Exactly 100 years ago, an investigation began that led to changes
that still affect us today.
An investigation into the lives of people trapped in poverty, without work.
Reading what my ancestors had done, and the struggle in that time,
was just something that, er...
..was amazing, really.
A century later, unemployment is still with us.
..When do we want it? Now!
People are still living on the margins.
It's Friday. It's been raining for the third night on the trot.
We have a welfare state our great-grandparents would have dreamed of.
Has that brought its own problems?
You get that used to the safety net, you're scared to leave it.
In this series, we're going to look at how much has really changed
and how we got to where we are today.
We dig deep into the history of the British family.
The archeology that you're interested in is further out here.
This is the story of all our working lives over the last 100 years.
It's a journey of hope... That's a eureka moment.
..and conflict.
ANGRY SHOUTING
And, for one family, an amazing detective story
that leads from absolute poverty to undreamed of success.
Our story starts exactly 100 years ago
in the city of York during the summer of 1910.
That year, like today, Britain was emerging from recession.
Back then, it left many families on the edge of destitution.
But a century ago, something happened here that was unique.
These families were asked to describe their lives.
It was research that gave a voice to the voiceless.
MAN: Up at five. Walked round and round the town until 12.
Nothing doing anywhere so I was fairly sick of walking about.
No breakfast, no tea and no supper. Went to bed around 7.30.
It brings home to you the starvation level existence,
the hand-to-mouth level existence.
Waking up every morning and not knowing by that evening
whether they had enough to eat
to keep them going the next day.
And it's happening in your home city. It's astonishing.
This was a ground-breaking study, and the man behind it
was one of the richest and most powerful in the city.
Seebohm Rowntree was the third generation of the chocolate dynasty.
He was wealthy and successful, but what really drove him
was a passion to improve the life of the common man.
You cannot live in a town like York,
with its poverty, its intemperance, its vice,
without a sense of responsibility being, from time to time, borne in upon you.
What part are YOU going to play as a citizen?
In 1900, Rowntree had written an investigation into poverty in York.
He said more than a quarter of the people
lived in unacceptable conditions.
That this was in a wealthy city like York
made its revelations particularly shocking.
He was shining a very bright light on something that was hidden.
Most people didn't know that people were living in those conditions.
He drew attention of the highest people in the land. That was a powerful message.
The book was read widely
and influenced the creation of the welfare state.
Winston Churchill, already an influential figure,
said Rowntree's findings made his hair stand on end.
"I see little glory," he added,
"in an empire which can rule the waves but is unable to flush its sewers."
In 1910, Seebohm Rowntree went further.
His study on unemployment would depend on first-hand accounts.
The poor would speak for themselves.
Rowntree wanted to know why people were out of work and how they were surviving.
So, that summer, the work began.
This is the Yorkshire Evening Press from Tuesday June 7 1910.
This is the local paper.
And the news on that day?
There was an earthquake Italy and an uprising in Mexico.
Local news was a bit quiet.
There was a car crash on the Harrogate road.
But this was a big day for York because June 7 1910
is when Rowntree started his survey.
The first thing Rowntree needed to know
was who was working and who wasn't.
He dispatched a team of 60 researchers to knock on the door
of every working-class home in York.
Each person without work was interviewed.
Some were selected for more detailed research -
what they were doing to find work, how they lived, even what they ate.
All part of an attempt to tell the human story behind the numbers.
This room was Seebohm Rowntree's office,
where he coordinated the research from.
It looks over the garden.
You can imagine it 100 years ago -
the walls covered in maps of York of where researchers had been.
Researchers coming back with more information that they'd gathered.
It's the detail and the data that marks this book out.
This table is a list of people who've lost their jobs
and the reasons they're out of work.
We have a "confectioner's labourer"
who would have worked in the chocolate industry,
described as "a fairly good worker
"but a heavy drinker".
His current occupation is a hawker. He sells things on the street.
Everyone thinks of York as an attractive,
well-preserved middle-class medieval city.
He opens a window on the underbelly of the city
and shows that York is like a lot of the other industrial cities.
It's a microcosm of what's going on with the unemployed in Edwardian England.
