28/11/2011 Inside Out North West

Hello. This week, I am in Blackpool where the search for a new source

of energy has been blamed for a series of earthquakes. On the

programme: coming to a community near you. Just how does fracking

for natural gas change lives? has been fantastic. I hope it lasts

forever. Art or vandalism? We investigate the true cost of

graffiti in the north-west. They are using a valuable resource from

the council. That money could be spent elsewhere on vital services.

And fact or fiction? Paul McGann asks of whether Hitler really did

come to Liverpool. Why would he want to come? He was fleeing the

It is a controversial process that has led to concerns over safety and

damage to the environment here on the Lancashire coast. Fracking, a

method of extracting gas from shale rock deep underground, could

transform this area it plans to drill for hundreds of Wells corps

ahead. The industry say it is safe and well creates jobs and money.

Peter Marshall has been to Pennsylvania to find out what we

can all expect from a fracking inspired gas brush.

-- rush. I have gas in my water. What has fracking done to this

area? It is reaping it. -- raping it. I have never thought about

moving anywhere else until resume a. Anyone that is in business welcomes

it because it has been nothing but a boom. It has taken Bradford

County into a whole new time in its history. There is no going back.

Welcome to Pennsylvania of. A place that has seen more fracking for gas

than any other place on the planet. coast might fare under a gas Rush,

there is no better place to search for answers. This bowl holds

massive amounts of natural gas. It is being freed by horizontal

drilling and fracking. Millions of gallons of water, along with sand

and chemicals, injected at high pressure to force gas out. This is

the seat of the county. They have healed with this for nearly four

years. Has it been good for you? has bought me a new car. I am doing

good! This is not the little towns -- the little town made used to be.

Rents have doubled and trebled. That is good if you are a landlord,

but bad if you were trying to find a place to lay up. For me, it is

bad because it ruins the environment. We have had a water

tested four times. It is fine. I have no problem with fracking.

Lancashire, they forecast at between 208 hundred wells could be

drilled in the future. In Bradford County, they have already drilled

600. This woman became ill from barium poisoning from drinking

water soon after a well was drilled close to home. An investigation

decided drilling was not to blame and the contamination was pre-

existing. But she believes it is too much of a coincidence.

Literally, the rig went up behind my house and within a fortnight my

hair started falling out. If I was an elderly woman and didn't get my

water tested, doctors have said I would have been dead on the floor.

Pre-existing pollution by naturally occurring elements is a common

defence by gas companies. And one that is rejected by opponents of

the industry. This man's party piece is setting fire to his water.

He says it became contaminated with me fame after he least his land for

drilling. He insists it was fined four decades previously. Five

months after the drilling started, we notice bobbles and the water. We

noticed the pipes rattling. You can see the water bubbling now. It is

frightening. It was at the beginning. Now I have got used to

it. This is just a hose pipe feeding water into this dark and

the methane in there is gathering and venting out. There you go. The

company involved has installed ventilation pipes. For now, the

supply his drinking water. They deny any responsibility, saying the

area has a history of naturally occurring the theme. All the time I

was here, it didn't naturally a car. One academic study has now shown

methane concentration in drinking water increases near drilling site.

Companies say that opponents are a vocal minority. For many, it has

created fortune has. It has been fantastic. I hope it lasts forever,

to be honest with you. These hotels are booming. This hotel was built

pure and simple on the back of gas industry? It was. Simply because we

saw the industry's you would continue. We would not have built

this industry -- hotel if it had not been for this industry. It has

been blocked out solid for two years by one company. It is like

Christmas every day. We have been extremely fortunate. Bradford

County also has the lowest unemployment rate in the state. The

growth in gas rendering it to some extent recession per if. These are

high pressure -- highly paid labour jobs. You could see a high-school

graduate leave school without an education and they could see a

salary of $70,000 a year. That is very substantial. Hit main street

and you will see how the gas industry has inspired business.

These are miniatures of the actual drill bits the use for drilling.

