ECCENTRIC MONEY-MAKERS.
A CURIOUS romance adds one more instructive fact to point the moral of a
miser’s life, and of “the love of money.” For many years past an old man
might have been seen carrying an old bag on his shoulders, scraping up
odds and ends from the gutter, and garbage from the streets. This man’s
home was in a London suburb, a wretched room filled with rubbish—old
pieces of iron and brass, bits of string, &c. Around the room were tin
deed-boxes, which some of his friends half suspected must be possessed of
properties of more or less value. The wretched man lived on what he
chanced to pick up by the way, or what was given to him by the
charitable, who thought him to be a beggar. He used to attend one of our
metropolitan hospitals as an out-patient, receiving advice and medicine
gratis. This man died in the midst of squalid wretchedness and apparent
want. His friends at once proceeded to ransack the place in search for
his money; the deed-boxes proved to be “dummies,” containing only strings
and tapes, and for some time the search proved fruitless. At last,
however, the old chair in which he used to sit was found to contain, in
the worn-out cushion, a bundle of most valuable securities, amounting to
£60,000, and a will. This will, after leaving £100 each to his
executors, devised all the residue of his property to two
institutions—one moiety to the Royal Free Hospital, Gray’s-inn-road, in
which institution he used to obtain advice and medicine gratis, as above;
and the other half to the Royal National Lifeboat Association. So that
these two useful institutions will receive £30,000 each, and possibly
more, as the result of this “miser’s” wealth! Search is being made for
further documents amid the heaps of rubbish that have been allowed to
accumulate in the wretched man’s attic. The case constitutes a sad and
melancholy illustration of this fallen nature of ours, in one of its most
afflicting forms of eccentricity and madness.
In the case of the Dancers, we have it recorded that their money-grubbing
propensity was prominent in three generations of the family. The
grandfather, the father, and the children, were all misers—the lot of
them, Daniel Dancer, Esq., appears to have been the most distinguished.
He lived on the Weald of Harrow, where he had a little estate of about
eighty acres of rich meadow-land, with some of the finest oak timber in
the kingdom on it. Besides, there was a good farm belonging to him,
worth at that time, if properly cultivated, more than £200 a-year. One
day, coming to London to invest £2,000 in the funds, a gentleman, who met
him near the Exchange, mistaking him for a beggar, put a penny in his
hand—an affront which, it is needless to say, the beggar pocketed. In
spite of the fact that his wretched abode was often broken into, he made
a great deal of money by his penurious habits. It took many weeks to
explore the contents of his dwelling. As much as £2,500 were found on
the dung-heap in the cow-house; and in an old jacket, carefully tied and
strongly nailed to the manger, was the sum of £500 in gold and
bank-notes; £200 were found in the chimney, and an old teapot contained
bank-notes to the value of £500. Lady Tempest and Captain Holmes, his
heirs, were benefited by the old miser’s savings to the extent of about
£3,000 a-year.
Money is sometimes strangely made. For instance, there is the case of
Gully, who was M.P. for Pontefract in 1832. “He was taken out of
prison,” writes Mr. Charles Greville, “twenty-five or thirty years ago by
a gentleman to fight Pierce, surnamed the Game Chicken. He afterwards
fought Belcher (I believe), and Gregson twice, and left the prize-ring
with the reputation of being the best man in it. He then took to the
turf, was successful in establishing himself at Newmarket, where he kept
‘a hell,’ and began a system of corruption of trainers, jockeys, and
boys, which put the secrets of all Newmarket at his disposal, and in a
few years made him rich. At the same time he connected himself with Mr.
Watt, in the north, by betting for him; and this being at the time when
Watt’s stable was very successful, he won large sums of money by his
horses. Having become rich, he embarked in a great coal speculation,
which answered beyond his hopes, and his shares soon yielded immense
profits. His wife, who was a coarse, vulgar woman, in the meantime died,
and he afterwards married the daughter of an innkeeper, who proved as
gentlewoman-like as the other was the reverse, and who was very pretty
besides. He now gradually withdrew from the betting-ring as a regular
blackleg, still keeping horses, and betting occasionally in large sums.
He ultimately bought an estate near Pontefract, and settled down as a
gentleman of fortune.”
