Daniel Radcliffe's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? aired on Monday, starting the series off with high levels of drama.
Having made their fortune in the jewellery trade, Daniel Radcliffe's ancestors were doing well in Hatton Garden. Until the robberies started.
Heists at Hatton Garden are nothing new - a high level of gold and jewels concentrated in a fairly small area are always going to be a target.
After about the third robbery, however, the police began to suspect Daniel's ancestor of insurance fraud, and became convinced that this was the case on circumstantial grounds, highly coloured by their prejudice.
Daniel's ancestors were Jewish. And the anti-Semitic sentiments of the 1930s meant that the fact that the family were Jewish was taken to be evidence against them.
Hopefully, in modern Britain, any informant's letter that says someone must be committing fraud because they are Jewish would be entirely written off as bigoted. Sad to say, in the 1930s, the police didn't much care if the Jewish jeweller had legitimately lost his diamonds and gold, and the fraud explanation seemed to be an easy one for them to fall back on.
That's not to say that financial desperation hadn't driven Daniel's ancestors to fraud, as he himself admits. But the justice system was very clearly stacked against them.
The story ends even more sadly, with the distressing suicide note of Daniel's ancestor. (Viewer discretion is definitely advised with this episode.)
I've come across suicide more than once when researching customers' family histories. It's never an easy thing to explain, and deciding how to present the information and the circumstances surrounding the events takes a level of metaphorical tightrope-walking that can be very tricky to get right. (Hopefully I manage it.)
Daniel Radcliffe's episode also includes stories of the First World War, and plenty of people who have a particular look on their face - a look that says, 'Oh my God, I just met Harry Potter!'
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