Horatio W. Bottomley

British journalist and businessman

• Born: March 23, 1860
• Birthplace: Bethnal Green, London, England
• Died: May 26, 1933
• Place of death: London, England

Born into poverty, Bottomley acquired and squandered up to four fortunes. As editor of the popular newspaper John Bull, he became the self-appointed tribune of the British “person in the street” before and during World War I. His exploits as a superpatriot made him a popular idol until his fraud conviction in 1922.

Early Life

Horatio W. Bottomley was born to Elizabeth (née Holyoake) Bottomley, the daughter of engineer George Holyoake and sister of George Jacob Holyoake, secularist and founder of the modern British cooperative movement. Bottomley’s father was William King Bottomley, a tailor who died after a fit of mania. By the time he was five years old, Horatio had lost both parents and was sent to an orphanage founded by Sir Josiah Mason at Erdington, near Birmingham. He ran away from the orphanage at age fourteen and spent his early years doing a series of odd jobs: office boy in a solicitor’s office, worker in a jeweler’s shop, and reader for George Jacob Holyoake’s The Secularist and for Charles Bradlaugh’s famous freethinking magazine, National Reformer.

While working for the solicitor, Bottomley learned shorthand and was admitted to the exclusive Institute of Shorthand Writers. He then served for three years as a reporter in the Supreme Court of Judicature, where he added to the legal skills that some say made him Great Britain’s finest lay lawyer. By 1883, he was a partner in the firm of Walpole and Bottomley, law reporters, and also wrote for the National Reformer. For many years, Bottomley believed that Bradlaugh was his real father. Facially he resembled Bradlaugh, with a large upper lip, massive head, and piercing eyes. He had a stocky figure with an obstinate John Bullish appearance.

In 1880, though a secularist, Bottomley married Eliza Norton at St. John’s Church. Eliza was the daughter of a vinegar salesman from Battersea. Throughout his life, Bottomley professed religious belief only when it was advantageous. He had one daughter, Florence, who married an American millionaire, Jefferson Cohn.

Life’s Work

In 1884, Bottomley founded the Hackney Hansard, which recorded the proceedings of local debating clubs and municipal bodies. He soon expanded his publishing interests to include a weekly journal, The Debater, Youth (a boy’s paper whose subeditor was Alfred Harmsworth), Baby (a mother’s magazine), the Financial Times (as a competitor to the Financial News), and Draper’s Record.

In 1889, Bottomley, with the help of the financier Osborne O’Hagan, floated a company, the Hansard Union, with œ500,000 capital. Its board of directors included Sir Henry Isaacs, the lord mayor of London, the publisher C. Kegan Paul, and Coleridge Kennard of the Evening News. On April 13, the Hansard Union bought five companies for œ325,000 (one of which printed the parliamentary Hansards, while the other four were also in the publishing trade). In May, Bottomley’s brother-in-law offered the Hansard Union two other companies for œ105,000. To ensure continued dividends Bottomley persuaded the board to increase capital to a million by issuing debentures of œ250,000 and later œ50,000 to continue to pay dividends. By summer, however, only œ1,120 was left in Hansard’s bank account: Some œ600,000 had “disappeared” and the company declared bankruptcy. Hansard Union shareholders charged Bottomley with conspiracy to defraud. Inspired by Bradlaugh’s example, Bottomley successfully defended himself in a trial through the use of banter and facetious logic.

Though the trial judge, Justice Sir Henry Hawkins, urged him to become a barrister, Bottomley moved from Fleet Street to the City (London’s financial district), encouraged no doubt by his easy manipulation of the legal system. Bottomley launched his financial career with the Joint Stock Trust and Institute and a number of Australian gold mining companies. He constantly merged, reconstructed, and amalgamated them to keep investors pacified. By 1897, the Financial Times featured him as one of its “Men of Millions,” claiming that he had made three million pounds promoting companies. On the negative side, between 1901 and 1905, sixty-seven bankruptcy petitions and writs were filed against him.

Bottomley lived well and spent his money freely. He was an incorrigible womanizer, and he spent considerable sums on mistresses. He was addicted to Pommery champagne and drank it morning, noon, and night. Bottomley built a fine country home, the Dicker, at Hailsham in Sussex near Eastbourne, maintained a luxurious flat in Pall Mall, and kept a villa for his wife near Roquebrune on the French Riviera. In 1898, Bottomley started his own racing stable, on which he claimed he broke even. He won œ80,000 when Wargrave won the Cesarewitch, and œ70,000 with Northern Farmer’s victory at the Steward’s Cup. In 1914, he promoted the Ahearn-Carpentier boxing match, which was canceled because of World War I.

Bottomley was aided in his political and financial enterprises by a “stable” of bodyguards, friends, and a professional claque that included Tommy Cox, H. J. Houston, John Harrison (known as “the People’s Perkins”), and Willie Lotinga. They were useful at law courts and political or company shareholders’ meetings to quiet hecklers or cheer their champion. Bottomley’s reputation was also furthered by his newspaper enterprises. In 1898, he bought the Sun newspaper from Harry Marks and used it to secure justice for two brothers wrongfully imprisoned for murder and also to start a fund for Ruby Bennett, orphan of a soon-to-be-executed murderer. The end of the Western Australian mining boom led Bottomley to sell the paper.

