LOST MILLIONS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XX, Issue 2064, 8 January 1925, Page 7

LOST MILLIONS.

MEN WHO TAUGHT ENGLAND TO SMOKE CIGARETTES. Said to have been worth two million pounds before the war, Mr Nicholas John Condouris. of Forest Hill, a patriarchal-looking Greek of eighty, applied for liis discharge in bankruptcy at Greenwich County Court on November 14. it was one of tho most tragic eases he had ever known, said Mr J. Dodds, who appeared on debtor’s behalf. This “hi man was at one time a merchant prince ot Constantinople and Smyrna, and had owned 200,000 acres of land in tho Near East. At one time his income was enormous. He was a pioneer of cigarette smoking in England, and had twenty shops of the Ottoman Tobacco Company. The war came, said Mr Dodd, and prosperity vanished, all his Smyrna property being destroyed. Tbo Official Receiver observed that it was inconceivable that a man possessing two million! pounds worth of property, and having an income of from £50,000 to £60,000 a year, could be so destitute of friends that he could find no ono to investigate his claims abroad. The application should nojfc have been brought until ahere was some evidence of the existence or tho non-ex-istence of this property. The applieswould be adjourned. Describing the introduction of the cigarette do this country, Mr Coundo uris said recently that it was at tho invitation of the Duke of Cambridge that he send ten bales of Turkish tobacco to England in 1858. “At the beginning only a handful of people smoked cigarettes, among them the then Prince of Wales, Admiral Dundoinald, and tho Earl of Dalkeith.

“People smoked only pipes or cigars in iliose days, and it' took much patience and advertising to introduce the cigarette habit.”