Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right)

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B ottomley’s downfall came through frauds audacious and gross even by his high, or low, standards. He had exhausted the possibilities of bilking the rich who no longer trusted him; now he turned his attentions to the poor, in the process confirming the dictum of the sixteenth-century German bishop who said that the poor were a gold mine. Horatio Bottomley was a sincere believer in all things English. And like all genuine patriots he chose the best way to act on his patriotism which was to enrich himself as fast as he could. If he did so more fabulously than others it was only because better opportunities provided themselves to him. At one meeting a man in the audience shouted out: "Isn't it time you went and did your bit, Mr. Bottomley?" Bottomley replied: "Would to God it were my privilege to shoulder a rifle and take my place beside the brave boys in the trenches. But you have only to look at me to see that I am suffering from two complaints. My medical man calls them anno domini and embonpoint. The first means that I was born too soon and the second that my chest measurement has got into the wrong place." In 1918, having been discharged from bankruptcy, Bottomley re-entered parliament as an Independent member. In the following year, he launched his fraudulent "Victory Bonds" scheme which, when exposed, led to his conviction, imprisonment and expulsion from parliament. Released in 1927, he attempted unsuccessfully to relaunch his business career and eked out a living by lecturing and appearances in music halls. His final years before his death in 1933 were spent in poverty. Horatio wound up relying on the charity of one of the same women he had showered with gifts decades before – Peggy Primrose, the one mistress who had stood by him through the years. Peggy was an actress and she might have been the one who got him his last public appearance, a one man show at the Windmill Theatre where he told stories of his life and recreated some of his greatest speeches. Reports vary as to how this was received – some say that he only succeeded in baffling the crowd at the shows, others that he was popular enough that he might have been able to spin yet another fortune out of his stories. It was a moot point – his health went into decline, and in 1933 at the age of 73 he died. A large crowd attended the funeral, where he was lauded for the contribution his poisonous brand of patriotism had made to the war effort. In accordance with his wishes, he was cremated and had his ashes scattered in Sussex. He was remembered as a symbol of wasted talent, a man who had all his achievements destroyed by his own corruption. In the end, everything he built was like his ashes, just dust in the wind.

Among Holyoake's close associates was Charles Bradlaugh, who founded the National Republican League and became a controversial Member of Parliament. [5] A longstanding friendship between Bradlaugh and Elizabeth Holyoake led to rumours that he, not William Bottomley, was Horatio's biological father—a suggestion that Bottomley, in later life, was prone to encourage. [6] The evidence is circumstantial, mainly based on the marked facial resemblance between Bradlaugh and Bottomley. [7] [8] Bottomley's obituaries dwelt on the common theme of wasted talent: a man of brilliant natural abilities, destroyed by greed and vanity. "He had personal magnetism, eloquence, and the power to convince", wrote his Daily Mail obituarist. "He might have been a leader at the Bar, a captain of industry, a great journalist. He might have been almost anything". [147] The Straits Times of Singapore thought that Bottomley could have rivalled Lloyd George as a national leader: "Though he deserved his fate, the news of his passing will awaken the many regrets for the good which he did when he was Bottomley the reformer and crusader and the champion of the bottom dog". [148] A later historian, Maurice Cowling, pays tribute to Bottomley's capacity and industry, and to his forceful campaigns in support of liberty. [108] In his sketch for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Morris delivers a different judgement: "[H]e claimed to serve the interests of others, but sought only his own gratification". [2] Rolph, David (2008). Reputation, Celebrity and Defamation Law. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-0-7546-7124-4. Worst Britons". www.newstatesman.com. Archived from the original on 19 September 2018 . Retrieved 19 September 2018.

