Who Do You Think You Are? - Claire Foy

Actress Claire Foy is perhaps, appropriately, best known for playing historical figures in period dramas.

And while none of the family members who featured in her episode of WDYTYA? on Thursday were of the ranks of nobility - unlike Andrew Lloyd Webber last week - their stories were definitely drama-worthy.

There was tragedy in her maternal line - beginning with her charming Irish grandfather having lost his father at a young age in a motorbike accident.

That great-grandfather had, himself, lost his own father to a tragic accident.

It was this great-great-grandfather's accident that Claire turned to first - in England, rather than Ireland, to the site of a military training exercise which went terribly wrong, leading to the drowning of several men in a treacherous stretch of river.

Perhaps most heart-breaking was how close rescue could have been - the bank where their bodies came to rest being only a short distance downstream from the point where they went into the water.

On her paternal line, Claire turned to her father's biological family - the Foy family being his adopted line.

Moving further back in this line, Claire discovered an Irish veteran of the British army, who settled in Manchester.

She learned that he and his brother were arrested in Manchester in 1867 following an attack on a police van carrying prominent Fenian prisoners, during which a policeman guarding the prisoner transport, a Sergeant Charles Brett, was killed.

The Fenians, also known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood, were a movement fighting - often via violent means - for home rule in Ireland.

Over 40 men were arrested in the days following the murder of Sergeant Brett.

28 men were charged with joint enterprise murder - which did not require the accused individual to have actually shot Sergeant Brett, but only that they were involved in the violent disorder that resulted in Brett's death; at the time this carried the death penalty.

To begin with, the case against Claire's relatives seemed suspicious, but as she learned more and more about the circumstances, the question became whether they were guilty... or simply Irish.

The addition of a police sketch artist to this episode was really quite entertaining, and added more realness to the story of these two men, on trial for their lives.

It's definitely something that the shows producers should consider incorporating in future episodes, where appropriate.

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