This is to prevent plant. Do they sell well? Yes. -- preven blow-outs.

We sell a lot of this jewellery for local people who are getting

royalties. Are they happy to have the industry here? Berry. Anyone

who is in business welcomes this. It is nothing but a boom for the

economy. -- they are very happy. Gas industry traffic has

industrialised the place. Everyday life is happy -- everyday life is

different. There is talk of potential accidents. Special

response teams have been on the scene are round-the-clock. This

reporter saw first-hand the leak of thousands of gallons of fracking

fluid from a site in a local township. It did so much to bring

Glyn White to what could go wrong. It was spilling so quickly that

they could not stop it. It made its way quickly into the -- into a

nearby tributary which feeds a river. A report said that accident

had no lasting environmental impact. The gas companies say there will

always be accidents, just like there are on the roads. But no one

talks about banning driving. There is spin on both sides of the

argument. It is either an environmental catastrophe or an

answer to future energy needs. In Lancashire, the firm behind test

drilling his Cuadrilla. People are concerned about contamination of

drinking water. There have not been any cases in Pennsylvania of that

happening. Fracking changes lives. If it does indeed become commercial

on the Fylde coast, daily life will be different, for better and for

worse. Whatever is under this ground and they are producing, I

hope there is a lot there. It has just been wonderful. I hate it here.

Yet you have lived here all your life? I never thought about moving

anywhere else. Until recently. Honestly, I don't want to bring my

son up in this area. Coming up, the stories surrounding

Hitler and Liverpool. Adolf Hitler lived on Upper Stanmore Street, 50

yards that way. There is a German church 50 yards that way. This part

that is right in between the middle. Don't tell me that he never called

in for a half-pint on his way home from church!

Graffiti is a problem in the north- west. We all know that we're facing

cuts to our local services - library closures and fortnightly

bin collections have got us hot under the collar. Here on Inside

Out we've been adding up the cost of graffiti removal, and as Jemma

Gofton found out, the results are Graffiti, street art, vandalism,

criminal damage. Call it what you like, one thing's for certain -

there's a lot of it about. In Northern Ireland, the murals

reflecting the sectarian troubles are now a tourist industry, and

here there's great excitement over Banksy's forays into the North West.

But one man's street art is another's mindless vandalism, and

sites like this are all too common across our region. And it's costing

us a fortune. Our research at Inside Out North West puts the bill

at cleaning up graffiti at a staggering �2 million. Here in

Rochdale, the council has a zero tolerance approach to graffiti - as

soon as it's reported, it's removed within 24 hours. I've not seen

anything that resembles artwork. It tends to be tags, it tends to be

names, racist or offensive and nothing that in my opinion is

anything that would constitute art. What would you say to these people?

They're using a valuable resource from the council in view of the

recent efficiencies, and that money could be spent elsewhere on other

vital services. Does graffiti breed graffiti? Without question. Where

there is no graffiti, you are far less likely to see any. Then there

are areas we go to where there's been graffiti for years and it's

added to on a regular basis. there a piece of graffiti where you

think "I'm loath to remove it, it's a nice piece of art"? Occasionally

you might come across something where you think it's art, but at

the end of the day, our instruction from the council is it's their

Graffiti is nothing new, and here at Lancaster Castle they've

discovered some scratchings in stone that date back more than 200

years. Down in the old cells, you can see the names of former

prisoners like highwayman William Garner. Is this early graffiti?

80 is definitely early graffiti. I suspect that graffiti began as

scratchings. Some person in the dim mists of time discovered that if

you scratch one rock with another you get graffiti, and the term

graffiti is derived from the Latin Modern graffiti, influenced by

American hip hop, hit the UK in the mid '80s and shows no sign of

losing its appeal. Graffiti artists Crec and Onek, who

wants to hide his identity, have both been to prison for spray-

painting trains in the past. This is one of the first names I saw

repeated on the railway lines, this was the first tag I ever saw and I

understood. What are you expressing that you couldn't express on

canvas? It doesn't suit the canvas like it suits her trainer or a wall.

