In 2008, one of our British partners presented us with a case that initially seemed strange.
A gentleman who, as the “Wolverhampton Ring Road Tramp,” lived for almost 40 years on a traffic island in the British city of Wolverhampton, died there at the age of 87. Our concerns that the deceased probably left no estate were quickly dispelled when our British colleague discovered that the deceased never cashed out his pension payments and the estate thus amounted to almost 100,000 British pounds.
With the help of our Polish correspondence office, we succeeded in a race against various European colleagues to find heirs in Germany and Croatia and to submit their claim in Great Britain.
In the course of the proceedings, it became clear why so many of our colleagues throughout Europe were so vehemently searching for the heirs: The “Wolverhampton Ring Road Tramp” was a kind of local hero who, born as a Pole, fought during the war on the side of the German Wehrmacht in Africa, then emigrated to Great Britain and after a few years of work could no longer stand the confines of his apartment and set up his tent on a traffic island, where he spent the rest of his life. The local city administration initially put an end to the matter, but then bowed to the protests of fellow citizens who saw the deceased as a “higher being” who placed no value on earthly desires. Over the years, a worldwide fan base formed that saw the deceased as a kind of patron of the city.
The heirs in continental Europe only knew the deceased by hearsay and were quite astonished when requests for interviews from various European television stations approached them. They had not expected such a celebrity as a relative.
