This week the staff in our Local and Family History department bring us a wonderful story sourced from a recent customer enquiry and some dogged detective work in our resources…

One of the joys of working in the Local and Family History department are the occasionally offbeat enquiries we get, and the many wide and deep rabbit holes those questions can send us down.

One recent example concerned the solicitor Harold J. Houghton. A customer wrote to us explaining that they were in possession of some letters from 1934, left by their grandparents, and containing correspondence with Mr Houghton, then of Helm Chambers in Leeds, who was representing our customer’s ancestors in an important matter of law. We were asked if we could find any information about Harold and whether there were still to this day any family members engaged in the legal profession.

Our research drew a complete blank, it is fair to say. We could find no trace of either Mr Houghton OR even Helm Chambers itself in our trade directories for 1932 and 1936 (we have no directory for 1934 itself), or in our map collection, or on our Leodis website of historic Leeds photographs and images. In fact, the only reference we could find to a Helm Legal Chambers at all was an advertisement in Hull.

Where we were more successful was in the second part of our customer’s query: what could we find about the so-called “Metcalfe Millions” and, specifically, did any official documents exist about it? We were told this was a “huge story at the time” and concerned a claim to gold in Canada, supposedly a windfall left by a man named Metcalfe on his death, and claimable by others of the same surname. Aside from the fact that this all sounds like something straight out of a Frank Capra movie from, well, 1934, we were eager to find out more about something that no member of staff in the department had ever previously heard anything about.

And, thanks to our rather wonderful index of local newspapers (testament to the skill and effort of librarians past and present!), we were able to find several articles in the Leeds Mercury, enough to make us realise that the Metcalfe Millions was a story that gripped and fascinated the nation through the late 1920s and into then 1930s. In fact, such was the level of public interest that the Mercury took to running a regular advert in the personal columns advising people to stop writing to them for information – rather bluntly stating “We have no evidence that such millions exist”!

While we couldn’t find any official documents about this modern-day gold rush, were able to track down another Mercury article, one which it seems describes a possible end to the saga: an unofficial committee being convened by a private citizen (Mr Arthur Metcalfe of Openshaw, near Manchester) who investigated the tale in its entirety and reached the conclusion that there was absolutely no substance to the story whatsoever.

More successfully, however, Arthur’s committee was also able to trace the origins of the story: “a small paragraph in a Yorkshire newspaper” that was “copied in other publications and resulted in hundreds bearing the name of Metcalfe, particularly in Yorkshire” to seek their supposed share of the supposed millions. If only our newspaper article told us the name of the original “Yorkshire newspaper” where this fantastic tale began we could pursue further! Even so, this is a wonderful example of the enquiries we sometimes get, and the many paths our subsequent research take us down.

Do any readers know either the name of that newspaper specifically, or any general details about the “Metcalfe Millions”? Do let us know – either in the comments or below or by contacting us on 0113 37 86982 / localandfamilyhistory@leeds.gov.uk