John Elwes was a man so adversed to spending money that he’d put Mister Krabs to shame and could reportedly hold onto a penny so hard it would turn into a shilling out of pure fear. Amazingly Elwes wasn’t poor, quite the opposite in fact, he was a millionaire! He just didn’t like spending money, like at all.
Yep, despite owning dozens of houses and having enough money in the bank to live the rest of his life dining on crushed pearl milkshakes served from the bodies of whatever the Ye Olde version of supermodels were, John Elwes reportedly never spent a penny more than he ever needed to.
We should mention that Elwes inherited the equivalent of 8 million pounds before his fifth birthday, so it’s not like he grew up with nothing and just never got used to spending money, he was always a tight-fisted bastard, even as a kid. Even after inheriting a further 18 million pounds from his uncle a few years later, Elwes still refused to spend anything for no reason anyone has ever been able to discern. The guy just hated spending money, often to the detriment of his health, reputation and the noses of anyone standing near him.
For example, Elwes would wear clothes until they literally fell apart and rather than buying new ones, would steal them from hobos or simply sew together rags he found on the floor. When it came to food, Elwes was known to keep rotten food, which he’d usually found in the street, in his pockets and would become incredibly irate if he misplaced it, which happened quite a lot considering almost all his pockets had big-ass holes in them. A famous story about Elwes’ pocket food is the time he rode several miles on horseback, in the rain just to retrieve a sandwich that he’d accidentally left in his other coat when leaving a friend’s house, nearly breaking down the door to get it back. While it’s certainly ridiculous that Elwes once nearly broke down someone’s door to get back a sandwich, to us the most unbelievable part of that story is that this miserly, Mr Burns-looking motherfucker had friends in the first place, but we digress.
Perhaps the story that really sums up just how much of a tight-fisted penny-pincher Elwes was is the time he spied an obscenely large rat dragging a half eaten moorhen (a kind of ugly duck creature) from the river Thames and instead of walking past like a normal person, he bum-rushed the rat and ripped the half eaten bird from its jaws before tearing into its flesh himself with the ferocity and subtlety of a toothless vampire eating a watermelon. We’ve heard of taking candy from a baby, but come on, Elwes, that’s just taking the piss. Another story involved Elwes dining on a half eaten pike (a sort of fish creature) that had already eaten another fish, upon finding the half eaten fish inside of the already half eaten fish he was currently eating, Elwes reportedly smiled and likened it to killing two birds with one stone. No, Elwes, it was more like eating two disgusting half rotten fish instead of spending your money, you asshole.
