THE END OF A .ROGUE.
ON Monday Horatio Bottomley was convicted of what the judge called " a long series of heartless frauds," and was sentenced to seven years' penal servi- tude. Owing to the ingenuity with which Bottomley invariably covered up his financial tracks, it was impossible to find out exactly how he had disposed of all the money, but it was at all events clear that he had stolen more than £150,000 of other people's savings within ten months. Mr. Justice Salter's words were thoroughly justified : " The crime is aggravated by your high position, by the number and poverty of your victims, i by the trust which they reposed in .you. It is aggravated by the magnitude of your frauds, and by the callous effrontery with which your frauds were committed. I can see no mitigation whatever." 13ottomley had continued his career of swindling for so many years with such success and with, such-immunity from the law that he had, no doubt, come to regard himself as safe. He understood the law well, and in the difficult seas of Company Law he sailed closer to the wind without getting into serious trouble than any man that we know of in history. He thought that by his own cleverness, his remarkable forensic skill and his emotional appeals to an average jury, he could always• get off. But he played the game too long ; his very confidence made him careless, and in the end he com- mitted blunders which might well have been avoided by swindlers of smaller brain-power who had not amassed such an overweening egotism, self-confidence and con- tempt for the foolish Law. It is probable that the public had also come to regard Bottomley as safe. A legend had grown up to that effect. " He will get off—you see " was a common remark when one speculated in conversation about the latest trial.
It is a familiar feature in the careers of the most notorious criminals that, although they have thought out their operations with amazing cunning and accuracy, they have frequently left one of the gates by which they might have escaped locked against themselves. So it was with Bottomley. He generally used as his agents shady persons who could not afford to have their records brought into the light of day. If he wanted to lead them further along the dangerous swindlers' path than they wanted to go, if he tried to urge them beyond the point where timidity made them cry out, he could always say " The book of your fate is in my hands. Every page is in my keeping, and you know it. If necessary I shall publish it. I am safe and you are not. Serve me or take the consequences." What he did not reckon upon in the case of Mr. Reuben Bigland, who-was the ultimate cause of his undoing, was that Mr. Bigland was rather obviously subject to sudden impulses. He was not a man who thought of his own position or his own showing before the world when an impulse took possession of him. Bottomley tried Mr. Bigland too high, and Mr. Bigland broke away in a fury and published what looked like an incredible story of Bottomley's swindles. The pamphlet entitled The Downfall of Horatio Bottomley, M.P. His Latest and Greatest Swindle, was sold in the streets for 2d. Bottomley brought an action for slander against Mr. Bigland, but failed to offer evidence at the trial. He issued plausible excuses for his failure, but the acquittal of Mr. Bigland led inevitably to action by the Crown. The Public Prosecutor took up the subject -of Bottomley's Bond Clubs. Bottomley's handling of his Bond Clubs bore a strong resemblance to that of the swindling companies with which he had entrapped innumerable gulls over a large number of years. When one of his companies was obviously failing—they practically all went bankrupt— he would start a new company. He used to pay dividends to the investors of the new company out of the remaining assets of the old company. So it went on. The only difference between the Bond Clubs and his mining and other companies was that much more money was involved. With the aid of the sentiments invoked by the War, he made a combined appeal—which was very clever of. him —to the patriotism and the gambling instincts of the public. He announced that he would buy War. Loan on behalf of the -public and would turn the capital into Premium Bonds by instituting regular drawings and distributing large prizes to the lucky winners. At the same time the gamblers would be helping their country. Even those who did not draw prizes would get only a little less than the ordinary interest on War Loan. The galls flocked to the decoy. Nearly a million pounds were subscribed. The subscriptions were already large when. the Government decided that the scheme was a lottery and was therefore illegal. Bottomley calmly retorted that the fund-would be transferred to France and be invested in French Bonds, under the same conditions. The French Government then objected, and the Victory Bond Club underwent yet another transformation and became the Thrift Prize Bond Club. Meanwhile, doubts about the solvency of the clubs spread about, and thousands of subscribers demanded their money back. Some received it after a considerable delay. Most of them apparently did not. The fortunate minority were repaid, no doubt, with other people's money, for the loss on the whole scheme was great. The securities had slowly and 'steadily depreciated in -value. We must here pay a compliment to Truth, which for many months, in spite of being subjected to a cataract of writs from Bottomley, persisted in revealing the fact that Bottomley, when inviting subscribers to increase their holding rather than sell out at a loss, demanded a balance from his dupes which represented much more than the market value of the £15 French Bonds. Bottomley, in fact, simply traded i on the ignorance of the class of people who were his customary clients.