Of the beggarly race of misers, the most notorious was Thomas Cooke, born
in the year 1726, at Clewer, a village near Windsor. His father, an
itinerant fiddler, got his living by playing in alehouses and fairs, but
dying while Thomas was an infant, his grandmother, who lived near
Norwich, took care of him till he was able to provide for himself, at
which time he obtained employment in a manufactory where there were a
number of other boys who were paid according to the work they did. These
boys always clubbed some money from their weekly earnings for the
establishment of a mess; young Cooke, however, resolved to live cheaper,
and when the other boys went to dinner he retired to the side of a brook,
and made his breakfast and dinner at one meal upon an halfpenny loaf, an
apple, and a draught of water from the running stream, taken up in the
brim of his hat. With the money thus saved, he paid a youth, who was
usher to a village schoolmaster, to instruct him in reading, writing, and
arithmetic. Arrived at years of maturity, Cooke found employment at a
Norwich warehouse as a porter. There his sobriety and industry caused
his master to make him a journeyman, and raise his wages. Further, his
master finding that he wished for an appointment as an exciseman,
procured a situation for him near London, and he came to the capital by
the Norwich waggon with only eight shillings in his pocket; but that is
of little consequence. It is not money that makes a man succeed in life,
but the want of it. In the world, a man who begins with money generally
ends by losing it.
Being appointed to a district, Cooke found there was great delay, and
some expense, before he could act as an exciseman; he therefore took the
situation of porter to a sugar-baker, and, in course of time, became a
journeyman. Here he did not neglect his appointment to the excise, but
reserved sufficient time to himself to give it every necessary attention.
By attending on the superior of the district in which he was to act, and
by the money he saved while in the service of the sugar-baker, Cooke was
at length enabled to assume the dignity to which he had so long aspired.
Being appointed to inspect the exciseable concerns of a paper-mill and
manufactory near Tottenham, Cooke was exceedingly well pleased; for,
being already versed in some parts of the trade from the knowledge he had
acquired at Norwich, he was desirous of learning those secrets in the
trade to which he was still a stranger. During the time he was
officially employed in this concern, the master of the paper-mills and
manufactory died. The widow, however, by the advice of her friends,
carried on the business with the assistance of the foreman. Cooke’s
knowledge of the business, but particularly the regularity with which he
rendered his accounts to the Board of Excise, induced the commissioners
to continue him in the employ. In the meantime he took a regular and
exact account of sundry infractions of the laws, which, either from
design or inadvertence, were daily committed in this paper manufactory.
Having calculated the value of the concern, and the several thousand
pounds the penalties incurred by frauds on the revenue would amount to,
he seized the opportunity of privately informing the widow, that the
penalties, if levied, would amount to more than double the value of all
her property, and expose her to beggary and the King’s Bench. He assured
her that the frauds which had been at different times committed were only
known to himself, and suddenly proposed marriage to her as the only means
of insuring his secrecy. The widow, no doubt, convinced of the truth of
the statement, and seeing in Cooke a man of comely countenance and of
good figure, gave him a favourable answer, but suggested the propriety of
deferring the marriage till the time allotted to the mourning for her
first husband had expired. Cooke agreed to this delay, having taken care
to obtain her consent and promise on parchment. At length his marriage
with this lady took place, and Cooke became possessed of all her
property, which was very large, and particularly of the mills at
Tottenham, which were on a lease to her former husband. On the
expiration of the lease, he applied to the proprietors for a renewal of
it; but, in consequence of a previous treaty, the premises were, to his
great mortification, let to another person. He next purchased a large
sugar concern in Puddle Dock, and, as he knew something of the business,
flattered himself that he would he able to add rapidly to his already
large fortune. Here he carried his former habits of parsimony and
abstemiousness to the utmost extent.
