An unrepentant Deist, he spent his final days penniless, in a ramshackle house in Greenwich Village, shouting away the clergymen who stopped by to save his soul.
The inquiry was set up partly in response to a petition signed by over 200,000 people shocked by the death of diabetic former soldier David Clapson, who died penniless in July 2014, 18 days after sanctions were imposed on him.
"Of these dreary men who had committed themselves, each for his own good reason, to the task of finishing their days as penniless drunkards, I alone, as the sharer of their way of life, presented a replica of childhood to which their vision could daily turn, and in being thus grafted onto them, I became the unnatural son of a few score beaten men".
(Obama was virtually penniless himself in those days).
Within ten days, she was penniless".
The profile of today's bride and groom has changed from the days when two penniless love-birds just starting out could easily tie the knot.
Could the K.G.B. in 1945 really have predicted that a penniless, malnourished Holocaust survivor would one day become "a very rich mackintosh manufacturer and make the acquaintance eight years later of an MP from Huddersfield who, ten years on from that, would become Prime Minister"?
But on this particular day, Howell found the penniless, desperate Nicol wandering the forlorn alleys of his hometown in search of whatever fragments of loose coal he might use to stay warm, and thus alive, one more night.
He was born and raised in Merthyr Tydfil and it was in the town's Prince Charles Hospital that he ended his days 61 years later, virtually penniless, pained by a broken marriage and a body wracked with illness largely brought on by excessive drinking, an all too familiar tale once those hand bandages have been unwrapped for the last time.
He walked three more days with no food before crossing, penniless, into Arizona.
