How it Feels to Give £500,000

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 526, 1 December 1928, Page 5

How it Feels to Give £500,000

Millionaire Tells GIFTS TOTAL £1,750,000 What does it feel like to give away £500.000? A “Daily Mail’* reporter asked this ot Mr. Bernhard Baron, the millionaire tobacco magnate, whose munificent gift to hospitals and homes for cripples and orphans was announced recently. Mr. Baron, a small man with fresh complexion and greyish, dark hair and moustache, was sitting in his plainly furnished office in City ltoad, E.C. He smiled and said: I feel happy to-day, but really not a great deal happier than I have felt for many years. You see, this habit of giving to those in need is one that is not really new to me. I began it years ago, when I could afford onlj just a little. Perhaps I learnt something of what it is to be hard up. 1 remember my lGs-a-week job with a New York tobacconist, and the life I led then. My arrival in England with the specifications of my cigarette maclune comes back to me, too, and the struggle to get someone to buy it which they did after some time and at a fair price. Then I gradually made progress making cigarettes, and I became rich. Of course, I look after my ow T n people, my relations, and my great staffs, of whom lam so proud. What then? I am not a politician. I know' nothing about politics, and i care " It is the poor, the sick and the suffering Who come most into ‘my thoughts. As I sign some of these give-away cheques of mine it is they who come before my mind. Money itself does not bring me happiness, but the giving of it does Mr Baron hinted that his iSth birthday, December 5, may see his contributions to charities added to. Already, including his recent gift, he has given away more thanjfi 1,750,000.