LAST GAMBLE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 3742, 17 January 1928, Page 4

LAST GAMBLE.

ACTOR STAKED ALL. AND DIED PENNILESS. LONDON, Jan. 3. After a long theatrical career, marked by many financial ups-and-downs, in which we drifted from wealth to comparative poverty, Jack W. Wilson, the variety artist, has died. His life-long partner, Nellie Waring, was with him to the last. Otherwise known as Mustante, Wilson, partnered by Nellie Waring, toured England, America, Australia and Africa. Altogether, he lost three fortunes on the Stock Exchange and on the turf and gambled away £IO,OOO of his theatrical earnings in real estate at Seattle.

Before he was 30 he took £30,000 from Australia in 1898 and then lost £20,000 in a wheat gamble at New York in 1907. . TURF LOSSES.

He lost a further £7OOO in an effort to recover his losses on the turf. Further fortunes went the same way. He earned £IOO a week in England and £2OO a week in America, but finally died penniless, of pneumonia, in Fulham Hospital. Nellie Waring sat by his bedside for 14 hours.

Born in California, the son of a “Forty-niner,” Wilson ran away in a travelling circus and then went into vaudeville. He later played in straight plays and was a contemporary of the great Cinguevalli and Chirgwin.