In 1906, two months after he had entered Parliament, Bottomley again felt the need to control a newspaper. The result was John Bull , a newspaper Bottomley launched ostensibly to expose the injustices of the day. Bottomley left the management of the paper to Julius Elias (later Lord Southwood), and by 1912, circulation had increased from fifteen thousand to 1.5 million. The paper’s style was fearless, dogmatic, and lively; politicians, business and labor leaders, and judges were frequent targets. Well-known journalists such as Frank Harris, Herbert Vivian, A. G. Hales, Charles Palmer, and Charles Pilley served on the paper’s staff, often ghostwriting articles signed by Bottomley.

One of the newspaper’s features was the John Bull Exposure Bureau, which employed a team of retired police officers and reporters to investigate organizations or individuals targeted by readers. In 1910, the headmaster of the reformatory training shop, the Akbar, wrote concerning abuses to prisoners. The Liberal under secretary of state for the Home Department, C. F. G. Masterman, investigated and recommended that the two men involved in brutality be removed but gratuitously called John Bull’s charges random and reckless. Bottomley accused Masterman of a whitewash, setting off a vendetta that eventually ruined Masterman’s political career.

Bottomley frequently used his journalistic enterprises to aid his financial fortunes. His paper, the Joint Stock Circular, advised readers to buy shares in companies he controlled, and some of his exposés culminated in extortion, as when an attack on the Waring and Gillow Company ceased after they agreed to carpet his offices. On another occasion, Bottomley paid a printer to libel him so that he could sue him and win to try to tar all of his critics as liars. Bottomley’s běte noire was Edward Bell, an incorruptible solicitor with a fanatical dislike for fraudulent financiers; Bell succeeded in forcing Bottomley to refund œ20,000 to James Platt, a retired woolen merchant, and repay John Murray œ2,000 because of Bottomley’s intentional misrepresentation of the facts. Bell also succeeded in reclaiming œ100,000 invested in various bogus companies for the executrix of the estate of Robert Master, an elderly retired Indian civil servant, in spite of Bottomley’s burglaries of Master’s diaries and other pertinent documents.

Bottomley’s downfall began when he chose the Prudential Assurance Company as a target and detailed how more than one hundred of its agents had committed suicide, implying that this resulted from guilt at having victimized poor policyholders or from despair at their low salaries as compared with the directors’ fortunes. Prudential retaliated by accusing Bottomley of systematic fraud and blackmail. Eventually, he was found guilty of contempt of court and fined one hundred pounds. Justice Darling believed that this was a better punishment than sending him to prison, where he would be unable to repay his creditors, but the revelations ruined his political career.

Bottomley’s political career had officially begun in 1906 after unsuccessful attempts to win a seat in Parliament from Hornsey in 1887, when he was only twenty-seven years old. In 1900, he ran as a Liberal from South Hackney and, though unsuccessful, won one thousand pounds in damages from his opponent, who called him a fraudulent company promoter. By 1906, Bottomley turned a negative 280-vote margin into a majority of 3,479.

In Parliament, Bottomley took an individualist stand. He opposed the government’s Licensing Bill and Sunday Closing legislation. He advocated a five-shilling-a-week old-age pension paid for by an employer’s tax of a penny on the pound on all wages, a supertax on share certificates, a tax on betting stakes, and state appropriation of all dormant bank accounts and securities. In some form, all eventually became law. His shady financial reputation, however, and the maverick radicalism of John Bull, which attacked all parties indiscriminately, ruined his political career.

In 1907, stockholders of the Joint Stock Trust petitioned for its liquidation and in 1909 charged him with fraud. Only by making pertinent ledgers and evidence disappear and through evasion, good-natured badinage, and half-truths did he manage once again to survive. By 1911, a cash-flow problem forced him to declare bankruptcy after he had placed most of his property in the hands of relatives, and he was forced to resign his seat in Parliament in 1912.

Undaunted, he turned to promoting lotteries and sweepstakes as a way to recoup his fortune. He usually cleverly rigged these sweepstakes, and one based in Lucerne, Switzerland, called the Patrick O’Brien Sweepstakes, netted him œ150,000.

World War I presented Bottomley with new opportunities for both fame and fortune. John Bull’s radical headline “To Hell with Serbia” within a fortnight was replaced by articles attacking “The Potty Potentate of Potsdam” and calling for the use of poison gas (before the Germans had used it) and a policy of taking no prisoners. Bottomley fueled the anti-German war hysteria, proposing that naturalized Germans should have to wear a distinctive badge. He traveled the length and breadth of the British Isles making patriotic recruiting speeches. Most were modeled on his Prince of Peace speech made at the September 14 rally at the London Opera House. Five thousand attended while another fifteen thousand waited outside. An even larger rally was held at Albert Hall on January 14, 1915, with members of the Irish Guards and men of the newly formed Sportsmen’s and Footballers’ Battalions. In Hull, a thousand men joined the colors after hearing him speak. He gave 340 lectures in three years and took between 65 percent and 85 percent of the gross. In 1915, the Northcliffe Press founded an illustrated paper called the Sunday Pictorial and paid Bottomley one hundred pounds for a series of weekly articles that continued until 1921. The series made him the most famous journalist in Great Britain.