The whole nature of that some culture, if you get into the game

if painting illegal graffiti, you come -- become part of a society.

It is a very exclusive world. If you make a name for yourself in

that, you become sort of addicted to keeping up appearances, hearing

reports back. The north-west is spending �2

million the year on cleaning up graffiti. It can't cost as much as

they say. The train companies say it costs �4,000 to clean up the

train, but it takes two minutes. Wenders graffiti stop being

criminal damage and start becoming art?

I guess when it is on a gallery wall were the �2,000 price tag.

Abstract artist Danny Cawley has sold hundreds of canvasses, and

counts musicians and footballers among his clients. He incorporates

techniques he learnt as a graffiti artist into his work. When we did

graffiti pieces it was spray paint. When we were tagging it was perm

pens. I get a much better buzz from this, because I don't have to look

over my shoulder. There is more money in this. There was no money

in graffiti apart from fines, which was going the other way.

As graffiti is arguably more popular than ever and the councils

are spending a fortune removing it, what's being done to catch those

responsible? Well, here in Poynton the police came up with a novel bit

of detective work. We spoke to the local schools to ask who was

putting graffiti tax on textbooks. They gave us a couple of names of

people who are putting graffiti on their textbooks. That is a great

piece of evidence. We have their tag, and it is also next to their

name on the textbook. See you can completely prove that that person

has done that tag. What were the repercussions? We went through a

process known as restorative justice. They were asked for �150

each to help towards the clean-up costs. Some people might suggest

that police time could be better spent. If I took something that was

dear to them, like their mobile phone, and etched my name on it, I

don't think they would see that as a work of art. I think they would

There are very few legal graffiti walls in the North West where you

can paint without fear of being arrested. One solution is a street

art festival like this one in Accrington. I think people's

reservations are that you are teaching these kids a skill that

they will then use on bus stops. When we come into a workshop, we

teach them the health and safety and the legality, and how to do it

properly. That is, work on your designs on paper, and put it on to

her legalised wall. Come to a workshop and learn about it. If we

had more legal walls, young people would go away and learn from their

peers, people they would like to aspire to.

And who knows, maybe the young people learning today will be the

art sensations of tomorrow. At the end of the day, a lot of the

artists just want to get their art out there. It amazes me that a lot

of the councils think "We've found a Banksy" and they're preserving it.

They've wiped so many Banksy pieces away without even realising it, and

look what's happened now. This is the whole point, there's two sides

Britain's coastline was a great defensive against its enemies

during World War Two, but many years before, some claim a younger

Adolf Hitler spent time living just on the coast in Liverpool. It is an

unlikely tale, but one that just won't go away. Paul McGann has been

back to his home town to find out We love a good tale in Liverpool. 1

I was taller, they said there were leprechauns in the park, and we

heard that John Lennon had met the devil. But the one that tops the

lot is that Adolf Hitler used to walk this very street. His brother

definitely did. Alois Hitler was actually Adolf's

elder half-brother. They had the same father but different mothers.

In 1909, Alois travelled from Austria to Ireland, where he fell

in love with 17-year-old Bridget Dowling. They ran away to London,

got married, and then settled in Liverpool, where their only son was

born. This is William Patrick Hitler's birth certificate,

registered in Toxteth Park in 1911. It shows the family are living in a

rented flat. And that flat was on Upper Stanhope Street in Toxteth.