When the research was finished, Rowntree said he's uncovered a national disgrace.
The power is in the detail.
It is a unique glimpse into our history.
And one family stand out from the report.
They were the Nevinsons.
They lived in a small house on the outskirts of York.
Mr Nevinson hadn't worked regularly for years and the family were desperate.
We know what their life was like because Mr Nevinson kept a diary.
This is how he describes looking for work in July 1910.
Sunday 10th July.
Up at 4am and went round town to see if I could find anything that had been lost.
Couldn't see anything so I came home at 7am.
Had breakfast consisting of jam and bread.
Went to bed until 1pm.
Rowntree's background was in science.
He was interested in the link between diet and health.
The Nevinsons kept a diary of what they ate.
Monday, breakfast - tea, bread and margarine.
Dinner - tea, bread and margarine.
Tuesday, breakfast - tea, bread and jam.
Dinner - tea, three stale buns.
Sunday, breakfast - tea, kippers, bread.
Dinner, three pennyworth of meat pieces boiled with potatoes.
Tea - bread and margarine, onions.
The family were eating a third of the calories they needed.
The diary also showed that they were in a poverty trap.
A life without work meant a life with debt.
They are in arrears of rent and have a heavy bill at the corner shop.
Until that is paid off, the family will continue to live almost entirely on bread and margarine.
When I read Mr Nevinson's story, I felt a link with him.
I'm from Yorkshire.
I know the places that he was going to to look for work and the distances that he was covering.
I got a real sense of just how desperate he was to find a job.
The testimony of the neighbourhood
is that the Nevinsons are a sober, decent, well-living family,
always eager for and willing to do any kind of work,
however poorly paid.
Mrs Nevinson feels the heat, being tall and very stout,
with a face radiating good nature and even hope.
How she achieves her expression or her weight is a mystery.
For the wolf which many contrive to keep outside the door
crosses the threshold of the Nevinsons' pretty continually.
This is absolutely shocking,
just how precarious people's lives were.
You don't get any understanding unless you "hear" it in the voices of the people themselves.
"Nothing is against the Nevinsons but bad luck," say the neighbours.
They have had a very large family but, as Mrs Nevinson remarked,
"The undertaker has buried them a lot."
Mrs Nevinson had an astonishing 22 children,
but only five survived infancy.
The diary is a glimpse of what it was like to fight for survival.
The parish had a duty to provide food for the children of the poor,
but there were no benefits as we think of them today.
If the conditions we found in York
approximate even roughly to those in other towns up and down the country,
they point to a social evil, appalling in its magnitude.
It is a terrible blot on the face of the richest country in the world.
The Nevinsons' and Rowntree's work
changed the way we think about unemployment and poverty.
Benefits that we all enjoy can be traced back to what he found on these streets 100 years ago.
We're going to attempt something that's never been tried before - to track down this crucial family.
Where are the descendants of the Nevinsons now? What happened to them?
If we find them, what will that tell us about all of our families,
about the journey of ordinary working people over a century?
We are setting ourselves an enormous task.
All we know about the Nevinsons is their name
and the few details in that diary.
We'll need more than that, so where do we begin?
To start with, we target the archives, the parish and city records of 1910.
We head to the Borthwick Institute in York,
where some local records of 100 years ago are kept.
As soon as we start, the scale of the challenge becomes apparent.
These are the parish records
from about the time that the diaries were produced.
They're for the areas of Layerthorpe and Hungate, the poor areas of York,
and are likely to be where our families lived.
So far, we've had no breakthrough, despite all our searches.
We can't find the Nevinsons.
It's hard work. Census returns, electoral rolls, housing surveys all draw blank.
So we broaden our search and spend days scouring files
not only in York, but at the Public Record Office in London.
Still we have no success.
Time to call in the experts.
York's Family History Society are archive detectives
who specialise in finding lost branches of a family tree.
Maybe they can spot clues that we are missing.
You know about our search, but we've not had much success.
It's surprising given that, in the book, there's quite a lot of detail.
Pam and David have an impressive track record at forensically searching records.
Maybe they can help find this elusive family from a century ago.