In September, 1917, Bottomley visited General Sir William Robertson on the Somme and in December, the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow. John Bull was particularly harsh on that section of the Labour Party that opposed the war, calling them traitors and demanding their court-martial. Bottomley also got a chance to even a score with Ramsay MacDonald, who had attacked him in 1911 as “a man of doubtful parentage who has lived all his life on the threshold of jail” by publishing a facsimile of MacDonald’s birth certificate showing that the Labour leader was illegitimate.

Bottomley was unable to contain his greed and soon dressed up his prewar lotteries with patriotic hype, calling them successively the Victory Bond Club, the War Stock Combination, the Thrift Prize Bond Club, and the Victory Club Sweepstakes. By 1918, he had paid off his debtors and was returned to his South Hackney seat by eight thousand votes. When, through sloppy or deliberate mismanagement, his lottery schemes led to demands for repayment that he was unable to satisfy, Chancery Court appointed a receiver to examine them. Odhams Press, publisher of John Bull, decided to retire Bottomley and purchased his shares for œ25,000. Meanwhile, Bottomley had incurred large racing debts, which were then covered by loans from an admirer, Reuben Bigland. When Bottomley reneged on a œ1,000 loan and refused to back Bigland’s support for a œ60,000 scheme to turn water into gasoline, he won Bigland’s enmity. Bigland proceeded to ruin him both politically and financially by airing some fifty-seven of his past frauds. Bottomley unwisely sued for libel because he was in the middle of organizing an Independent Parliamentary Group (including Charles Palmer, Christopher Lowther, and General Townshend) with the hope of someday becoming prime minister. The trial revealed Bottomley’s sordid financial practices, and the jury ruled in Bigland’s favor. Forty-eight hours later, in March, 1922, Bottomley was charged with fraudulently converting money belonging to shareholders of the Victory Bonds Club. He was convicted in May and sentenced to seven years in jail.

On his early release after five years in prison, Bottomley, ever the optimist, founded in 1928 a new weekly, John Blunt, but it failed. For a time he made a living through journalism and lecturing, but following the death of his wife in February, 1930, he suffered another bankruptcy; thereafter, until his death in 1933, he was supported mainly by his old-age pension and by his mistress Peggy Primrose. She had visited him at prison and after his death scattered his ashes on the Sussex Down.

Significance

Horatio W. Bottomley’s story is the story of a talent without a moral anchor. He always looked for the quick and easy scheme. Bottomley never learned the meaning of moderation. An incurable gambler, he was intoxicated with his own talents. Though greedy and hedonistic, he could show sympathy for those outside the orbit of his fraudulent financial schemes. Surrounding himself with an aura of success, he led those impressed by bluff and show to trust him in spite of evidence to the contrary.

Indeed, before his fall in 1921, he was one of the most popular figures in Great Britain. Few could equal his gift for capturing the mood of the bluff, beer-drinking, race-going British “man in the street.”

Bibliography

Bigland, Reuben. Horatio Bottomley. London: Forwood, 1922. By the Birmingham printer, racetrack tout, and former friend whose vendetta against Bottomley sent him to jail.

Blathways, Raymond H. B. The Man as He Is Today. London: Odhams, 1916. Written during the period when Bottomley’s star was ascending.

Bottomley, Horatio. Bottomley’s Book. London: Odhams, 1909. Bottomley’s defense of his practices.

Felsted, Theodore. Horatio Bottomley: A Biography of an Outstanding Personality. London: John Murray, 1936. Good biography, weak on war years.

Green, Jonathon. Directory of Infamy. London: Mills and Boon, 1980. Another biographical account of Bottomley’s life.

Houston, Henry. The Real Horatio Bottomley. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1923. By one of his closest advisers and main traveling companion.

Hyman, Alan. The Rise and Fall of Horatio Bottomley: The Biography of a Swindler. London: Cassell, 1972. Excellent biography. Good on Bottomley’s activities during World War I.

Minney, R. J. Viscount Southwood. London: Odhams, 1954. A biography of Julius Elias, editor of John Bull.

Parris, Matthew. “He Was a Shameless Liar and Thief. He Went to Wormwood Scrubbs. He Was a Lovable Scallywag.” Spectator 287, no. 9027 (August 11, 2001). Recounts Bottomley’s life and crimes.

Symons, Julian. Horatio Bottomley. London: Cressett Press, 1955. Probably the best balanced biography of Bottomley.

Tenax [Edward Bell]. The Gentle Art of Exploiting Gullibility. London: David Weir, 1923. Written by the shareholder and Bottomley’s běte noire.