NOTHING THROWN AWAY

Evening Star, Issue 21319, 25 January 1933, Page 6

NOTHING THROWN AWAY

WOMAN'S HOARDING GRAZE FIFTY YEARS’ ACCUMULATION. There is a woman living in a bade street in Stepney, London, who has occupied the same three rooms for fifty years, and during all that time she has never thrown a thing away. The woman would not have parted with anything even now if her possessions had not become so numerous that they overflowed into the yard and street, and so attracted the attention of the local authority. It took seven dustmen with two carts to remove her superfluous rubbish. The odds and ends stored up included twenty boxes of clothes, some of which had not been worn for thirty years; five boxes of old boots and shoes; 300 empty tins, which had contained every kind of. food ever canned; more than a hundredweight of broken crockery; 122 odd woollen stockings. Nearly everything was carefully wrapped in brown paper. _ The stockings were not only packed in pairs, but each stocking had also an individual wrapping. ' There is a note of tragedy in the story, for the accumulation was not all rubbish; much of it would have been valuable had it been properly taken care of. The woman is of Polish extraction, and among her “ treasures ” were a national costume made more than eighty years ago, with the colours unfaded, and old Polish shawls, but they fell to pieces at a touch. The crockery, too, included fragments of Polish ware of great interest, hut it was beyond repair. Another queer find was shorthand note books the woman had used when a girl.