LONDON'S LONELIEST MAN

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXI, 17 June 1926, Page 7

LONDON'S LONELIEST MAN

THREE YEARS' A HERMIT For three years Tom Long has been the '.-loneliest man in London. He has been the caretaker and sole occupant of the ,First Avenue Hotel, in Holborn, all the time it lias been closed. It has lately been refurnished for reopening. "My only companion," he told an interviewer, "was my dog Jack, a mongrel, but a gcocl 'un. What I should have done without him I do not know. "We have 300 bedrooms in the hotel, and I. had charge of the lot. My own room was furnished with a bed, a chair, and table. Sometimes I had my meals' there, and sometimes off a shelf. It Was a queer life. 1 used to go for a down the corridors and up and. down the stairs. For a change, I would go into the big lounge and the bilhaird .room. I have walked round and round the place and. listened to the echoes. J There was nothing else to listen to."

Tom is a short man, with a dapper air, and has been in the service of the hotel for 20 years. Except on days off, to go and see his family, he has been practically in exile, although in one of the busiest parts of London. "I have Often wondered what he did with;himself all the time," said an oLI waiter friend who has been 34 years in the same service. "Sometimes when he was a bit move than usually fed-up, he used to go and play 'Home, Sweet Home' on the grand piano, and then he would go upstairs to bed. If only there had been a ghost in the place, that he and Jack could have chased about, but the hotel was built in 1882, and ghosts never came there. "All the time he never had a fire, nor a cat-burglar, nor an accident.' The only caller was about two years ago, when: somebody knocked at the door. But he went again away before Tom could get down the second flight of stairs."