FORTUNE TOO LATE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 80, 28 December 1935, Page 16

FORTUNE TOO LATE

Old Woman’s £lB,OOO Mrs. Rosamund Templeton has, at the age of ninety, just received £lB,OOO. It has cost forty-five years—half her life —of penury and litigation to secure it. And it has come too late. “I am very old and money no longer counts,” she told me as we sat in her bleak house ' overlooking the sea at Lancing, Sussex. The money is compensation for the seizure of the site of Armageddon in Palestine. “What can I spend money on at my age?” she asked me. “Any interest I had in clothes no longer exists. “I have bought a house and a motorcar. “Some money has gone to help small tradesmen who helped me in my time of need. “Some I have given to a clergyman who was a constant friend during my years of penury. “I have given £3OOO to my favourite niece.” Mrs. Templeton, when a young woman, wrote several books on her ideas of human conduct. “One day,” she explained, “Laurence Oliphant, the Victorian mystic and reformer visited me. “I knew the moment I saw him that I should marry him. In fact, so certain was I that I bought my trousseau the day we met! “Laurence wanted me to go with him to Palestine to his colony of ascetics. “He died shortly after we were married, however, and I had to carry on alone. “I have been to Palestine twentyfive times. Only a few months ago I made my last journey to sign the papers which would give me my money. “It was during my first years in the Holy Land that I bought Armageddon, the battlefield of Babylon and my life. I bought it because it seemed to symbolise the war Laurence’s colony were waging against the vices and unhappinesses of the world. Then, through poverty, I was forced to give up the experiment. Arabs and Jews and Turks settled on my laud, and eventually the Haifa railway station was built on it. “Now, after years of fighting, the Palestine Land Court has given me this money as compensation. “And I have one satisfaction —I know to whom to leave my money—to those who have helped me!”