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Horatio Bottomley -
the soldier's friend (2)
At the election in December 1918 - during which Lloyd George made his
famous (or infamous) "homes fit for heroes" speech - Bottomley
once again became Member of Parliament for South Hackney in London, and
his substantial majority went a long way to convince him of his continuing
popularity.
In July 1919, with the
signing of the Treaty of Versailles, the government issued Victory Bonds
aiming to help offset the costs of paying for such a ruinously expensive
war. Priced at £5 they were out of the reach of most ordinary people at a
time when an unskilled worker might earn as little as £2.50 a week.
Bottomley - ever the people's friend instituted a scheme whereby the
poorer members of society (especially returned, unemployed soldiers) might
benefit by sending him £1 for a fifth share in a Victory bond.
He promised
boldly: "I will buy bonds, and hand them over to trustees, and each year we
will draw for the accruing interest. Your capital will remain intact, or at
any time, if you wish it, you may receive it back in full."
Unfortunately, he had
no real head for business, and ignored warnings about the risks inherent
in promising to return invested capital to subscribers on demand. He also
overlooked the massive initial expenses for advertising, ticket printing
and hiring of a staff of 12 clerks to handle ticket distribution.
But to begin with the
scheme was a roaring success. Every day an army of people, most of them ex-servicemen,
eager to buy tickets queued up the
whole length of King Street. At the
height of the Victory Club boom Bottomley was receiving cash at the rate of
£100,000 a day - and this was before he had actually bought any bonds,
since he was waiting for their price to drop.
The first signs of
real trouble came from his overworked clerks, who were mostly
ex-servicemen with no experience of office work. With no systems in place
to deal with the huge number of people arriving in person to buy their
tickets, nor to deal with the thousands of letters arriving by each postal
delivery, containing cheques, money orders or cash. The clerks got further and further behind with sending out
tickets, and some helped themselves to cash and never sent out tickets.
Then thousands of subscribers started writing to demand the return of their
capital. By the end of 1919
Bottomley had paid out a total of £150,000. With no administrative control many
subscribers were overpaid by the clerks, and others wrote in two or
three times for their money and were paid each time.
With no trustees to
keep an eye on him Bottomley had sole control of all the money and while
he did finally buy around half a million pounds worth of bonds at a
bargain price, he used money remaining to buy two newspapers or to pay off
other debts. At last it dawned on the public that this was all a massive
swindle. Life became increasingly difficult for Bottomley. Whenever he
spoke to meetings he found himself confronted by aggrieved subscribers
demanding their money back - and he took care to have plenty of cash on
him so he could pay back members of the audience there and then.
Nonetheless, his
opinion of himself scarcely faltered. On November 11 1920 the Daily
Mirror commissioned him to cover the Unknown Warrior
ceremony, and it was clear he thought that God was still on his side. He
wrote: "It
was during that awful silence - when the world stood still - that I heard
that voice from Heaven, telling me to write."
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Bottomley arrives at Bow
Street Court to face fraud charges
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The law finally caught
up with him and he was brought to trial
in May 1922 on a charge of
"fraudulently converting to his own use sums of money entrusted to him
by members of the public".
During the trial, where
he defended himself, he made extravagant claims about how his scheme had helped ex-soldiers, claiming (quite untruthfully) that he had engaged
a hundred ex-servicemen at £1 a day and he had
personally paid them £15,000.
He was sent to prison
for seven years. He was sixty-two years old and completely unfit to face
the rigours of prison life. He weighed seventeen stone and the authorities
were unable to find a regulation uniform to fit him.
One (probably
apocryphal story) recalls how a visitor came to see him in jail and found
him sewing mail bags. The visitor enquired, "Ah, Bottomley -
sewing?" The soldier's friend turned to him with a sorrowful shake of
the head, "No, reaping."
Years later, Travers
Humphrey, the prosecuting counsel wrote:
"In truth it was not I who floored Bottomley, it was Drink. The man I
met in 1922 was a drink-sodden creature whose brain would only be got to work
by repeated doses of champagne."
At all events, when he
was discharged from prison in 1927 he disappeared into obscurity, and one
of the last public accounts of him in the London Daily News
in September 1932 shows just how far he had descended:
The strangest turn in the new non-stop variety programme at the
Windmill Theatre last night was the appearance of an old man in a dinner
suit who walked slowly to the middle of the stage and cast a sad and patient
eye upon a puzzled audience. ... he told a little string of anecdotes from
his Parliamentary, journalistic and racing experiences ... the occasion had
a curiously disconcerting air of pathos
He was not destined to
enjoy a new career on the halls. Horatio Bottomley died less than a year
later in May 1933.
  The
picture on the right shows Horatio Bottomley's Sussex house, The Dicker. Lavish garden parties were held in the grounds which
included an artificial lake. The house was one of the last of Bottomley's
assets to be sold off to meet his debts. The story of Horatio Bottomley
and his association with the village of Upper Dicker told by Gil Saunders
can be found at
A
disgraced squire and a haunted priory.
I have been unable to
locate any books about Horatio Bottomley currently in print . Alan Hyman's
The Rise and Fall of Horatio
Bottomley published in 1972 has provided much of the information for
this article.
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