extended family,

Eric and his wife Irene are keen to find out more.

I'm very curious about William's life. I've been trying to think of

all sorts of reasons why he would be interesting.

Not knowing enough about that side of the family, it's very curious.

I was checking on the date of his birth to see what he could possibly

be involved in. He was too late to be hung as a murderer

so it can't be that, so...

I'm really keen to know what it is.

Today, Eric and Irene are travelling to Ancoats in Manchester

to find out more about their mystery benefactor.

Well, hopefully, we're going to meet a friend of William's

and he's going to tell us much more about him - flesh him out as a person.

I can't wait.

Let's see what sort of a life he's had and let's hope it's interesting.

They're meeting up with William's lifelong friend,

Canon Kevin O'Connor,

but they have no knowledge of William's Roman Catholic connections.

-Hello, good afternoon.

-How do you do?

-My name's Eric,

-this is Irene.

-Pleased to meet you.

-I'm William's first cousin.

-Canon Kevin O'Connor.

-How do you do?

-Friend of Bill's.

I would be delighted to tell you anything that I can about him.

I'm curious to find out what sort of connection Bill had with this church.

Bill was a Roman Catholic priest.

He was a very good preacher.

He was very clear in what he had to say and he wasn't one who went on

for a long time, he was well able to make the points he wanted to make

clearly and quite briefly.

-I know who you take after now!

-ERIC LAUGHS

That is surprising actually

because all my family are Church of England.

Bill was born a Catholic.

His dad and mother were Catholics.

But I did actually...

I was actually told by my mother that generations back

one of my...I think it was great-great-grandmother

-married an Irishman...

-Mmm.

-..and they had children

who were brought up as Catholics and then the Irishman died

and then they have them re-baptised in the Church of England

in Manchester Cathedral.

Did Bill ever talk about his parents?

Well, I met his mother and father a few times.

They were straightforward, simple, working-class people, really.

Can you tell me what he was like as a priest?

Well, people liked Bill and so he made friends quite easily,

although underneath all that he was quite a shy person,

but he blossomed as a priest and was able to mix quite freely

and was popular with fellow priests as well as parishioners.

But Father Hunt was not just a parish priest here at St Anne's -

he had a much more solid involvement in its foundations.

When Bill came here, the whole area was being rebuilt

and the diocese decided that the old church should be pulled down

and that they would provide a new church

and Bill was responsible for the building of this new church here.

Father Hunt was appointed parish priest

at St Anne's Church in April 1970.

When Bill arrived in Ancoats,

it was quite a vibrant area with a large Catholic population

but it was also an area that was decaying and full of slums.

-JIM ROWAN:

-Ancoats when I was a mere...

a schoolboy, was the classic Coronation Street set-up

of back-to-back houses, no bathrooms,

in our instance, no electricity - we used to admire people

that had electricity, so it really was an impoverished area.

But Ancoats hadn't always been so downtrodden.

In the 19th century, the area's cotton spinning mills

were a major part of the Lancashire cotton industry boom.

Cotton developed in Lancashire, and, through that, the mills, because of a combination of factors.

Initially, there was

available water power that was unused for other things

so that was great for the initial rural mills.

You also had busy ports, you had centres of population,

and one of the key components was the weather.

Cotton needs to have a fairly humid and moist atmosphere

to be able to work it.

If it's too dry, it will just break and it becomes unworkable.

Contrary to popular opinion,

Manchester and the North West hasn't got any more rain than anywhere else

but it falls as drizzle or showers rather than as persistent rain

so we get it over more days

and from a mill perspective that's exactly what you want.

Manchester had so many cotton mills that it became known as the Cottonopolis.

Many of those mills were in Ancoats,

which by 1815 was the most populated district of Manchester.

Cotton's always been an industry where you can have both

male and female, boys and girls, so it's been very adaptable

to circumstances and the demographics of each of the towns it goes into.

So those that are first entering the industry are doing the basic jobs,

they're, sort of, helping out a spinner or helping out

a weaver, and gradually they learn the skills of the trade through,

if you like, a sort of apprenticeship.

So, by the time they hit 20, 22, something like that,

they've got a set number of years of experience

and a few skills, so gradually they can work their way up the ladder

and get slightly better paid employment. Probably, by the time

they're in their late 20s, they're a very productive senior member of the workforce.

The start of the 20th century was when the industry was most successful.

1913 was the peak of the industry.

There were about 624,000 people employed in the textile industry

in Lancashire, and at that point

Lancashire was producing eight billion yards of fabric.

By value it was 25% of British exports, and in terms of production

it was 85% of the world's cotton manufacture.

By 1930, that had shrunk to 3.5 billion yards.

Both the First and Second World Wars took their toll on the industry,

as demand for cotton fell.

As the mills closed, people moved out of Ancoats in search of work

so by the 1950s the death knell had been struck

for both the industry and the area.

The big issue, really, with Lancashire

is, because traditionally the textile industry was unchallenged,

the entrepreneurs were a little bit complacent

so they never really modernised at the rate they should have done,

they were always using old machinery.

I think their mantra probably was, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Eventually, that goes against you

because the foreign competition are continuing to modernise

all the way through, they're looking at the processes,

they're making more efficient, more productive, faster machines,

so they're able then to contract Lancashire's traditional markets

and eventually also affect the domestic market,

the British domestic market.

1958 is a significant date because, for the first time then,

Britain is importing more cotton manufactured goods

than it's making itself, so that really is a crucial date

and there's no recovery from that point.

So, in the '60s and '70s,

you're getting on average one mill a week closing in Lancashire.

It was just as the cotton industry was on its last legs

that Father Hunt arrived in Ancoats.

He offered advice and support to those struggling to survive

in the area and his church remained a place of solace for those most in need.

Well, here's the foundation stone and the date when the church was opened

and there's Bill's name carved for evermore

on the foundation stone,

"Father William Hunt,"

and at that stage he was not only parish priest here,

he was the dean of the area.

He was the rural dean.

Father Hunt opened the new church in 1978

and as people moved into Ancoats

he worked hard to bring them in to his congregation.

The church itself was very important to Bill, he was very proud of it.

As a priest, was Bill a popular person with his congregation?

Bill was a very caring priest

and the love that he had as a priest was extended beyond God,

if you like, to all those that he came into contact with.

-What sort of funeral did he have? Was it a big occasion?

-Well,

it was a huge funeral and even though he didn't have a wife or children,

when he died, the people who had known him as their parish priest

and had loved him all flocked to his funeral.

Father William Hunt may have died on 8th November 2005

but his memory will now remain not just in this building

but in the minds of his long-lost relatives.

It's really amazing, being here in front of this church,

because he built it. It's his church and he was responsible for it

and to find out one of my family has actually done something like this is amazing.

For your beliefs...

To give up so much for your beliefs...

is true dedication, isn't it?