RICH ECCENTRICS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVII, Issue 23767, 21 September 1940, Page 2 (Supplement)

RICH ECCENTRICS

With Money For Every Luxury ■■ They Lived Like Paupers

THEI identity of "Paper Jack" is known to Londoners at Last. He was a hermit of the Croydon district, who dressed himself in sheets of brown paper tied round his bodji-., and was killed because a motorist' could not distinguish that weird attire from the'mud. .

cq-l APER JACK," as many people suspected for a long time, was not a poor, feeble creature whose brain had been turned by poverty and hardship; he was an "eccentric" who had chosen the bitter path in life. He was the son of a prosperous London business man; he was, too, an Oxford graduate, a student of Oriental languages and the higher mathematics ; yet he chose to sleep out of doors and live on twopennyworth of brown bread per day. Why? No one could say. Eccentricity is a disease which often afflicts men of wealth who in other respects are sane enough. Some eighty years ago there lived in Buckinghamshire a man named John Camden Nield. Fortune Left to Queen

pounds—to Queen Victoria. His family were destitute. Living at the same time at Hitchin was James Lucas. "Hermit Lucas'• "Msul Lucas," as he was variously known, was the son of an opulent West Indian merchant. After his parents' death lie adopted the life of a recluse and never left his' house for 25 years! He converted the kitchen into a cell' sleeping on the warm embers of; his wood fire.. In time the cinders rose to half the height of the room. Once, when l;is brother sent him a Bond Street suit, of clothes, he met the offer with a shotgun. So long as he had enough*ready cash, to give to tramps and children who collected outside his window," lie had little use for moneys His cell was littered with hundreds of banknotes, cheques, and dividend warrants, and on his death £24,000 in accumulated dividends and arrears of rent was inherited by his brother. F.M., in Answers, London.

He was miserly to the point of madness, and he would never have his clothes brushed for fear of spoiling the nap. When, as patron of North Marston Church, he was called on to repair the roof of the chancel, he did so by filling up the cracks with strips of calico, and he sat on the roof all day so that the workmen could not_ cheat him by idleness. At his death it was found that ho had left the whole of his fortune —amounting to half a million