A few minutes on Google brought up much interesting material on Esther's great-grandfather Montague Leverson. He worked as a patent agent, wrote a textbook on copyright, and as a solicitor one of his articled clerks was Charles Bradlaugh, the first atheist MP in the British House of Commons. In the USA, he seems to have had a very colourful life, and eventually he became a medical doctor, with a connection to the Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore. He lived until the age of 95. One of his daughters was the mother of composer Gerald Finzi. In a recent biography of Finzi (Diana McVeagh's Gerald Finzi: His Life and Work, there's a footnote mentioning that one of Leverson's sons was Esther Rantzen's grandfather (Esther mentions this in an article in yesterday's Daily Mail, so I suspect that much of her family history on her mother's side was known to her already).
These programmes are obviously fully researched before the subject is filmed, and are presented in a slightly artificial way. This week's programme seemed to be more artificial than most. I thought that an opportunity was lost to examine more closely the different Jewish communities of 19th century London, as the Leverson side of the family was clearly comfortably off at a time when the Rantzen side was just beginning to emerge from poverty.