There's quite a clear description of where they lived.
"The Nevinsons live in a very small four-roomed house in a small street.
"Fortunately, it's situated on the outskirts of the city, on pretty high ground."
You get a real feel for where they are. Has this been a help? No.
Good! It seems like there was a lot in there!
There is an awful lot in there.
But to find a very small four-roomed house in a small street
on the outskirts of the city, I have no idea where we could start.
Wasn't Nevinson a pretty big clue?
What have you done to track down the Nevinson name?
On the 1911 census I found a Nevison, not Nevinson. There's no Nevinson.
So it's difficult, this research,
even though it does give a lot of information in the survey.
It's very little when it comes down to it. David, where do we go now?
Well, I think that we're coming to the conclusion
that the names for not only the Nevinsons,
but for all the families, are pseudonyms.
If we work on that assumption,
then it's going to be a bit of a long job!
If the names have been changed,
finding the Nevinsons is going to be really hard.
But there's one last hope - York's cemetery.
Wherever you lived in York,
there was only one place you went to when you died.
There are 123,000 people buried here.
Historians have spent 16 years entering the names into a database.
Maybe this is our final chance.
We can look in our database for anybody of that name. Nevinson.
PAM: Ah! Nobody.
What do you think, Hugh?
It's a blow that we haven't got Mr Nevinson in your system, therefore in that cemetery.
Is it the end of the line? It's the end of the line for that surname.
That lends weight to the fact that these are pseudonyms.
We've got to look for other clues that might lead us to the family.
What do you think, David? Well, there's always hope.
That's the spirit! We aren't going to give up just yet.
We can only conclude their names were changed,
probably to protect the family's privacy.
But what about Rowntree's original research notes?
It turns out we can't even go back to them.
We discover they were burned when he moved from York in the 1930s.
So if Mr Nevinson isn't really called Mr Nevinson
and the paperwork is all gone, how on earth are we to track him down?
That book and those diaries are full of clues.
There must be something we've missed.
What about the man behind all this research?
Perhaps the key to solving our mystery is somewhere in the life of Seebohm Rowntree.
Rowntree's was a company with its history and its success
rooted in York.
We're in the heart of the city.
One of York's main shopping streets is across the end here.
We're here because of this building.
From inside here sprang a British institution.
This place now might be a pizza restaurant
but back in 1850, this was Joseph Rowntree's shop.
He was a grocer and he imported tea and he'd just started selling cocoa.
He had a number of apprentices. Let me introduce you to three.
George Cadbury, Lewis Fry and his son, Joseph Rowntree.
Three big names from British chocolate worked here as young men.
An industry started in this shop.
And that industry was thriving by the time Seebohm came along.
He was the son of Joseph Rowntree, the young apprentice.
The family were Quakers.
Their faith deeply influenced how the company was run,
and every aspect of their lives.
Seebohm went to Bootham, the Quaker school in York.
This is the area he would recognise.
What he learned here influenced everything he did later in life.
Help me with this idea of what it is to be a Quaker, the faith.
What does that mean?
It's a branch of Christianity that believes in the simple form of faith
and the idea that there is that of God in every person.
That would have underpinned the way that the school was operated,
its plainness in speech and language,
and plainness in the way that everyday life was conducted.
From school, it was into the family firm.
When his father retired, he became chairman.
Rowntree's was one of the biggest factories in the city,
employing more than 10,000 people.
Seebohm Rowntree himself is emerging from the shadows.
He was not originally intended to take over the family firm.
His elder brother died and Seebohm stepped in.
His interest was social policy and social affairs.
It was part of Rowntree's Quaker background to present what he found without judgment.
He was meticulous in his attention to detail.
He pushed his researchers to be accurate
in reporting what they observed.
The book is packed full of raw data about York's unemployed
and it gives precise information, not only about Mr Nevinson
but about his family as well.
Maybe there's something there.
This is how they are described.
One of the children is a delicate girl of 20,
who has worked in various factories, but always left through ill health.
She sits by the fire, inactive, while her mother bustles to and fro.
She looks more like death than life,
yet she is to be married in a few weeks to a man whose employment is quite fitful and precarious.
