From the champagne lifestyle to his lonely, tragic end in prison cell
Time is nearly up for old £5
CHECK your pockets, dig under your sofa and hunt out those paper £5 notes before it’s too late.
The Bank of England says shops will no longer accept the old-style Elizabeth Fry fivers from Friday, May 5.
New polymer notes featuring Winston Churchill were released in September last year.
But do not worry too much, the Bank of England says many High Street banks and the Post Office will swap old fivers for new ones after May 5.
And if you’re really late, you can take old notes to the Bank of England’s cash desk in London and swap them there.
The polymer notes have attracted criticism for containing traces of animal fat. Tallow is derived from suet and is also used in the manufacture of candles and soap.
Jane Austen is set to feature on the new £10 notes released in the summer, while plans are also under way to release a polymer £20. IT was in December 1998 that the Raymond Scott story began when a Shakespeare First Folio with an estimated value of around £3m was stolen from Durham University library.
The first edition of the Bard of Avon’s collected works published in 1623 was one of six other books stolen from two display cabinets.
None of the books were seen again until June 2008 when Raymond Scott walked into the world-renowned Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, USA with the First Folio and asked for experts there to value it with a view to selling it.
Of the 750 originally printed, only around 240 have survived which makes them extremely valuable.
It also makes them extremely identifiable too as over the four centuries since being first published all have been the subject of extensive expert analysis which has detailed every blemish, tear, typographical error and personal note contained within their 700+ pages. In effect, that establishes a unique literary DNA for every single one of them.
As such the First Folio Scott took to the Folger was identified as the stolen Durham copy within a matter of minutes by an expert there.
The FBI were informed who contacted the British police and soon after he was arrested at his then home in Washington, Tyne and Wear.
Scott always maintained his inno- cence, saying he had bought it from a book seller in Cuba.
However during a series of interviews I conducted with him over an 18 month period, from his initial arrest to his conviction for handling stolen goods – not theft – he dropped enough hints he had done it.
He even confessed once in the final week of his four-week trial.
“You know I did it, don’t you?” he said – and he went on to explain exactly how.
In 1998 Scott, then a small scale book thief, lived around 10 miles away from Durham University and said he had been “scoping” out the library and had seen five cabinets – two wooden ones Raymond Scott died a sad death in prison shortly after his realisation of the “gargantuan catastrophe” he’d landed himself in and three metal – containing books and manuscripts.
He broke into one with a screwdriver and shoved its contents into a plastic shopping bag before making his way out, leaving the cabinet with the First Folio in as he thought it too big to sneak out.
However such was the ease of his theft and getaway he returned soon after and broke into the second cabinet to get the Folio.
For years he kept it in a bookcase in the bedroom of the home he shared with his elderly mother.
He recalled how some nights, as she watched Emmerdale on TV downstairs, he was upstairs reading as he put it “the greatest secular book in the English language”.
And there it might have remained but for two events.
First, in 2006, Scott read a newspaper report which revealed how a First Folio had been sold for £3m.
Then the following year he went on holiday to Cuba where he met and fell in love with cabaret dancer Heidy Garcia Rios, who at 21 was less than half his age.
Scott returned a number of times, the holidays being largely funded by him ‘maxing out’ his credit cards.
However it couldn’t go on and with the credit card companies demanding he pay his debts putting in jeopardy the champagne lifestyle he financed with Heidy, he decided to take the extraordinary risk of selling the First