AMAZING WAR HOARD

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1054, 19 August 1930, Page 14

AMAZING WAR HOARD

£17,000 FORTUNE BURIED IN SHELL CASES UNDER CONCRETE BED A fortune of £17,000 burled under a war tank in a small Black Country town; and the possibility of a syndicate being formed to put forward the owner’s claim to the hoard. Such are the main facts of an amazing story from a district not far from Birmingham, which is related in an English paper. The tank, which fought at Arras, and is now a war memorial, became the guardian of the “pile” in strange circumstances. In the course of the war a manufacturer dealing in munition metals saved £17,000, placed his fortune in a number of shell cases and secretly buried them on land adjoining a church. The shell cases were sunk on foggy nights to a depth of nearly twenty feet. Afterward the munitionaire went to South Africa, where he found his lucky star still with him, and he made a further fortunb by speculation while in business as an hotel proprietor in Johannesburg. Then ill-luck came, he lost all, and he had to tramp to the coast and work the trip to England in a cargo boat. After years of wandering he arrived in his home town to find that the piece of land where he had buried his fortune had been acquired by the local council, a concrete bed many feet thick put down, and resting serenely on it the war-scarred, massive tank from Arras. The man says he is willing to pay whatever taxes may be due, and also to pay the council for removing and replacing the tank and for dynamiting the concrete base to reach the money. But the disappointed one whimsically pointed out to a reporter: “How do I know that when the concrete bed was sunk my fortune was not discovered by a workman or workmen, who collected my shell cases as ‘souvenirs’ and carefully placed the coin in safe custody? Asked whether the council were prepared to permit tunnelling through the road to the spot under an expenses guarantee the surveyor said: “The whole position is very involved, and there is no precedent. When we ac quired the freehold we were entitled to everything that was in the land and everything in the soil. Since the land was not the man’s property he was a trespasser. Equally he has no right, as a trespasser, to seek facilities for regaining the money. “All the victim can do, in my opinion, is to get lawyers to petition to the higher authorities, with a view to their agreeing with the local authorities that the condition of the freehold should be waived for a given period in order that suitable methods of reaching the hoard might be employed. And it would be a very costly business.”