The other is a lad of 12, undersized but fairly healthy.
Another child, the youngest, is at the Blind School
but comes home for holidays.
A daughter who went to a school for the blind!
Could this be the clue we've been looking for?
In the early 1900s, there was a famous Blind School in the city.
It featured in an early film about York.
Time to go back to our investigators.
We meet at the Blind School itself, now part of the University of York.
If this is to be trusted and we can believe what's in here,
we've got this young girl who's blind,
at this school in the centre of York.
We know that she's approximately ten or 11.
The 1911 census lists the children who went to the Blind School 100 years ago.
Could our lost little girl be here?
Pam and David say these records give the chance of a breakthrough.
There are six girls of the right age. Five are from outside York.
There's only one...
There's only one that's just plainly born in York.
Through all the book? That's right. In the school.
It's an enormous stroke of luck.
Down the end here is, in theory, our answer.
Ivy Addy, and she is the correct age of ten.
Ivy Addy. It's extraordinary that we've got a name.
We've been working with Nevinson for so long. That's right.
But the actual real name is Addy.
Could this child be our missing link?
You're being really guarded. We've found the family.
We have to prove it without a shadow of a doubt.
It's amazing to me
that our big breakthrough
was a little girl who played in this courtyard 100 years ago.
Ivy Addy, the youngest daughter of our lost family,
who came here to the Blind School in York.
Here's her name again, in the school's annual report.
She's somewhere in this picture.
Ivy Addy definitely was here in 1910.
We just need to find out for sure
her family details match the family Rowntree wrote about.
Next step, the city archives, to try and find the name of her father.
100 years ago, children in York received a vaccination for smallpox.
The records are still kept.
If Ivy Addy is here, we'll be led to our family.
There she is.
Wow. There she is.
So, she was born on 5th April 1900.
She lived at 6 Ancroft Street
and her father was John Thomas Addy.
That's the eureka moment! That is the eureka moment.
Ivy Addy is the key and, after months, we found our lost family.
In the records, everything about Ivy tallies -
her mother, father, brother and sister.
The names had been changed, after all.
The man so desperate for work was not Mr Nevinson but Mr Addy,
John Thomas Addy.
And now we have a name, we can dig deeper.
York is a city that lives with its history.
Within the city walls, they're digging up the past.
Archeologists are peeling back the layers of the past.
This surface is 1,000 years old.
They're dealing with Jorvik,
that Viking age city, and underneath that,
we're going to find Roman archeology as well.
The archeology you're interested in is further out.
Over the Roman and Viking layers, here at Hungate
the Victorians built rows of tiny back-to-back houses.
Because we now know our family is called Addy their world opens up.
We are walking into our most recent excavation,
focusing on 19th-century and early 20th-century Hungate.
Through the remains of the Bricklayer's Arms.
This is a photograph of the actual street we're walking through.
To the left, you can see the pub.
We're now walking through, well, somebody's house. These are houses?
This is a house. We're now into somebody else's house.
There is a row of ten one-up, one-down back-to-back houses here.
If we stand up onto here,
we're now standing above the exact space
where the Addy family were living in 1881.
The 1881 census reveals, amazingly, that the Hungate dig
has unearthed the exact house the Addys lived in 130 years ago.
It seems extraordinary to me that after all of our searching,
we can trace back this family to a house unearthed by archeologists.
Entire families living in just two rooms - one up and one down.
By the time of the survey in 1910,
the Addys had moved from here.
All we know is that the family lived on the edge of town.
Where, exactly, was that?
Time for more detective work,
hunting through birth certificates and census returns.
After Hungate,
the Addys came to live here.
It would have looked very different, pretty much everything has changed
apart from that chapel, now a commercial property.
We know from the work we've done and from this old map,
that this used to be Phoenix Street, where the Addys came to live.
This would have been a step up, away from the slums of central York.
Because of our research, we know something else, and it's amazing.
100 years on,
the Addy family live less than two miles away from this property.
So we can now move our story forward.
It wasn't just finding them.
We wanted to know what had happened to them as the century shifted on.
If they survived, what became of them?
