£1m getaway stash is dug up
SHOPFITTERS have found a £1million wartime escape stash hidden in the 1940s under Winston Churchill’s favourite tailors’ store. Workers discovered the hoard stuffed beneath floorboards at a former branch of Bradley’s in Brighton and handed it to police.
The £30,000 in mouldy £5 and £1 notes – equivalent to £1million today – was concealed in the 1940s.
Now a Cotswold Outdoor store, between 1936 and 1973 the site was home to Bradley Gowns, understood to be a branch of London furrier and couturier Bradley’s.
Bradley’s client list was a Who’s Who of Europe’s elite, with customers including the Royal Family, wartime leader Churchill – and fi lm star Brigitte Bardot.
Howard Bradley, sole heir to the family business, runs its only outlet, a specialist dry cleaners in Milton Keynes.
He was surprised by the find but thinks it may have been part of a plan to escape Nazi occupation.
He said: “After Dunkirk it was looking pretty bleak.
“We are English back to I don’t know when but I know there is Jewish blood in the family. People on the Continent were buying their way out – out of Austria, France.
“They might have worried they’d have to buy their way out of England, maybe it was part of a getaway plan.”