1930s furniture was located and used on sets, while kitchen pantries and the corner store were stocked with packaged goods of the era. The set designer Nick Rossendale said it was a "fascinating job" to find these items. He went on to say that the big companies would say to him they didn't have anything for him but he persisted by asking if he could look through their warehouses. "When I got in, I usually found something", he said. "It's amazing what a bit of research and looking around will dig up. The forgotten stuff that was lying around was unbelievable. No one knew it was there." For instance, he found "hundreds of old pub mirrors labels, completely clean and unused" with every one of them "for a certain period of time". He said "to reproduce these would have cost a fortune but we can now label any product – can or bottle – with a real label so it won't be a reproduction at all." Characters Grace Sullivan (née Grace Katherine Donovan) – born 24 October 1900 (Lorraine Bayly) was the Sullivan matriarch. The daughter of Dr Edmond Donovan, she married David Sullivan, a young soldier invalided from the battlefront, on 4 April 1919. She was intelligent, rational and greatly respected by her family. Although opposed to her sons enlisting to fight, she eventually came to terms with this. Grace was a devout Catholic, which sometimes created tension with her husband Dave, who was a non-practising Anglican. Later in the series, she flew to London at the request of the War Office, to assist with the recovery of her son John. There she was killed when a German V-1 flying bomb struck John's flat on 6 July 1944 (episode 598). Dave Sullivan (Paul Cronin) – born 19 February 1898 – was an upright, hard-working and somewhat old-fashioned patriarch. He was a foreman at a small engineering firm and a veteran of the First World War, serving in the light horse in the Middle East. Dave eventually becomes a freemason, and Councillor and tries at national politics after the war throughout the series run. At the outbreak of war in 1939, Dave encouraged his sons to fight; later in the series he eventually enlisted himself, reaching the rank of major in the engineering corps. Dave was hit by a car on 20 August 1948 (episode 1,112) and he died the