A PENSIONER who called himself Frugal McDougal has left £700,000 to a charity for the blind.

Robert Simes, known as Bob, worked seven days a week from the age of nine and took his first proper holiday only after he had retired.

When the 93-year-old, of West Parade, Horsham, died it emerged he had left his entire estate of £700,000 to the Royal National Institute for the Blind.

Mr Simes had suffered polio as a child which affected his sight and in later years he developed glaucoma and had been in regular contact with the charity.

Staff had no idea how much money he had and were amazed when they heard how much he had left behind.

Mr Simes's working life began as a nine-year-old boy. His father, a clerk at Horsham Railway Station, had died and he began clearing manure from the streets to help

support his family. He lived with his grandmother, mother and sister Gladys in Horsham and took up a paper round from the post office where his mother worked in Victory Road.

After that Mr Simes started selling the Argus from the basket of his bike under a chestnut tree in the Carfax, Horsham. He continued to sell papers until his retirement 20 years ago.

His only remaining relative, cousin Ann Davey, 55, who did not receive a penny in his will, said: "He never had a day off, let alone a holiday, and stayed under the tree until the last paper was sold.

"The only time he went away was when there was a newspaper strike in the 1950s and he had a weekend in Paris.

"As he got older and the weather got to his bones more, he bought a newsagents in London Road.

"When they built Albion Way and had to bulldoze his shop, he was paid compensation which he invested in various things."

The investments paid off and left Mr Simes with his fortune, but he never spent a penny of it.

Mrs Davey said: "He just spent his pension and saved the rest. He called himself Frugal McDougal.

"He was very clever and kept himself to himself."

The pensioner lived in Horsham all his life. He had never married after suffering a broken heart in 1939.

He had been courting an Austrian girl for 14 years but by the time he finally decided to pop the question and drove round to her house, he discovered she had run off and married someone else.

Mr Simes' thriftiness has meant a shock windfall for the RNIB.

He had been a great fan of Talking Books - novels recorded on to cassette tapes by actors or the authors themselves - and specified the money should be used to fund more of them.

RNIB legacy manager Tim Stone said the bequest was one of the biggest the charity had received.

He said: "We provide the Talking Books service to 51,500 people in the UK and to 640 in West Sussex alone.

"They cost about £500 each to produce and are free to our users. For many people they are an absolute lifeline. They may be the only human voice a person hears all week.

"Something like this will make all the difference. A legacy of this size is something we don't see very often."

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