A GOOD RICH MAN.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20703, 29 April 1929, Page 15

A GOOD RICH MAN.

♦ MILLIONAIRE’S GOLDEN RULE. One of the most beautiful of lives has just been ended. The story of Charles EdWard Baring Young, who loved'boys, is told In a London paper. If you had seen him ih.the street you would have thought he needed help,” a friend says of him, “ so shabby did he look with his worn coat and frayed trousers^” One would not have thought "Mr Young could have been to Eton, or guessed that in. his youth people said he might have been a Cabinet Minister. Least of all would one have dreamed that he had given away a million pounds. The handsome, shabby old man guarded his secret from the world so well that when he died only a few friends knew what a wonderful story had ended. At last the truth is creeping out. Charles Baring Young was born with all the gifts that made him sure of the ’ world’s favour, aristocratic birth, wealth, good looks, and a brilliant mind. If he had been ambitious he would certainly have become one of the great figures of the day, perhaps Prime Minister. But while he was still at Eton he. had begun to feel for the poor and sorrowful. He i worked with. Mr Quintin Hogg, the I father of the British . Lord Chancellor { and founder of the Regent Street Poly- I technic. ' I Mr Young entered Parliament, but he ! felt that he could help the needy better in another way. Retiring to his beautiful estate at Daylesford, in Worcestershire, near the Oxfordshire border, he founded a unique thing—a charity which was kept a secret. .He took three houses in Fitzroy square, where 66 homeless boys could be received, and then he built the Kingham Homes on Kinghain Hill, in Oxfordshire, eight houses for 30 boys each, where the waifs could grow up in country air and learn almost any trade they chose. . This benefactor built, costly workshops and employed highly-skilled instructors. He laid out 500 acres as an agricultural school for boys who preferred farming, and bought a huge tract of land in Canada for those who wished to settle there. He also founded two factories to give the boys employment in later years. He endowed the homes richly. They never appealed to the public for money; it all came from one‘man, who forbade his friends to speak of it. He spent money on these homes, and on all the enterprises connected with them, as if they had been his yacht, or his racehorses, or his business, or his hunt, or his shooting box.

Mr Young was happy to the end. Only two or three days before he passed away he was listening to the boys singing hymns at his open window. “ Let them sing on,” he said r “ I could listen for hours.”, He himself had written a hymn, and, with the help of his sister, prepared a volume of 1200 hymns. The faith of Mr Young was very simple: he believed in the Word of God as plain men understand it. The chaplain of the homes, who knew him well for many years, has said of. him that he never swerved a hair’s breadth to right or left from what he believed to be right. One who knew-'Mr Young declared that “he was the most lovable man I have ever known,” and described how, though he had three or four cars at his country house, he would insist on the same old “ growler ” meeting him when he returned from a visit to London. He wore an old hat, faded green, and promised his wife a thousand times, to buy a new one. He kept a piano factory‘and an iron foundry going at a loss in London to help'to give boys work.