WOMAN MISERS HOARD.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XIV, Issue 277, 3 November 1924, Page 6

WOMAN MISERS HOARD.

INTEREST IN ART AND CATS. London, Oct. 18. When the police searched the house of Miss Clarke, an elderly recluse of Gravesend, who collapsed in her back garden and was taken to hospital, they found several bundles of Treasury, notes suspended on wardrobe hooks. Other packets of pound notes were found among lace and hosiery. A meat dish was full of bags of silver to the value of £2OO. Several hundred sovereigns were tucked away in a mattress.’ Miss Clarke had lived in the house for 30 years. She held little communication with her neighbours, but conceyed the impression that she was poor. She once declared that she hated the English people, and the neighbours assert that she gleefully hailed the German air raiders during the war. On one occasion she showed a neighbour a handsome book with the former Kaiser’s signature on the flyleaf. She said she had received the book from the Kaiser, together with a money gift, for having saved valuable papers for him. The woman was accomplished in music and art. Otherwise heir only interest in lite was a mania for cats, a number of which were found halfstarved. In the house were some rooms which contained small trees to enable the cats to exercise by climbing.