It was a typical Liverpool terrace. They lived in number 102, which was

on the corner of Berkley Street. But I soon discovered the flat

where the young Hitler family lived no longer exists. The street, as

they knew it, has long gone ironically much of it demolished by

German bombs, years after they'd left. The story goes that the man

who sent those bombers over actually lived just over there for

about five months when he was a The claim that Hitler came to

Liverpool from November 1912 to April 1913 appears in memoirs

written by Adolf's sister-in-law Bridget. The memoirs were written

in the 1940s, but only came to light in New York in the early

1970s. This was manna from heaven. It was unbelievable. The man who

broke the story back in 1973 was Mike Unger, then Deputy Editor of

the Liverpool Daily Post. It's a story which has stayed with him

ever since and he's now published a new version of the memoirs. While

are you so fascinated by the story? It was a great story. When we are

convinced that it was true? I think the research recently has shown

that. I didn't know whether it was true when we first published it, to

be honest, but bits-and-pieces have come into being, that make you

think that this is true. Why did he come? He didn't want to join the

Austrian army. He was fleeing the draft. The Austrian officials were

getting closer to him, and he decided to get out.

Mike has yet to hear a convincing argument against Bridget's claims.

There is no official evidence, but all of the circumstantial evidence

would indicate that it is absolutely true that Adolf lived in

Liverpool. The story is complicated by

Liverpool novelist Beryl Bainbridge, who wrote a novel and then a TV

play on the subject for the BBC. Both have helped blur the line

between fact and fiction, further adding to the legend which has

taken on a life of its own in Liverpool.

My next piece of key research was done "down the pub" Peter

Kavanagh's would have been the Hitlers' local in Toxteth.

story is that he was an ever Tony in. Imagine that, Hitler was a blue.

- Mike he supported Everton. I have been here quite a long time, and it

was said he used to sit here in the snug and tell stories. It was said

that he came in here and sat in the snug when he was visiting his

family in Liverpool. If that is a myth, or a legend, or the truth,

absolutely. So did Hitler walk the streets of Liverpool? Did he take a

job at the Adelphi, as one legend suggests? And did he walk up

Renshaw Street to St Luke's, decades before his own planes made

it the famous bombed-out church? Not everyone is convinced by

Bridget Hitler's memoirs. Professor Frank McDonough has written

countless books on Adolf and the Third Reich. He's a Scouser, but

he's also a historian. obviously thought of it as a way of

making some money. He was at that time the most famous man in the

world when she wrote it, and she probably would have written a kiss-

and-tell now. But then, it was something juicy, something to get

some interest in Britain. So she comes up with this manufactured

story, Hitler came to Liverpool. And also we have to go back to

Vienna and look at the evidence there. Hitler had to fill out a

police registration form every year that he lived there, and he felt

there might from February 1910 to May 1914, and he gave a specific

address, which was a men's lodging house. Then we have got him also in

this lodging house on a specific date being seen by two eyewitnesses.

That is strong evidence for him being in this Other Place, in

Vienna. And also, he didn't just have to get out of Austria. He also

had to get to one of the port to come to Liverpool. There are

records from passenger lists, from Hamburg or Rotterdam. He should

show upon one of those if he came to Liverpool. There is no record of

that, or back. And Hitler rambled on and the Second World War, sat

around with his generals, and at no point, it did he ever say,

Liverpool is getting bombed, I used to live there! The fiction is much

more interesting. I am depressed now!

Mike Unger has answers to all of Frank's points, but one thing

convinces him more than anything that the story is true. There are

lots of things in the memoirs that only a close member of the family

could no, and if she was making it up to sell for money, which she

wasn't, she would have embellished it far more than she did. The story

is so trivial, so trite, so banal, you couldn't make it up.

So what became of everyone in this amazing tale? Alois went back to

Germany in 1914, leaving Bridget to fend for herself with young William.

They eventually sailed to America as war was breaking in 1939.

William had four sons. Three are still alive and living in Long

Island under a new surname. They all vowed never to have children so

One thing which won't die is this story. One of the regulars at Peter

Kavanagh's has written a new play called Adolf In Toxteth. Expect it

to be in keeping with the spirit of Adolf Hitler lived on Upper

Stanhope Street, which is 50 yards that way. There is a church 50

yards the other way. This pub lies right slap bang in the middle.

Don't tell me he never called in for a half on his way home from

Services it, that is Adolf Hitler's seat. It is a tall tale, but it is

a Liverpool tile. And for me, until somebody produces irrefutable proof