WEDDING-DAY GIFT

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 239, 6 July 1931, Page 2

WEDDING-DAY GIFT

Noted Comedian’s £20,000 “TEN YEARS OF BLISS” : . v »’. . » - ■ • Beautiful Norah Emerald—the woman Will Evans fell madly in love with when he saw her for the first time as a girl of sixteen on the stage of the Empress Theatre, Brixton, and waited twenty-five years to marry—has defended the dead comedian’s memory, against a cruel slander that he had loft her destitute. Will Evans made two fortunes out of his fun-making. One he spent on a former wife, the second he left absolutely to the woman who was his devoted companion during the last ten years of his life.

It was not of her own ordeal during the last days of the comedian's life —for more than a week she never left her husband’s bedside—that Mrs. Will- Evans spoke when an interviewer culled to seo her in Abril. The talk was of Will Evans off the stage —the other side of tho life of this great comedian which the public never knew. The widow and the visitor sat m the breakfast room. It was Will Evans’s favourite room. The walls were covered with beautiful water-cblours—the comedian’s own work. On the top of a bookcase were lifelike models of his fellow “stars”—-Robey, Chirgwin, R. G, Knowles, Nellio Wallace, T, E. which ho made out of sticks of firewood. Will Evans was a genius in a hundred different ways! The writer looked through the window out on the garden where he had left his last unfinished task. He was making a pagoda when paralysis of the brain struck him down, and closed for ever tho voice which had made 1 millions laugh. No one knew or recognised Will Evans off the stage. He was as handsome without his make-up aa he was grotesque in his stage parts. Money meant nothing to him. He was a great spender. He bought beautiful pictures, magnificent silverware and antiques. He adorned his home with the works of Turner, Van Dyck, and other great painters. His greatest joy in life was to give. The day that Mr. Evans married Norah Emerald, he gave her everything—the house he lived in, the freehold property he owned, bls furniture, his motor-car. His wedding gift to his wife was wortji £20,000. He died without making a will. He had no need to—he had given all he possessed to his wife. The day Will Evans became ill the play “Tons of Money,” of which he was part-author, was made into a talkie. The royalties from this go likewise to the woman in the silent house close to Brixton parish church. Will Evans’s dying words are on little scraps of paper in a bureau. He used a pencil when his death-agony robbed him of the power of speech. These scraps of paper arc richer in the eyes of the tiredlooking woman of Brixton Hill to-day than the Turner pictures, the silverware, the house property, and the royalties that he gave to his wire. Mrs. Evans reverently picked up aii off-thc-stage portrait of the comedian. ‘.‘Ten years of perfect bliss,” she murmured. “It is not as a husband I miss him. It is as a companion. He never went anywhere without me. We were not only husband and wife—we were pals. How I miss him. 1” The caller left the widow alone in her sorrow, staring at her husband’s picture —a woman whom grief had changed almost out of recognition in one short, week.