The appeal of Mr. Bottomley, M.P., against a verdict of
£50,000 returned by a jury before the Lord Chief Justice was dismissed by a majority of the Judges in the Court of Appeal on Monday. The case of the plaintiff, Mrs. Curtis, was that Mr. Bottomley had by false representations obtained large sums of money from her father, Mr. Master, to recoup losses which he (Mr. Master) had sustained by his investments in Mr. Bottomley's companies. Mr. Bottomley appealed on the grounds of misdirection by the Lord Chief Justice and the improper conduct of the case by the plaintiff's counsel. Mr. Bottomley, who conducted his own case, but did not go into the witness-box, originally asked for judgment or a new trial, but ultimately only asked for a new trial. Lord Justice Vaughan Williams held that there ought to be a new trial, but Lords Justices Fletcher Moulton and Buckley dismissed the appeal, bolding that the trial had been fair and the verdict right, and refused to grant a stay of execution pending an appeal to the House of Lords. Lord Justice Buckley in his judgment said that in his professional and judicial life he had been acquainted with many company-mongers and company- promoters, but he had never come across a series of trans- actions which impressed him as deeply as this one. He doubted whether the true enormity of these transactions ever reached the minds of the jury.
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