RECLUSE FOUND DEAD WITH £l0,000.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18015, 27 November 1926, Page 8

RECLUSE FOUND DEAD WITH £lo,ooo.

FLEW INTO RAGE AFTER SPENDING 6D. (Special to the "Star.”) LONDON, October 5. Regarded as a poor man who lived as a recluse mainly because he could not afford to live otherwise on a small pension, Mr Janies Forster Green was found dead yesterday in the house in Whitehall Road, Gateshead, where he had lived for twenty-four years. So careful was he that he— Kept house himself. Bought his own supplies. Cooked. He would not have even the gas laid on to his house. After finding his body the police, in another room, found securities worth £IO,OOO. Only a charwoman and a girl who ran messages had been permitted to enter the house at certain periods. When a call was made at the week-end, there was no response, and the police were informed. Mr Green, who was eighty-two years old, was found huddled up in the kitchen, near a chair on which he had been sitting. His home, though well furnished, was in an unkempt state, for, though his windows were kept clean, he declined to have the interior of the house touched. To cook his food Mr Green would bum oil and papers. Apparently he had been dead many hours before anything wrong was suspected. There is no suspicion of foul play. Mr Green was said to be a linguist. He had no relatives in this country, but from letters found in the house he had corresponded frequently with friends in New Zealand. He kept a suit-case ready packed with linen in anticipation of his removal to a nursing home. Of his frugal habits, it is said that he told a boy once to clean the front of his house. The work took only a few minutes, and when he calculated how much an hour the payment of 6d represented he flew into a rage.