The hugely influential newspaper editor, politician, orator and crook had a remarkable journey from poverty to Westminster and back — he was well ahead of his time, writes STEPHEN ARNELL

That Sir George Makgill was active within this complex network of inter-related organisations is however beyond doubt. In the London telephone directory for 1917 he is listed as the Honourary Secretary of the British Empire Union based at 346 Strand Walk (the office of the Diehard newspaper "The Morning Post"). In 1918 the "business secretary" of the British Empire Union was listed as Reginald Wilson, who was later associated with National Propaganda, and its successor the Economic League. Makgill was also, in the same years, the General Secretary of the British Empire Producers' Organisation, which had certainly been courted by the BCU as a potential sponsor, as early as 1917. A further link with this Diehard, anti-socialist network around National Propaganda, is suggested by an entry in The Times on December 17th 1920, in which it was announced the Makgill was standing as a candidate for Horatio Bottomley's People's League in a Parliamentary election in East Leyton. Bottomley was a jingoistic, right wing populist closely associated with the diehards. His group was one of the more successful "patriotic labour" movements which sprang up after the extension of the franchise to attract and encourage anti-socialist working class votes. (8) Henry J. Houston, The Real Horatio Bottomley (1923) He needed a great deal of care as a result, and I found it necessary to travel special blankets for him. The first thing I used to do when we arrived at a hotel was to place the special blankets on his bed. That was done mainly at the request of Mrs. Bottomley, but it was a necessary precaution... Purdue, A. W. (15 November 2012). " Book review: Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain: The National War Aims Committee and Civilian Morale". The Times Higher Education Supplement. Archived from the original on 16 October 2014 . Retrieved 2 July 2016. Rather than the end of his career, Horatio Bottomley’s trial for fraud would prove to be the first of his finest hours. The evidence against him was overwhelming, and the case would seem to be over before it began. He was helped by the complacency of the prosecution, who didn’t bother presenting all of their evidence against him and who managed to annoy the judge with their blase manner. In contrast, Horatio’s charm and wit managed to get the judge fully on his side, as he argued that what he was being accused of was standard industry practice, that the prosecution was deliberately understating the amount he’d had to spend on expenses, and that the whole thing was an attempt on the part of the official receiver to gain prestige by bringing down his company. As a result the judge summed up in his favor and Horatio was, against all the odds, acquitted. Horatio’s best known mistress, Peggy Primrose. Source

Intricate details of organization bothered him, and he would not patiently allow anyone to explain them to him. That was work he paid others to do for him, and he did not want to know how it was managed. "That is a matter of detail," was a favourite expression of his. Sometimes said to have been the first usage of this now ubiquitous cliché, though in fact the phrase university of life had been in use for many years. Some early instances: Cox, Howard and Simon Mowatt. "Horatio Bottomley and the Rise of John Bull Magazine: Mobilizing a mass audience in late Edwardian Britain," Media History volume 25, Issue 1 (6 Jul 2018), pp.100–125. Horatio William Bottomley (23 March 1860– 26 May 1933) was an English financier, journalist, editor, newspaper proprietor, swindler, and Member of Parliament. He is best known for his editorship of the popular magazine John Bull, and for his nationalistic oratory during the First World War. His career came to a sudden end when, in 1922, he was convicted of fraud and sentenced to seven years' imprisonment.

Primary Sources

In May 1915, Churchill suggested that Bottomley should be asked to pay visits to munitions workers, and there were visits of this sort through the spring and summer. Hyman, Alan (1972). The Rise and Fall of Horatio Bottomley. Littlehampton, West Sussex: Cassell & Co. ISBN 0-304-29023-8. Horatio’s uncle George Holyoake was an outspoken secularist, and in 1842 he had been the last person in Britain to be convicted of blasphemy in a public lecture. [1] One of his allies was Charles Bradlaugh, who became a mentor to young Horatio. [2] Bradlaugh was an active pamphleteer (he was prosecuted in 1877 for publishing one promoting birth control) and this was Horatio’s first exposure to the world of publishing. It was a growth industry in the late 19th century, and in 1884, just after receiving his partnership, Horatio made his first break into it. Bottomley also had a luxury apartment in Pall Mall and owned several racehorses. He twice won the Cesarewitch and several other races, but never achieved the successes in the Derby or the Grand National, even though he spent a great deal of money trying to achieve this ambition. He also lost a great deal of money on failed betting coups.