At this time his artfulness and meanness seem to have quite gained the
upper hand. One of his plans was to have his table well supplied by the
generosity of other people. His colloquial powers were admirable. In
his latter days it was his practice, when he had marked out any one for
his prey, to find his way, by some means or other, into the house, by
pretending to fall down in a fit, or asking permission to enter and sit
down, in order to prevent its coming on. No humane person could well
refuse admission to a man in apparent distress, of respectable
appearance, whose well-powdered wig and long ruffles induced a belief
that he was some decayed citizen of better days. The host would soon
learn that this was the rich Mr. Cooke, the sugar-baker, worth £100,000;
and this would lead to an introduction to the family, all of whom the
artful sugar-baker would pretend to admire, asking the fond mamma
particularly for their names all in writing. The parents, of course,
considered that there could be but one motive for asking such a question,
and the consequence was, as he pursued the plan with a score or two of
people, that so great was the quantity of poultry, game, vegetables, and
provisions of every kind which used to be sent him, that it did not cost
him in housekeeping, for himself and his domestics, more than
fifteen-pence a-day on an average; but it was considered as great
extravagance when the expenses of a day amounted to as much as two
shillings.
Alas! however, in spite of all his parsimony, the sugar-baking business
did not pay. At the end of twelve months he found himself considerably
the poorer. This would never do; and in order to discover the secrets of
the trade to which he had been a stranger, he was induced to invite
several sugar-bakers to dine with him, and, after plying them with plenty
of wine, he put questions to some of the younger and more unguarded of
the trade, who, in a state of intoxication, made the desirable
discoveries. His wife, astonished at his being so unusually generous,
expressed her apprehensions about the expenses of the wine, but he told
her he would suck as much of the brains—his usual phrase—of some of the
fools as would amply repay him. His wife was as much a victim as any one
else. She died of a broken heart. After he had retired from business,
Cooke went to reside in Winchester Street, Pentonville, where he
cultivated his own cabbages on a plot of ground which had been originally
laid out for a garden. To get manure for his cabbages he would sally out
on moonlight nights, with a little shovel and a basket, and take up the
horse-dung that had been dropped in the course of the day in the City
Road. He seldom passed by a pump without taking a hearty drink. In his
daily visits to the Bank, he regaled himself at the pump near the Royal
Exchange. He was in the constant habit of pocketing the Bank paper, as
he never bought anything if he could get it for nothing.
Notwithstanding Cooke’s inordinate love of money, he was fond of
amusement. It was said of Gilpin’s wife, that—
“Though on pleasure she was bent,
She had a frugal mind.”
It seems the same could be said of Cooke. For instance, he was very fond
of going to Epsom races. But these excursions never cost him anything,
for he always took care to fasten himself upon some of those people whom
he used to buoy up with assurances of making them his heirs. Thus he had
his ride to Epsom in his friend’s gig and back to town, his bed during
the time of the races, his meals, and every other accommodation at the
expense of his fellow-traveller, to whom, for all this treating, he never
had the generosity to offer so much as a bottle of wine in return.
Cooke died as he had lived, a pauper in heart. To the last he cheated
everybody. In 1811, he took to his bed, and sent for several medical men
in the hope of obtaining some relief; but all knew him so well that not
one would attend, except Mr. Aldridge, who resided close by. Cooke
permitted this gentleman to send some medicine. On his last visit the
old man very earnestly entreated him to say candidly how long he thought
he might live. Mr. Aldridge answered that he might last six days. Cooke
collected as much of his exhausted strength as he could, raised himself
in his bed, and, darting a look of keenest indignation at the surgeon,
exclaimed, “And are not you a dishonest man, a rogue, a robber to serve
me so?” “How, sir?” asked the doctor, with surprise. “Why, sir, you are
no better than a pickpocket to rob me of my gold by sending two draughts
a-day to a man that all your physic will not keep alive for above six
days. Get out of my house, and never come near me again.” During the
last days of his existence he was extremely weak, and employed his few
remaining hours in arranging matters with his creditors. Some short time
before his death, one of his executors observed to him that he had
omitted to remember his two servants in his will; the one who had served
him as his housekeeper and nurse faithfully for upwards of ten years; the
other who used to lead him about the streets, particularly to the
Exchange Pump, to regale himself, and who was also a good nurse during
the time she lived with him; but Cooke answered, “Let them be paid their
wages to the day of my death—nothing more.” On the gentleman
remonstrating on the very great injustice it would be not to leave them
something, all he could obtain was twenty-five pounds for one and ten
pounds for the other, and even from that twenty-five, after his friend
had left the room, he took the will and struck out the word five. He
treated Dr. Lettisom quite as shabbily. In order to evince his
gratitude, he told the doctor that he would make an ample donation to any
public charity which he should recommend. After the doctor had taken the
pains to explain to him the objects of different charitable institutions,
Cooke fixed upon the Humane Society for the Recovery of the Apparently
Dead, intimating, at the same time, the extent of his fortune, and
confirming it by bringing his will in his pocket, which he submitted to
the doctor’s inspection. About three weeks before his decease, he
confidently assured Dr. Lettisom that, besides the ample provision he had
made for his numerous relatives and friends, and his two maid-servants,
and still more ample bequests to almshouses, he was in possession of a
surplus fund of £40,000 unappropriated, and desired the doctor to specify
such hospitals and dispensaries as he deemed most in want of funds their
support. The doctor gave himself an immense of trouble in the matter,
but all to no purpose, the will was read, it was found that he had left
but pounds to the Royal Humane Society, and to the doctor, for all the
trouble and plague he had given him, a plain gold ring.
