Charity girl, 23 returns £7,000 left by mistake in an old purse
A YOUNG charity shop worker tracked down a pensioner to hand over a £7,000 wad of cash hidden in a donated purse.
The stash – in $100 bills – was hidden in the lining of the decorated evening bag handed in to the charity shop.
Sophie Condren, assistant manager of the Shelter boutique in north London, found the tightly packed bundle of cash while cleaning out the purse. She was about to put it on sale for just £10.
The 23-year-old said she was shocked when she made the discovery, on Valentine’s Day, as she was much more used to finding dirty tissues and two pence coins.
She said that when donations are handed in it is common practice to check through any pockets.
Ms Condren said: “I hadn’t ever found anything interesting until then. Usually we just find tissues or loose change.
“I counted the cash and a volunteer counted it as well.
Reunited
“It was $9,700 – worth £7,000. It was all in 2006 and 1996 printed dollars – we found that out while checking to see if they were real.”
But with never a thought of keeping the cash, kind-hearted Ms Condren painstakingly tracked down the former owner of the purse, through a Gift Aid form she had signed, and reunited her with her savings.
She said: “The lady was just really grateful. We contacted the woman and the lady came in two days later.
“The woman took it back. It was a little evening bag that was purple with little beads on it.”
The owner, who wished to remain anonymous, is a woman in her 70s.
She had not realised what was in the bag because she thought that somebody had stolen her money.
Ms Condren said: “I think she was unwell. Our manager said that she didn’t want to talk about it any further.
“She didn’t want much to do with it. I think she was embarrassed. We are always careful with donations.
“I suppose it could have been a lot worse if we didn’t check the bag and it went on to the shop floor.”
Ms Condren added: “I enjoy working through people’s stuff and trying to guess who it is that handed it in.”
The popular boutique in Hampstead donates all of its proceeds to Shelter, the UK homelessness and housing charity. Ms Condren explained: “The shop is more like a thrift store, which makes the people around here less afraid to come in.
“We get donated food – quality stuff – and people want to buy it, too.
“With all the bad press at the minute for charities in general, it’s good that something nice has happened.”
IHAVE known the small fenland city of Ely for the past three decades and in that time I have seen it grow bigger, busier and wealthier. It has also acquired a phenomenon from larger places which until recent years you never used to see: people begging on the streets.
Of course the Corbynite Left has a simple explanation for this: it is Tory austerity forcing people out on to the street. Well, actually, no. Police in Ely have disclosed that none of the beggars on the streets of Ely is in fact homeless.
Every one is an opportunist feigning homelessness in order to hoodwink concerned members of the public. When the shops close and there are fewer people about the “homeless” beggars are up and off back to their homes.
And yes, the police are in a position to know whether beggars are homeless or not. They work with charities and social services. Part of their duty is to make sure that genuinely homeless people are helped.
Ely of course is not the whole country. There are many genuine homeless people in other towns and cities who have fallen through the net of the welfare state. No one should show a heartless attitude, even in cases where they have brought downfall on themselves through drink, drugs or the inability to handle money.
QUITE rightly we have public-funded agencies to scoop up people who have ended up living on the streets. They don’t always succeed, not least because some people can be very difficult to help and may reject the offer of a roof over their heads.
But the idea that we are a vicious, capitalist society which leaves people to rot on the streets is a fantasy dreamed up by the Left. Worse, it is an insult to the work of the many who help the homeless.
It is naïve to see someone begging on the street and assume that they are there because an uncaring society has left them to fend for themselves. The whole issue is clouded by the issue of professional begging: people who are faking destitution in order to milk public generosity.
It has been going on for years. Back in the early 1990s I often used to see a particularly boisterous and healthy-looking beggar sitting with his ghettoblaster in a subway in London. I used to wonder why he wasn’t there in the evening – until one day I saw him catching the tube. He was a commuter – just like the people on whose charity he was living.
People have taken to sitting on the streets of Ely asking for money not because large numbers of local people have suddenly fallen on hard times but because professional beggars spied a business opportunity. They saw that the city receives many visitors to its magnificent cathedral and worked out that many came with a sense of Christian charity.
The problem has spilled over from Cambridge where two years ago police revealed that nearly half the “homeless” people sitting on the streets were nothing of the sort.
In one case a taxi driver reported that a passenger of his was boasting of earning £250 a day on the streets. I wonder how many of the people who had kindly dropped their hard-won earnings into his collection tin could afford to travel around by cab.
Professional beggars who obtain money by deceiving the public are fraudsters. They are distracting attention from the genuinely needy. Yet they get away with it thanks to the reaction from the Left-wing mob whenever the issue of street beggars is raised. No sooner had Ely police put out its statement on Facebook than it was receiving replies from people calling the police officer concerned various unpleasant names and hoping that he ended up on the streets himself. That sadly is the level of much of the debate on social media.
Last month the leader of Windsor and Maidenhead Council, Simon Dudley, appealed to police to use powers under the Vagrancy Act to tackle “aggressive begging and intimidation” and clear “detritus” left by some beggars on the pavement.
He quickly found himself the subject of a petition accusing him of trying to “criminalise homelessness”, which attracted more than 100,000 backers – many of whom, I suspect, were simply reacting to some re-tweet and hadn’t actually read the letter Dudley had sent to his Police and Crime Commissioner.
YET it soon emerged that some of the town’s beggars were not homeless at all – in spite of having built little dens of cardboard boxes and blankets in bus shelters and elsewhere. One newspaper’s reporters counted 13 people apparently sleeping rough in Windsor during the daytime. Yet by 10pm all but three had vanished – one of whom was followed to an address in nearby Slough where it appeared he lived.
Of course we should do all we can to help the homeless – and like other councils Windsor and Maidenhead Council does just that, approaching people in the streets to offer them accommodation.
But it is foolish to confuse homelessness with begging – and ignore ample evidence that there are people who pretend to be homeless in order to exploit the generosity of the public. The latter group needs to be tackled just like anyone else who obtains money by deception. The quickest way to stop them would be for all of us to stop giving money directly to people on the streets.
If we want to support the homeless it is far better we donate to charities who work with them, help find them shelter and are in a position to know which people on the streets are genuinely destitute and which are just taking us for a ride.
‘None of the beggars in Ely is homeless’