House of the Vanities

Joyce Amina Hanafy was a well-known character in this part of West Putney. She was known for wearing only purple clothes and knocking on people’s doors alarmingly late at night collecting money for animal charities. Her house here at // Larpent Avenue was dilapidated and covered in ivy.

But Joyce hid a number of secrets of which many of her neighbours were unaware.

When she died in 2006 the Care Home where she was staying had great difficulty in finding any relatives. This was because she had told the staff a number of fibs. Firstly, she said she had been a professional ballet dancer and secondly, the Care Home records said her year of birth was 1952, when in fact it was 30 years earlier in 1922!

Joyce had no traceable family members to claim her £1 million estate from the sale of this house. Therefore, a company specializing in hunting long lost heirs was engaged to uncover Joyce’s lost family and hidden story. It made such a fascinating tale that it was turned into a half hour TV documentary on the BBC series Heir Hunters.

Joyce was the daughter of Mohammad Zaky Hanafy, an Egyptian-born surgeon from a privileged background who worked at the King George Military Hospital on London's South Bank during WWI. He was made an OBE for his services to surgery in 1920, an astonishing accolade for a man who was only 33, and not British-born.

The heir hunters recovered photographs from Joyce's home that showed Joyce was a dancer, model and hostess working in the nightclubs of Swinging Sixties Soho.

They also found that in 1944 Joyce, then training to be a teacher at Durham University, was approached to become a spy. Joyce was approached by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) - essentially the wartime equivalent of Britain's [foreign intelligence unit] MI6 and her file is still held the National Archives in Kew. These interview notes describes Joyce as intelligent but also "spoilt, affected, greedy for admiration and vain and superficial".

Her spying career was also stopped when SOE found she had a fine for a minor offence under the 1939 National Registration Act. Joyce for some reason gave a false name and address when asked to produce her papers.

The heir hunters tracked down the closest relatives to Joyce in Cairo, who were shocked to receive the profits from the sale of this attractive London home.