“Thus lived and died,” writes his biographer, “unpitied and unlamented,
in the eighty-sixth year of his age, and possessed of a property of
£127,205 Three per Cent. Consolidated Bank Annuities, a man whose life
was chequered with as few good actions as ever fell to the share of any
person that has lived to an advanced age.”
It is not often that money is made by gambling; yet now and then this is
the case. General Scott, the father-in-law of George Canning and the
Duke of Portland, was known to have won at White’s £200,000, thanks to
his notorious sobriety and knowledge of the game of whist. The general
possessed a great advantage over his companions by avoiding those
indulgences at the table which used to muddle other men’s brains. He
confined himself to dining off a boiled chicken, with toast-and-water.
By such a regimen he came to the whist-table with a clear head, and
possessing, as he did, a remarkable memory, with great coolness of
judgment, he was enabled honestly to win the sum of £200,000. If the
general was not an eccentric money-getter, he evidently got his money in
an eccentric way.
Equally successful was the millionaire Crockford, who was originally a
fishmonger, keeping a shop near Temple Bar. His fortune was all made at
his gambling-house in fifteen or sixteen years. A vast sum, perhaps half
a million, was sometimes due to him; but as he won all his debtors were
able to raise, and gave credit, it was hard for men of fashion, fond of
play, to keep out of his lures. He retired in 1840, much as an Indian
chief retires from a hunting country when there is not game enough left
for his tribe; and the club, which bore his name, tottered to its fall.
It really seems that at that time there were no more very high players
visiting the place. It was said that there were persons of rank and
station who had never paid their debts to Crockford up to 1844.
Morissey, the well-known American gambler, has passed away. At one time
he kept a small drinking-saloon of the lowest character. So disreputable
was the place that it was closed by the authorities. Morissey was also a
prize-fighter. Drunken, brutal, without friends or money, he came from
Troy to New York to see what would turn up. At that time an election was
in progress; and elections were carried by brute force. There was no
registry law; and the injunction to vote early and vote often was
literally obeyed. In such a city, and at such a time, Morissey was in
his element. Having acquired a little money, he opened a place for play.
He became thoroughly temperate. He resolved to behave well, to be sober,
and not gamble. Those resolutions he carried out. His house in New York
was the most elegantly furnished of any of the kind in the State; the
table, the attendants, and the cooking, were of the first order. He
followed his patrons to Saratoga, and opened there what was called a
club-house; judges, senators, merchants, bankers, millionaires, became
his guests: the disguise was soon thrown off, and the club-house assumed
the form of a first-class gambling-house at the Springs. Horse-racing
and attendant games followed, all bringing custom and profit to
Morissey’s establishment; and thus he amassed a large fortune, and died
in the odour of respectability which wealth confers. Morissey, as
Congress man, was not exactly a working member. When he first went to
Washington, Mr. Colfax hardly knew on which of the committees of the
House it would be best to put him; so he said, in a very apologetic tone,
“Well, Mr. Morissey, I should be very glad to oblige in regard to a great
many old members, and all the best places belong by right to them.
