Image TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage Tile
Image size: 6144x8704 Scale: 35% - PanoJS3
Page overview thumbnail

Article text

THEIR FlfiST £100.
THE FIRST STEP UP THE
LADDER OF WEALTH.
"It is the first hundred that consts
—and also costs," Sir Thomas Lipton
once declared. "And I can assure
you it takes far more saving than
any later thousand."
And Sir Thomas speaks from painful
experience, for he had reached his
twenty-sixth birthday before he had
a hundred pounds to call bis own.
He bad been errand-boy in a stationer's
shop at. half-a-erown a week.
When he was promoted to a weekly
four shillings he had thought himself
the luckiest boy in Glasgow.
He had spent years across the Atlantic,
toiling in the Carolina rice-i
fields and trying his hand at a dozen
other ill-paid jobs, before be found
a place behind the counter of a store,
and was at last able to save the
£100 vith which he returned home to
start his tiny shop in Stobcross-St.,
Glasgow.
Mr. <Gordon Selfridge found his first
step up the ladder of riches no less
painful and slow. He bad, as be
says, "started at the very bottom,
as a boy, at Marshall Field's great
"store in Chicago, and worked his way
up, step by step, to be manager of a
department."
But half - a dozen years had passed
before, with the utmost thrift he was
able to lay his hands on his first
£100, the nucleus of his present large
fortune.
Lord Pierrie, the millionaire shipping
magnate, had no smiles from
Fortune when fee 'first began 'his
climb to riches. At fifteenhe left his
very modest home in the village of
Clandeboye, in County Down, to' be
office-boy for the firm of Hariand &
Wolff, then in their early days of
struggle in Belfast. When he fonnd
his way into the drawing-office he had
to toil early and late for six years
before he could boast a nest-egg of a
hundred sovereigns.
Lord Leverhulme entered his father's
grocery shop at Bolton at sixteen,
to expend his energies-on cutting
and wrapping up soap. He had
passed his twenty-first birthday before
he was allowed to try his luck
on the road as a traveller, and thus
found himself ia a -position to save
his first few pounds, the harbingers
of the riches to follow.
Sir William Arrol, the famous engineer,
had spent many strenuous
years as mill-hand, .blacksmith, and
mechanic before, when nearly thirty,
he had scraped together £100 and
was able to buy a discarded engine
and boiler and start in business for
himself. Sir Richard Tangye saved
his first £100 while doing clerk's
work in Ihe office of a Birmingham
engineering firm; and Sir Donald
ctirrie, on an office-stool of the newly
formed Cunard Company.
Mr. Russell Sage, the "Wizard cf
Wall Street," who amassed a fortune
of £16,000,000, first began "accumulating
capital" as assistant to a
!
Troy grocer.
$