The man I'm about to meet can tell me.
He's the grandson of John Thomas Addy.
Until we found the family, he had no idea about the Rowntree study
or about the research.
But this man is just two generations from someone who wrote a diary
that captured a life with no work, little food and fading hope.
Hi. How are you?
Nice to meet you. You too. Are you well? Yes, fine thank you.
Do come in. I will. Thank you.
So, what do you think about our amazing discovery? It's so strange.
It's remarkable, really. It is. It's extraordinary.
In fact, it's unbelievable. Yeah...
Ian Addy is the son of the boy in the book,
the lad described as "12 and underweight but healthy".
I found reading what my ancestors had done,
and the struggle in that particular time,
was just something that...
..was amazing, really.
And...I just thought, "I'm so lucky that, in fact, it's come to this.
"That people have joined me with my ancestors, basically."
"MR NEVINSON": Friday 15th July.
Got up at 5am. Went round town to several places, hoping to find work.
But was unsuccessful. Back home at 10am.
Had some cold tea and bread.
Went out until three.
Carried a bag for a gentleman to the station. Got sixpence for the job.
Bought quarter of flour, two pennyworth of kippers
and two ounces of tea leaf siftings for a penny ha'penny.
It's just an age that's gone by.
It's looking through a keyhole and realising
just how lucky I am.
Now.
This is your grandma here, Mrs Nevinson.
She's tall and stout and has a face radiating good nature.
You do that. How does that feel?
It's just a lovely trait that the Addy family have.
She must have been an amazing and resourceful woman.
And a strong woman, when you think of the number of children she had.
It's only 100 years ago. Yeah. But does it feel very different?
They lost 17 children.
Yeah. You think of that from a health point of view.
Things have come along that way but, for the rest of things,
there's a lot of parallels between then and now.
Particularly, I think, for young people.
There are direct links with you.
This is Wednesday July 13 1910. Yes.
This is Mr Nevinson, who we know is Mr Addy, your grandfather.
"Cut some old boots up to mend the little boy's boots." Sidney.
Sidney was your dad. That's right.
How does it feel? Make do and mend. That's what one did.
Now we know Mr Nevinson was John Thomas Addy.
And his son, Sidney, was Ian's father.
We don't know whether John Thomas Addy found regular work.
But we know his son did.
As York prospered in the '20s,
a time nationally of near full employment,
Sidney went to the cocoa works.
ORIGINAL VOICEOVER: Rowntree's, the cocoa works,
employing many thousands of men, women, boys and girls...
Sidney Addy was working at a company still run by the man
who'd written about his family.
This is Seebohm Rowntree in 1920, showing the then Duke of York,
later George VI, around the chocolate factory.
Unlike his father, Sidney held on to a steady job,
despite a generation where millions were thrown out of work because of the Depression.
The government had to increase the benefits it gave to those without a job.
Nothing like now, but more than had gone before.
Is that your father? That's my father.
Were you close to him?
Yes. We were very close.
We know from the diaries the poverty Sidney grew up in.
What about his son's life? What had changed for Ian's generation?
How old are you there? I'd be five.
Even in that time of the Second World War,
although there was rationing, there was food.
It wasn't just margarine and bread. We did have other things.
We might have to go down to the gasworks
to get some coke with a pram, but we got by. We did what we had to do.
Like his father before him.
Though Sidney and the unemployed of York had lived through hard times,
the lot of the working man was improving.
Action is being taken on the worst aspects of slum housing.
People are living in much better conditions.
The council is taking an active part in improving the housing stock,
raising people's physical standard of living.
It is very much a halfway house
between the world of 1910 and what was to come.
After the Depression, the economy expanded and Rowntree's grew.
They were employing more people.
Sidney Addy was one of the lucky ones.
He worked through the heyday of the chocolate factory.
VOICEOVER: You've probably wondered how these delightful wiggly things
get on the top of chocolate...
This is the main central corridor of the cream block.
It led to the production areas. The heart of the factory? Definitely.
Now you can see that it's all done by hand.
There's no girl like a Yorkshire girl for dexterity.
At least, that's what they say.