Still, I will see what I can do for you.” “Well, Mr. Speaker,” said the
new member, “I am pretty particular; but 1 will, at any rate, tell you
what I want. If there is a committee that has no committee-room, never
has any business sent to it, and never meets, I should like to be put on
the tail-end of that committee. How does it strike you?” “You relieve
me wonderfully,” said Mr. Colfax. “I will put you on the Committee of
Revolutionary Pensions.”
Another case of that rarity, a successful gambler, is thus described in
“Sunshine and Shadow,” in New York:—“A man lives in the upper part of
this city, and in fine style. He is reputed to be worth 500,000 dollars.
He came to New York penniless. He decided to take up play as a business;
not to keep a gambling-house, but to play every night as a trade. He
made certain rules which he has kept over thirty years. He would avoid
all forms of licentiousness, would attend church regularly on Sunday,
would avoid all low, disreputable company, would drink no kind of
intoxicating liquors, wine or ale, would neither smoke nor chew, would go
nightly to his play as a man would go to his office or his trade, would
play as long as he won, or until the bank broke, would lose a certain sum
and no more; when he lost that he would stop playing, and leave the room
for the night; if he lost ten nights, he would wait till his luck
changed;” and this system he followed exactly, while tens of thousands
around him were carried away into irretrievable ruin.
As I write I see the report of a peculiar case heard in Dublin, before
Chief Justice Morris and a special jury; and, as the _Times’_
correspondent informs us, some very curious revelations were made in the
course of the hearing. The action was brought by a Mr. Kavanagh to
recover £7,000 on account of work and labour alleged to have been done by
the plaintiff in his capacity of manager to the defendant, a Mr. Henry
Lindsay, a bill-discounter, who, it was stated, did business to the
extent of £20,000 to £30,000 a month, and who lived alone in a large
house in a respectable street, sleeping on a stretcher, and having bills
on the house announcing it as to be let, in order that he might avoid, as
he actually succeeded in avoiding, the payment of rates, on the plea that
he was merely caretaker of the house. It also came out that defendant,
who was advanced in years, had recently paid £5,000 to compromise an
action for breach of promise of marriage. So the old gentleman had a
soft side after all!
One of the great millionaires of France was Ouvrard, the financier—a man
sprung from a very humble origin, but of great financial capacity.
During his long career of success, which lasted from the latter part of
the last century till 1830, he made and spent millions of money. He was
ruined by making large sales in the funds, under the expectation that the
government of Louis Philippe could not stand. He was born in 1770; and
his first operation, which consisted in buying up all the paper made in
Poitou and Angoumois, and retailing it at an immense profit to the Paris
booksellers, laid the foundation of his fortune. He soon afterwards made
a contract for provisioning the Spanish fleet, which had joined the
French squadron in 1797, and made a net profit of £600,000. In 1800, he
was supposed to possess a million and a-half of English money. Soon
after he had the contract for supplying the French army in the campaign
which closed with the battle of Marengo. His prosperity continued for
many years; and in 1812, the government owed him, for enormous advances
made by him, nearly three millions of English money. He was
_Munitionnaire-Général_ for the Waterloo campaign; and, in 1828,
contracted to supply the Duc d’Angoulême with everything necessary for
the entry of the French army into Spain; but the misfulfilment of his
contract entailed heavy losses on him, and in 1830 he was completely
ruined.
No man was more reckless in his expenditure, nor more magnificent in his
manner of living. At the time of the Directory, the _fêtes_ given by him
were the theme of the whole of Parisian society at that time. At his
splendid villa near Rueil, during the Empire, he was in the habit of
giving suppers to all the _corps de ballet_ of the opera twice a-week,
and he used to send several carriages, splendidly equipped, to bear away
the principal performers when the performance was over. There an
enormous white marble bath, as large as an ordinary-sized saloon, was
prepared for such of the ladies as, in the summer, chose to bathe on
their arrival. There a splendid supper was laid out, of which the fair
bathers and many of the pleasure-seekers of the day partook; and, besides
every luxury of the culinary art, prepared by the best cooks in Paris,
each lady received a donation of fifty louis, and the one fortunate
enough to attract the especial notice of the wealthy host a large sum of
money. Mademoiselle Georges, the celebrated tragedian of that day, cost
him, as he was fond of relating, a large sum of money. He had invited
her to sup with him at his villa; but the very day she was to come, a
note informed him that she was compelled to give up the pleasure of
supping with him, as the Emperor Napoleon had given her a rendezvous for
the same time, which she dared not refuse. Ouvrard was furious at this
_contretemps_, and he could not bear to yield the _pas_ to _le petit
Bonaparte_, whom he had known as a young captain of artillery, too happy
to be invited to his house in the days of the Directory; and under this
feeling, with a hint to the lady that she would find 100,000 francs
served up at supper, he prevailed on the actress to give the emperor the
slip. The following day the great financier received a summons forthwith
to appear at the Tuileries, and was ushered into the emperor’s presence.
