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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. The periodical continued production during the First World War; [13] Howard Cox estimates its sales by August 1914 at in excess of three quarters of a million copies a week. [14] By the end of October 1914 the cover of John Bull was '"boasting that the magazine’s circulation was the largest of any weekly journal in the world". [ citation needed] Wussow, Helen (1998). The Nightmare of History: The Fictions of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses Inc. ISBN 0-934223-46-7.
I confess that such a series of transactions [as Bottomley’s] as it has been my duty to travel through in this case I have never seen before. In the course of a somewhat long professional life I have known many Company-mongers, many Company promoters, and many dealers in shares, but I confess I have never seen a transaction which has impressed me more deeply than this one. According to A. J. A. Morris: "His (Bottomley) patriotic appeals were barely disguised music-hall turns. The praise he received served to feed his latent megalomania. His political ambitions had always tended towards fantasy so that when, in December 1916, Lloyd George became prime minister Bottomley declared that he was ready to serve his country in some official capacity or other. He did not seem to realize that he was indelibly associated with dishonesty. Just as the blatant vulgarity of his writing in John Bull shamed journalism, so his speeches, with their ignominious appeals for sacrifice, degraded public life." Hooley's and Bottomley's paths would cross several times in future years; they were inmates together in Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1922. [50] Girls of tender age … have been ravished. Husbands have been hurled out of homes at the point of a bayonet, that wives might become the prey of uniformed ghouls. Vestals have been shamed in front of older relatives, women in the presence of their children … It is hard to believe that a British member of Parliament would lower himself to whitewash criminals in uniform, and I hope that Ramsay MacDonald can step forward and vindicate himself against the charge to which I have referred.”Bottomley also worked as a proof-reader to George Jacob Holyoake and Charles Bradlaugh, another leading figure in the secular movement. His biographer, A. J. A. Morris has argued that: "Bottomley bore a striking resemblance to Bradlaugh - not in stature, for he was short and stout, but in features. He countenanced, even encouraged, the rumour that he was the natural child of the great Victorian freethinker." Henry J. Houston, who researched his life, claimed: "It was always a foolish rumour, and never had any more basis than a rather striking facial resemblance between the two men. If Bradlaugh had been Bottomley's father he was the type of man who would have looked after his son, and not left him to struggle with the world as he did in the early days." It is possible that Bottomley was the source of the rumour as he did not like the idea of his father dying in Bethleham Hospital. Journalism
This was known as his “Prince of Peace” speech, and you only got it if receipts for the night were of sufficient size. On the outbreak of the First World War, Bottomley told his personal assistant, Henry J. Houston: "Houston, this war is my opportunity. Whatever I have been in the past, and whatever my faults, I am going to draw a line at August 4th, 1914, and start afresh. I shall play the game, cut all my old associates, and wipe out everything pre-1914" Houston later recalled: "At the time I thought he meant it, but but now I know that the flesh, habituated to luxury and self-indulgence, was too weak to give effect to the resolution. For a while he did try to shake off his old associates, but the claws of the past had him grappled in steel, and the effort did not last more than a few weeks." 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 BradlaughAnd then, surprisingly, the man who had prided himself so greatly on being the county’s most effective recruiting sergeant adds: 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: Stanton B. Garner (1999). Trevor Griffiths: Politics, Drama, History. University of Michigan Press. p.105. In politics, independents have more tangled roots. Not all of those who are described as political independents are virtuous free thinkers. Far from it. Paraphrasing Malvolio, you could say of independents that some are born independent, some become independent, and many have a form of independence thrust unwillingly upon them.
A month or so later, when we went north for a visit to Carlisle, I had to send Maggie a wire asking her to be on the platform at Lancaster for a few moments' conversation as we passed through. (7) Mike Hughes, Spies at Work: Rise and Fall of the Economic League (1995) To the defenders of the First World War, stories such as Bottomely’s do nothing to challenge a narrative of the essential benevolence of the British machine guns and tanks, which must be contrasted to their German counterparts. “They” were an Empire in whose leading circles ideas of militarism were prevalent. We, by contrast, had the Republic of the British crown, the anti-war academy at Sandhurst, and the moral rectitude of war-propagandists such as Bottomley.
At 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 a b c d e f g h i Morris, A.J.A. (January 2011). "Bottomley, Horatio William". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/31981. Archived from the original on 14 July 2014 . Retrieved 16 June 2014. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) In one respect at least, Horatio Bottomley resembled many of the most notable - and some of the most notorious - men in history. After every big physical and mental effort, whether in finance, the law, public oratory, journalism, or politics, he turned with unfailing regularity to the fair sex for solace, oblivion, and refreshment. 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... The Anti German Union, in which George Makgill was obviously such a central figure, has been suggested by Gerry Webber as a forerunner of the British Commonwealth Union, which in turn gave rise to National Propaganda and itself became the British Empire Union....
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." I intend] to give the government an independent and, I hope, an intelligent support, so long as it proceeds on the lines of robust and healthy democracy, but I am also here to oppose all fads and 'isms and namby-pamby interference with the liberty and freedom of our common citizenship. 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.
Bottomley's wartime popularity
Domestic Servants". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Hansard online. 25 August 1909. pp.col. 2092. Archived from the original on 26 March 2016 . Retrieved 2 July 2016. Monger, David (2012). Patriotism and Propaganda in First World War Britain. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-1-84631-830-6. Dunn, Bill Newton. The Man Who Was John Bull (1996 but still in print), Allendale Publishing, 29 Old Palace Lane, Richmond TW9 1PQ, GB. But God be thanked…for the university of life where we may acquire, at the same time that we put in practice, the rules which are to fit us for, and conduct us through the eternities." Elizabeth D. Livermore Zoë (Cincinnati, 1855), p. 14. Royle, Edward (January 2011). "Holyoake, George Jacob". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/33964 . Retrieved 16 June 2014. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
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