Who Do You Think You Are? BBC1 - TV review: Twiggy, have we got some bad news for you!

Twiggy’s great-grandfather, William Meadows, was a rogue and a vagabond – and that’s not just my opinion, that’s the official designation of the Victorian penal system

Window on the past: Twiggy appeared in ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ (BBC)

Twiggy, the Sixties supermodel and subject of last night’s Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC1), is not like today’s stuck-up fashion folk.

Born Lesley Hornby, to factory worker Nellie and joiner William, she was just an ’umble girl from Neasden, north-west London, until fame came knocking and propelled her into the international jet set. This would be a rare reversal in the fortunes of the Hornby line.

It was a happy childhood, but Twiggy’s mother Nellie never told them much about her upbringing and, as she “suffered with her nerves”, they didn’t want to risk upset by pursuing the matter. The mystery only deepened when Twiggy arrived at her older sister Shirley’s home to flick through the family albums. Grandpa was a tall man with a sergeant-major moustache, Nanny was a woman in a black hat called, they think, Alice.

The haunting refrain of Roy “Chubby” Brown’s song goes yet unanswered, as we never did learn much about Twig’s maternal grandmother. Instead, the revelation of Alice’s maiden name, Meadows, on Nellie’s birth certificate, led Twiggy to an entry in the 1891 census. It described a family with seven children living in two rooms in Willesden, but skip forward a decade to the 1901 census and the Meadows family were nowhere to be found. “All I can think is something awful has happened,” said Twiggy. Her sense of foreboding (aft-boding?) unfortunately proved justified.

Twiggy’s great-grandfather, William Meadows, was a rogue and a vagabond – and that’s not just my opinion, that’s the official designation of the Victorian penal system. The view Twiggy formed was not much kinder: “Well, maybe I shouldn’t judge, maybe he was desperate, but you don’t leave seven children. Sorry.” Once abandoned by their father, the Meadows children were condemned to various Victorian dooms: confined to the workhouse, arrested for begging, dead of fever... “It’s amazing how emotionally it hits you, actually,” said a shaken Twiggy.

The best WDYTYA? episodes feature celebrities who wear their hearts on their sleeves and Twiggy was thrilled every time a historian presented with her with another bundle of documents, despite the fact that most contained more bad news. There was at least one branch of the Twiggy tree sturdy enough to bear her hopes: “There’s no doubt that Grace, my great-great-grandmother, was a criminal, but I have to believe in my heart that she was a goodie,” said Twiggy.

Grace did indeed go straight (after a two-year stretch for burglary) and went on to marry off her daughter to a policeman. Twiggy cackled heartily at this irony and was still laughing when she read the newspaper clipping on Grace’s unusual cause of death. A branch of Iceland now stands on the spot at 333-339 Mare Street, Hackney, where Twiggy’s great-great grandmother was caught in a crush at a bargain sale in 1897 and later died of a heart attack. You’ve got to go somehow.