BANKRUPT BUTCHER

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20929, 7 January 1938, Page 2

BANKRUPT BUTCHER

AMBITION REALISED LONDON, December 11. John Ury Watts, fifty-one-year-old butcher, of Abingdon, Berkshire, was bankrupt. He had one ambition—to pay back the £540 he owed to friends who had tried in vain to save his little business from failure. He found a job and began to save in pennies and halfpennies. The task seemed hopeless. Then one day he filled in a football penny pool coupon—the first he had ever attempted—and won £315. A few weeks later he bought a share in a sweepstake ticket. Again he won, this time £BlO.

This week at Oxford County Court John Watts was granted his discharge from bankruptcy. He had paid the Official Receiver “more than sufficient for full payment of twenty shillings in the pound.” With head held high he went back among the friends ■who waited to greet him in Abingdon. These were the friends who had stood by John Watts when he was struggling against competition and bad luck; who, when he was forced to bankruptcy, five years ago, accepted without a murmur of complaint the Is 7d in the £ which was all he was able to pay them.