Johnson's Court EC4", in A Guide to the alleys, courts, passages and yards of central London by Ivor Hoole. Messinger, Gary S. (1992). British Propaganda and the State in the First World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-3014-5.You are in for fraud, I see,” said I. The deduction was not at all remarkable. Burglars do not read Wittgenstein. The young Horatio went to live with his maternal uncle George Jacob Holyoake, a radical propagandist, the editor of a rationalist and socialist review, the coiner of the terms “secularism” and “jingoism,” one of the founders of the cooperative movement that is still in existence today, and the author of a two-volume memoir, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (1892) . (Horatio’s other maternal uncle was the fairly successful painter William Holyoake, whose portrait of his brother shows him to have been a respectable Victorian bourgeois gentleman.) Bottomley’s origins were not altogether auspicious. He was born in Bethnal Green in the East End of London in 1860. His father was a tailor’s cutter who drank heavily, had once been admitted to a lunatic asylum probably with delirium tremens, and died of a recurrence when Horatio was three. His mother died not long after, and by the age of four Horatio was an orphan. Though he was capable of conceiving grandiose schemes - many of them quite impracticable, by the way - he could form no conception of the detail work necessary to carry them through. That always had to be left to others, and H.B. was very much at their mercy so far as the detail work was concerned.

Houston argued in his book, The Real Horatio Bottomley (1923): "He began to accept what were practically music hall engagements disguised as recruiting meetings, and I was very definitely of the opinion that he was drifting in the wrong direction. Nevertheless for some time it went on... Bottomley insisted that a substantial contribution (from the income generated from the meetings) went to his War Charity Fund... Three years later I discovered that the fund did not receive a penny of the money." John Bull is the name of a succession of different periodicals published in the United Kingdom during the period 1820–1964. [1] In its original form, a Sunday newspaper published from 1820 to 1892, John Bull was a champion of traditionalist conservatism. From 1906 to 1920, under Member of Parliament Horatio Bottomley, John Bull became a platform for his trenchant populist views. A 1946 relaunch by Odhams Press transformed John Bull magazine into something similar in style to the American magazine The Saturday Evening Post. Lentin, Anthony (1985). Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and the guilt of Germany: an essay in the pre-history of appeasement. Leicester: Leicester University Press. ISBN 978-0-71851-251-4.Bottomley regarded himself as a valuable recruiter for the British army and asked the prime minister at the time, H. H. Asquith, for a government position, to which Asquith replied, with a feline kind of double entendre, that he thought Bottomley would be of greater value outside the government. His mother had been a close friend—just how close is not known—of Charles Bradlaugh, the militant secularist who, repeatedly elected to parliament but refusing to take any oath that mentioned God, would at his meetings stride on to the stage and challenge the deity to strike him dead in five minutes. Horatio strongly resembled Bradlaugh, and it was sometimes suspected that he was Bradlaugh’s offspring, though, if so, Bradlaugh never recognized him as such, as almost certainly he would have done had he known of his paternity. Searle, Geoffrey R. (2004). A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-928440-5. Eliza Norton was a dressmaker’s assistant and the daughter of a debt collector. Not exactly a socially ambitious marriage for Horatio, but she was pretty and proved a supportive wife to Horatio. She gave him a daughter, and more importantly she tolerated his many, many infidelities over the next fifty years. His marriage also made him respectable enough to be given a partnership in the shorthand company, where his immense natural charm and apparent business acumen had clearly impressed the owners. But Horatio had bigger ambitions than just running a shorthand firm. And he saw two routes to achieve them – publishing, and politics. Charles Bradlaugh