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

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Bottomley launched a new journal, John Blunt. He also went on a speaking tours. However, he was unable to overcome his image as a swindler and both ventures ended in failure. His biographer, A. J. A. Morris, has pointed out: "He cut a pathetic figure and, a broken old man, he stumbled into obscurity. In 1930 his wife died and his daughter emigrated to South Africa. Of his former friends and acolytes all deserted him except Peggy Primrose, who shared her home with him."

Bottomley was born in Newport, Shropshire, the son of Sir James Bottomley, a wartime army officer who later joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and of Barbara, née Vardon, a social worker. He waAt the age of 26, Bottomley became the company's chairman. [27] His advance in the business world was attracting wider notice, and in 1887 he was invited by the Liberal Party in Hornsey to be their candidate in a parliamentary by-election. He accepted, and although defeated by Henry Stephens, the ink magnate, fought a strong campaign which won him a congratulatory letter from William Gladstone. [21] His business affairs were proceeding less serenely; he quarrelled with his partner Douglas MacRae, and the two decided to separate. Bottomley described the "Quixotic impulse" that led him to let MacRae divide the assets: "He was a printer, and I was a journalist—but he took the papers and left me the printing works". [28] Hansard Publishing Union [ edit ] Sir Henry Hawkins, the judge before whom Bottomley appeared, and was acquitted, on fraud charges in 1893 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 The farthing was the smallest coin in UK legal tender, worth one quarter of a pre-1971 penny. Its award as damages was a recognised gesture of contempt. [82] In 1874, when Horatio was 14 and due to leave the orphanage, he ran away without waiting for the formalities. His aunt Caroline Praill—his mother's sister—who lived in nearby Edgbaston, gave him a home, while he worked as an errand boy in a Birmingham building firm. This arrangement lasted only a few months before Horatio, impatient to be reunited with his sister from whom he had been separated for six years, went to London where he began an apprenticeship with a wood engraver. [11] Early career [ edit ] First steps [ edit ]

gpi: General Paralysis of the Insane, the last stage of neurosyphilis. Bottomley’s description exactly fits one of the only two cases I ever saw as a doctor, and her dreadful screams ring in my mind’s ear still; I can conjure them up mentally forty-five years later. I do not want you to be treated like children by the state or tied to the apron-strings of the parson or the priest. Why, half the work of bringing about a better understanding between masters and men – between Capital and Labour – has been done by the war itself. You will find new Rules of Trade Unions and Employers’ Federations – on a more humane basis; you will find brotherhood and humanity covering the whole relations in the financial, commercial and industrial field.”Bottomley published a book of prison poems after his release, called Songs of the Cell, with a preface by Lord Alfred Douglas, who after all had a strong personal connection with prison poetry. Bottomley was in apostolic succession, as it were, to A. E. Housman and Oscar Wilde in their poetic accounts of execution by hanging:

Bottomley refused to appear as a witness in his own case against Bigland, which was dismissed. His own prosecution inevitably followed; and Bottomley ended up serving a lengthy jail term for fraud. Bottomley argued in the John Bull Magazine that Ramsay MacDonald and James Keir Hardie, were the leaders of a "pro-German Campaign". On 19th June 1915 the magazine claimed that MacDonald was a traitor and that: "We demand his trial by Court Martial, his condemnation as an aider and abetter of the King's enemies, and that he be taken to the Tower and shot at dawn." To think of Bottomley in his wartime pomp is to see one of the great figures of his age. His magazine John Bull claimed a circulation in excess of two million by 1914, making it by some distance the best-selling news weekly of its day. John Bull pushed itself as the most patriotic publication of a patriotic time. It called on its readers to hate the “Germhuns” and “Austrihuns” against whom Britain was fighting. It taught the British people to keep an equal hatred for those in power, the politicians and the civil servants, by whose insufficient patriotism the war might yet be lost. Cowling, Maurice (1971). The Impact of Labour 1920–1924: The Beginning of Modern British Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-07969-1.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) 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. 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.) 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. I have not had your advantages, gentlemen. What poor education I have received has been gained in the University of Life.