After walking once or twice up and down the room, the great man turned
sharp round on his unwilling guest, and, with his eagle eye riveted on
Ouvrard’s face, sternly demanded, “Monsieur, how much did you make by
your contract for the army at the beginning of the year?” The capitalist
knew it was vain to equivocate, and replied, “4,000,000 francs, sire.”
“Then, sir, you made too much; so pay immediately 2,000,000 francs into
the treasury.” And Ouvrard, says old Captain Gronow, who tells the
story, immediately did—much, probably, to his vexation and disgust.
Before the French Revolution, the largest fortunes in France were
possessed by the farmers of the revenue, or _fermiers généraux_. Their
profits were enormous, and their probity was very doubtful. It is
related, that one evening at Ferney, when the company were telling
stories of robbers, they asked their host, Voltaire, for one on the same
subject. The great man, taking up his flat candlestick, as when about to
retire, began—“There was once upon a time a _fermier général_—I have
forgotten the rest.”
In the Bagot will case we see another illustration of the way in which
money is made, and the dissipation and extravagance to which it leads.
Mr. Bagot, a colonial adventurer, returned to Ireland with the reputation
of enormous wealth, and married the daughter of a baronet. Paralysed as
he was, a son was born to him, which he disowned. The Bagot case ended
in a verdict setting aside the late Mr. Bagot’s will, and disinheriting
the infant son, and thus Mrs. Bagot was in a measure legally
rehabilitated. The disclosures at the trial, however, revealed a
panorama of years of extravagance, folly, and riot, which is, we trust,
exceptional. The whole story of the Australian millionaire, Mr. Bagot,
is fraught with details that can only disgust; and it would have been
much better if the public had been spared recitals which, however
entertaining to frivolous persons, can hardly serve any good purpose by
the extraordinary publicity they have now gained. Should a new trial
take place, a good deal of the money must pass into the lawyers’ hands.
Not long ago the death was announced of M. Basilewski, the Rothschild of
Russia, which took place at St. Petersburg, at the age of ninety-two.
The deceased, who was the father of Princess Souvaroff, was the owner of
gold mines in Siberia, which have already produced for him more than
100,000,000 of francs.
In America, even literary men, if they have luck, make money. It is
reported of “Josh Billings” (Henry W. Shaw) that he made more money than
almost any American author by persistent working of his peculiar vein of
humour. Some years he got as much as 4,000 dollars from a weekly
newspaper for exclusive contributions: he made 5,000 or 6,000 dollars by
lecturing, and had a profit from his almanack of 8,000 or 9,000 dollars
more—18,000 to 20,000 dollars per annum. That is five or six times as
much as Emerson, Hawthorne, Lowell, or Holmes had ever made.
One of the most marvellous careers in London is that of Baron Grant, who
commenced his city life as a clerk in a wine-merchant’s office in Mark
Lane, and whose capacity in the way of “financing” and “promoting public
companies” appears to have been unrivalled. Of course he made himself
many enemies; but that is the way of the world. The men who are the
first to fling stones at a successful rival, and to call him hard names,
are the men who morally have no claim to be censors on the ground of
higher principle or superior virtue. It is thus the unlucky ones revenge
themselves on their luckier rivals. They are prone to hit a man when he
is risen in the world. Nowhere is there more lack of charity, or more
evil speaking of one another, than in the circles where Mammon is king,
and where the great object of life is held to be the art of money-getting
and money-making.