When the ladies were leaving for the day,
they'd be queuing up with their cigarettes in their mouths
to light up as soon as they got through the doors.
Rowntree's were embracing the latest technology.
The skillful fingers of each machine wrap up one chocolate each
every second of the day.
This is the world's first cinema advert with sound.
York milk is so much nicer. Try some and see.
It was for the chocolate bar that was to become the Yorkie.
Ooh! Isn't it lovely? It's quite different.
They might have been a progressive company, embracing new ideas,
but it didn't mean Rowntree's always made money.
Back in its heyday, in those days when this was so busy,
what kind of businessman was Seebohm Rowntree?
He was good at finding talented people, nurturing their talent, putting them to work.
But he didn't make a great deal of money.
In 1921, he made a 33% loss.
Then, in 1931, things had got so dire
it looked as though the business wasn't going to be able to pay dividends to their shareholders.
He had to reshuffle the board and start looking at last measures,
emergency measures to try and save the business.
It looked like it was going to go bankrupt.
But workers like Sidney Addy were able to hang on to their jobs.
The company had a radically different view of the relationship between employer and employee.
The bottom line wasn't the sole motivation for being in business.
They even built a new village for York workers,
and not just for those from their company.
They wanted people to have decent homes with gardens and space.
Seebohm was investing in health care, libraries, theatres
and swimming pools for his staff,
alongside production and development.
How different was he from other people,
the way they treated their workforce? Oh, crumbs.
He set the standard for the way you treat a workforce.
How enthusiastically did they embrace the idea of a library? They thought it was wonderful.
The company magazine is full of regular lists of the latest books.
Lots of cheap trashy novels, which Seebohm approved of
because it edified them to think of higher things.
An important part in the social life
is played by the athletic and sports clubs
which organise plenty of healthy rivalry during leisure hours.
We believe this is a rare recording of Seebohm Rowntree.
His accent sounds almost Scottish, but he was born and raised in York.
This is held towards the end of June on the company's playing field...
This was a time of arch capitalism. What did other people in the company
think of spending money on things that wouldn't bring money back?
Most of the board of directors were related to him or worked with his father in the very early days.
They were all in it together. The workforce thought it was great.
They saw Seebohm Rowntree as sort of a figurehead,
a focus for affection.
But his legacy is not to be found at the factory.
Seebohm Rowntree continued to advise politicians throughout the '30s and '40s.
His research helped mould the way we treat the poor and the jobless.
The welfare state was created by Seebohm Rowntree,
by his recommendations in his poverty study.
Legislation in workplaces today is as a result of the work that he did.
We have pension funds, paid annual holiday,
all kinds of rights that you now expect, it started with him.
He decided that an employee who was being dismissed
ought to be paid wages, like a redundancy package.
He said, "We will pay pensions to workers who've been here for many years." He pioneered that.
Ah. You've beaten us to it! It's good to get out of the fog.
It's awful outside, Mummy. It's terrible.
I've made a nice hot cup of Rowntree's cocoa.
That'll make us all feel better.
Seebohm Rowntree died in 1954.
He lived to see many of his ideas made real.
1946 had seen the introduction of the welfare state,
with benefits for anyone out of work.
For two decades, the population would soar,
but unemployment would stay low, rarely more than half a million.
The post-war world in York is the post-war world in most other British towns and cities.
There is stable full employment,
big industries that are employing large numbers of people -
skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled.
If you get a job with these organisations, you're not laid off when work dips.
It's that cliche of a job for life.
Start at Rowntree's or the railway after the war,
you expect to be there for the rest of your working life.
# And he gave me
# A box of Dairy Box... #
Into the '50s, the economy boomed.
For young people, there was a sense of freedom and opportunity.
..a box of Dairy Box.
And it was at this time that Ian Addy started his working life.
We're looking at the Five Sisters window.
That's grisaille glass. It's grey glass.
It's 13th century...
The grandson of John Thomas Addy,
who'd paced the streets looking for work,
joined the Minster as a glazier - not just work, but a trade.
This is the Zouche chapel.
This is a good place to look at some medieval glass
at close quarters.