The trial before Mr. Justice Salter proved that though Bottomley held nearly a million in trust, he was the sole trustee. He kept no accounts. He .did not even enter payments upon counterfoils. There •were no auditors. He had a variety of accounts with his bankers, some of which were private and some in the name of the Bond Clubs. He continually transferred money from one account to another—whether a private account or a trust account made no difference—so that it became impossible to follow the meteoric passages of the money. It would be as easy to identify a particular rabbit when rabbits are popping in and out of all the holes in a warren. One certain fact emerges. The receivers who are administering the assets of the bankrupt Bottomley Clubs have got only £23,000 in their hands.
It is an old story that a man is accepted at his own valuation. There have been few more remarkable instances of the truth of this than the career of Bottomley. When the war with Germany was on the point of breaking out Bottomley wrote an article in his paper, John Bull, entitled " To Hell with Serbia," the point of which was that the Powers of Europe were embroiling themselves over the affairs of a wretched little Balkan State which was not worth the bones of a single British soldier. He was se ignorant of foreign politics, had so little understanding of the fact that the dispute between Austria and Serliia was a pretext procured by Germany for trying much larger issues (involving ultimately, though not at the first attempt, the downfall of the British Empire), that he saw in events at the end of July, 1914, nothing whatever but a local squabble. Within a few days he learnt better, But he was in no sense humiliated ; he suffered no loss of assur- ance. Without a flicker of modesty he set up as an oracle of patriotism, the best recruiting sergeant of the nation, and the man with the whip who would keep the Govern- ment up to the mark. The man who was to handle nearly a- million pounds without accounts, without counterfoils, without auditors, demanded that there should be a Business Government to run the war in a businesslike way or the nation would know the reason why. It may be said that during the war Bottomley was widely read and believed in by men at the Front, that he did cheer people up by lectures—which he was paid for though he said he was not—and that for three or four years he was, on the whole, a kind of moral asset to the Empire. We nevertheless hold that every public man and the Govern- ment in their corporate capacity should have studiously refrained from making use of Bottomley's services in any official way. Although he had evaded punishment for so many years, his character was perfectly well known. On July 31st, 1911, for instance, his appeal against a verdict which made him a debtor for £50,000 was dismissed by the Lords. Lord Fletcher Moulton then said that Bottomley's Guernsey company was " from first to last a sham." Lord Buckley said that : " He had in his pro- fessional and judicial life been acquainted with many company-mongers and company promoters, but he had never come across a series of transactions which impressed him as deeply as this one. . . . It was clear that that [Bottomley's plea] was a false representation, and that Mr. Bottomley intended to get money out of Mr. Master. He doubted whether the true enormity of these transactions ever reached the minds of the jury." It is to be noted that Bottomley, seeing the probable conclusion of his appeal, withdrew his claim in order to avoid the comments of the Court. Lord Buckley remarked that that was " astute " of Bottomley, but he made his comments nevertheless as a public duty. There was a gaiety about Bottomley's rogueries which no doubt appealed to the public. Even those who recog- nized him as a swindler thought less badly of him than they would have thought of a Chadband who had robbed people of leas money. Although self-indulgent and not himself a sportsman, he was in a sense fond of sport and was an owner of racehorses. As an editor he conducted funds for the help of people whose " luck was out," or who were " under the weather," and he thus nicely cultivated the appearance of having a kind heart. All ex-Service men were his " dear boys," and he professed to be their particular champion even while he was robbing them. He also built up for himself an appearance of honesty by exposing the iniquities of other rogues. Some people who followed him therefore said, " He can't be so bad after all. Probably there has been a good deal of misunderstanding." Others said, " Even if he went in for shady tricks once he has found himself at la%t. Ere is running straight and can be trusted." The trouble was that Bottomley was incapable of running straight. He was a crook by nature. The present writer read some of the articles on religious subjects which Bottomley wrote in a Sunday newspaper during the war when he recognized that something like a wave of religious feeling was sweeping over the homes of England in which the war had made places vacant for ever. The articles were direct, moving, consoling, and, in their way, eloquent. They even seemed sincere. It would not be right to say that Bottomley did not feel the force or the truth of what he wrote in those days. Nobody could say that for certain who has not the power of delving into the innermost recesses of the human heart. The fact that hundreds of thousands of persons accepted those articles seriously and looked forward to " Another powerful article by Mr. Bottomley next week " shows, among other things, that the average man—and this is rather creditable to him—believes in the ultimate decency of men. He cannot easily conceive the possibility of a sustained and disgusting hypocrisy.
The whole story is a tragedy of crookedness. We may feel assured that our generation has seen one of the most accomplished rogues in history. And yet, amid all the contempt and anger which one must feel against a man like Bottomley, one cannot help being deeply sorry that some different arrangement of the grey matter in his brain or some different mentorship in his youth did not launch Bottomley upon a great and noble career. For he had abilities, originality and powers of application which would have brought him to the front anywhere.
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