Lost fortune
★ KIND-hearted refuse workers came to the rescue after a woman accidentally threw away her mother’s £20,000 life savings kept in old Bisto gravy tins.
As we reported yesterday, heroic employees Kenny McAdam and Tony Scanlon spent two hours searching through rubbish at a recycling centre in West Dunbartonshire to find the missing money.
★ But it’s not the only case of people binning a fortune by mistake, as JAMES MOORE reveals…
BOOMING SILLY: Flash Gordon star Brian Blessed, known for his loud voice, threw away a drawing by artist Pablo Picasso because he didn’t think it was very good. He was just 12 when he met the painter, but ended up chucking his sketch of a dove away. Brian joked: “I threw away about £50million.”
LOOSE CHANGE: In 2013 IT worker James Howells, 32, from Newport, South Wales, threw away a hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins. The cryptocurrency has since surged in value by about 1,000% meaning he effectively lost £75m.
POTTY MOVE: When Nigel Reynolds was the first reporter to chat to author JK Rowling she gave him a free first edition copy of her book
Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone. Nigel threw it away, thinking the story would be a flop. One recently sold for £127,000.
FLOP GEAR: When Alexander Thompson bought an old banger for a few quid from a farmer he was happy to sell it on for scrap. It turned out the crushed car was a 1927 limited-edition Rolls-Royce – one of only 12 and worth £1.4m. Brummie Alex, who lived in a caravan, decided there was “no point dwelling on” his loss.
KIP IT CLOSE: In 2009 a woman from Tel Aviv, Israel, decided to buy her mum a new mattress as a surprise and took the old one to the tip. What she
didn’t know was that her mother had stuffed £660,000 of her savings inside – for safe keeping. The mattress was never recovered.
WHEELIE ANNOYING: In the same year an elderly woman in West Sussex threw her £12,000 savings into her wheelie bin by mistake. They went to landfill where they were buried under thousands of tons of rubbish and deemed to be irretrievable.
UP IN SMOKE: In 2001 Damien Hirst was exhibiting a work of art featuring ashtrays, half-filled coffee cups, bottles and papers. Hirst’s pieces can fetch millions but cleaner Emmanuel Asare thought it was junk left over from a party and threw it all away. The bits were later recovered.
CLEANED OUT: In 2014 cleaners also put a £2.2m painting by the Chinese artist Cui Ruzhuo in the trash by mistake following an auction of his work held in Hong Kong.
RUBBISH IDEA: An Aussie truck driver threw away bin bags containing £33,000 of his wife’s uninsured gold jewellery during a clear out. The couple had hidden them in the sacks in case they were burgled. The bags went to the tip and were never seen again.
FAT LOTTO GOOD: In 2014 it emerged a man in Pennsylvania, US, who played the same lotto numbers every day, had mistakenly thrown away winning tickets worth over $1m.