So how old is this? There's some 15th-century
and some 16th-century panels.
And they're a joy, if you look at that one there.
It's the spider
and the wren, beautifully done.
When I left school, I was fortunate enough
to find that there were jobs out there.
I went to the technical college and I had a choice of jobs.
And looking down the list of jobs, there was one for a glazier at York Minster.
"Glazier" is a term now used for ordinary glass.
A better term might be stained glass craftsman or restorationist,
because you're dealing with something a bit special here.
Your grandfather, as we know from the diary, had no choice.
He took whatever work was about.
Your father worked but he didn't have much choice either.
He provided his labour for a wage to keep you in food.
How much choice did you feel that you had in the labour market? Well.
There was a big choice.
The people at the technical college found that there were jobs for them.
VOICEOVER: We're on top of a very high building in the city of York.
Over there, behind the walls, thousands of people are at work.
They're at work in a factory, a special kind of factory...
This is my generation of York. This is how I grew up.
The commonplace I accepted living here.
It's a lovely place to live. There's work for everybody.
The mass employment in Rowntree's and the railways continues through the 1970s and 1980s.
Whatever your background,
the world is your oyster.
You can contemplate university because there are grants.
You have a choice of employment opportunities.
In this era the next generation of Addys started looking for work.
This is the best bit!
The great-grandchildren of the man from Rowntree's study.
What do you think? You can't sing. You can't play. You look awful.
You'll go a long way.
You've got two sons. Simon is a potter.
What about Mark?
Mark, he decided, whilst at Joseph Rowntree School
to be an actor.
Which filled us with dread. LAUGHS
But he decided he would go for auditions
and he was very fortunate enough to be accepted by RADA.
So we are now about to get to the third generation since the diary was written.
It's been a long journey.
We set out to find out what had happened to John Thomas Addy,
who wrote those diaries in York 100 years ago.
Ian's son would be the third generation since those diaries were written.
We had no idea who we'd find, what they'd be doing, where they'd be living.
It turns out there is one more extraordinary twist to this story.
I believe you create your own opportunities in life.
You gotta go out there and make things happen.
It's not like something's gonna drop out the sky
and change your whole life.
That training to be an actor paid off for the great-grandson of our desperate diarist.
You might just recognise him from the small and the big screen.
I can claim it as a miracle from God.
Church in York would never deny a miracle.
Your family continues to have this strong link with York.
How important is it for you to be living here?
It's a place that I've lived all my life...
Mark Addy has a life about as far removed from his great-grandfather's
as you can ever imagine.
What did your parents think when you said, "I want to be an actor"?
I think they thought it was a phase I was going through.
But they were very supportive.
Once they realised it was something I was serious about,
that I was going to actually give it a fair old stab...
The telly jobs came in and then in the middle of it all,
The Fully Monty came up and it went a bit haywire from there.
Get on with it!
We may not be young, we may not be pretty, but we're here,
we're live and, for one night only, we're going for the fully monty!
Did you have a sense with The Full Monty -
about unemployment in Yorkshire - that was going to be a big film?
Not really.
We assumed that it wouldn't play well outside of Yorkshire, let alone outside of this country.
So when it did well Japan and the States and Peru and places,
I don't quite know how that worked out.
There were a lot of themes common to humanity, I suppose.
Mark's acting career took off in the late '80s
just as jobs started to leave York.
It held out longer than other parts of the country, which had gone through a deep recession.
In 1986, three million people, one in ten of the workforce, were unemployed.
Even York's chocolate industry wasn't immune.
In 1988, after 126 years, Rowntree's was sold to Nestle.
REPORTER: Managers at Rowntree's headquarters in York
spent the day explaining details of the Nestle's offer to the workforce.
I think it's very sad, owning Rowntree's all these years,
having to let it go to someone else.
It's the best firm in England to work for.
I've worked there for 45 years.
York was changing, not just the chocolate industry, but the other big employer,
the railways.
The city was moving towards what it is today,
a mixture of tourism and office jobs.
For the Addys, a journey that began in slums of York ended in Hollywood.
There's this extraordinary coincidence, from our point of view,
that a search that started with this very poor man four generations ago
here in York, has led to a film star
whose breakthrough film is about unemployment in Yorkshire.
What are the chances of that?
But that's, I suppose, that's... That's the nature of these things.
You never know where the path is going to lead you to.
That's fascinating.
"MR NEVINSON": Thursday July 21st.
Went out at 6am.
Walked to Naburn to meet boats for W's wharf.
Waited there till 12 and walked back home at two.
This is where your great-grandfather came. Yeah.
Fair old walk to try and beat the crowds of workers
lined up on the wharves in York.
Friday July 22nd. Up at five. Walked round and round the town till 12.
Nothing doing anywhere so I was fairly sick of walking about.
For dinner I had bread and kipper and a drink of tea. No breakfast. No tea. No supper. Went to bed at 7.30.
In the meantime, chopped wood that he'd picked up at the waterside.
Came all the way to Naburn looking for work. Didn't find any.
Take a bit of wood back home and chop it up to keep the family warm.
And tea is pretty much all you're going to get by on.
Is there any pride that it's your great-grandfather's voice,
his honesty, that led to changes that we all know? Absolutely. Yeah.
Although he would have no inkling that that was what was going on.
He was just being truthful about the way he lived
and the way his family lived.
Um... But extraordinary that, yeah, it is a part
of the changing shape of our social history.
Back at the cemetery, the records show John Thomas, his wife Jane,
their children including daughter Ivy who only lived to be 23,
are buried in an unmarked grave.
Just here.
There's no headstone. This plot here is where your great-granddad is.
That's where Ivy is. That is the Addy family plot.
There it is. Just a little blank piece of earth.
Empty space.
They bought the plot but didn't have enough for a headstone.
Well, maybe we can...
..do something about that.
You want to change that?
They'll get a headstone there.
We tracked down more family members
and reunited them at the old Addy home.
These people are all descendants of John Thomas Addy.
A former policeman, a store manager,
kids just starting school.
That is the house that your ancestors used to live in in 1881.
What does it feel like coming here to see where your family are from?
Brilliant. When I first heard about it I had tears in my eyes.
It's fascinating, absolutely fascinating.
Grandsons, great-grandchildren and the latest additions -
four generations from the man who moved through these streets.
You start thinking did they have the Addy ears and teeth?
They looked at the old house like it was from a different world.
In some ways, it is.
You just wonder whether these people were like me, like David, like Nicky.
The desperate poverty captured in the diaries has gone.
The story of the Addy family is one that most of us share.
We are richer and we have much more opportunity.
Goodness! How they managed. Yeah.
What does the Addy family history
tell us about the history of this country and working-class people?
I think it says that we...
we are survivors.
That we were able to...
meet any particular thing that we come up against,
any adversity, and that we will still manage,
like my grandfather, to go out and look for work.
Even when he hasn't got it.
And because of that,
we've each generation managed
to move a little bit further up that staircase.
And we're all so grateful for the generation before.
It's wonderful to see Addys that I didn't even know. It's remarkable.
We've all been on a long journey.
Ooh, look at them go!
APPLAUSE
And this family, at least, can see how far they've travelled.
But this is only half our journey.
Like in 1910, right now, we are coming out of recession.
Unemployment and poverty haven't gone away, even from a relatively prosperous city like York.
Next time, we return to York
and, as Rowntree did a century ago,
look beneath the surface of this city.
Well, it's Friday morning.
It's been raining for the third night on the trot.
My tent's, like, completely soaked. I'm damp.
How can it be that in 2010, a casual labourer is still living a hand-to-mouth existence?
And a middle-aged man will go to any lengths to fight for his lost job?
It's our job. You know it's our job!
I don't know a better word than scab. We can't say it cos it's hurtful.
It should be bloody hurtful. They should find it difficult to sleep.
And the desperate and the jobless are still living on hand-outs.
You like ham, don't you? Anyone for baked beans? Please.
People like you 100 years ago were the last rung.
How do you feel that you're still providing that kind of safety net?
Sad. Gob-smacked but sad.
If Rowntree came back now,
what would he make of the people we find and the stories they tell?
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd