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. Bottomley was cared for by his mother's brother, William Holyoake. Another brother, George Jacob Holyoake, the editor of The Reasoner one of the most important working class journals of the 19th century, helped to pay for Bottomley's keep. Holyoake used his journal to campaign on a wide variety of different social and political issues. Holyoake was a critic of Christianity and suggested that it should be replaced by a belief system based on reason and science. Holyoake called this new theory Secularism and by the middle of the early 1860s there were over forty Secular Societies in Britain. Bottomley was someone who was influenced by Holyoake's views. His energy was unbounded, and for days he was desperately restless because a short time had to elapse before all the arrangements could be completed. In “A Death,” Bottomley recounts the death in prison of a young man wounded in France during the war: The pair resembled each other, which led some to speculate that Bradlaugh could be Horatio’s real father as he had been a friend of Horatio’s mother. There’s no actual evidence of this, but Horatio did encourage the gossip as he considered the stigma of illegitimacy less than the stigma of having a father die in Bedlam.

Now officially bankrupt, Horatio still managed to arrange things so that his extravagant lifestyle continued unabated. His main source of income was from lotteries and sweepstakes run through John Bull. These were operated from outside the UK to circumvent gambling laws, and were rarely honestly run. Horatio faced legal charges on multiple occasions when it was suspected that winners were actually his employees or relatives. He managed to dodge these charges though. John Bull itself swiftly rose in popularity, with Horatio claiming a circulation of two million. (The actual figure was probably a still impressive three quarters of a million.) He even tried creating a spinoff aimed at women, Mrs Bull, though this was less successful. Then in 1914 the first World War broke out. And where many saw tragedy, Horatio saw opportunity. Horatio Bottomley on stage. During the war Horatio ruthlessly parlayed John Bull’s influence for political power. He joined with Noel Pemberton Billing in declaring the existence of “the Unseen Hand”, an organisation of pro-German traitors who sought to undermine the war effort. Conveniently, this meant that any of his enemies could be labelled as members of the Hand. That included the newly formed Labour Party, and as well as denouncing them as traitors he also publicly revealed that one of its founders and leaders, Ramsay MacDonald, was the illegitimate child of a Scottish serving girl. [5] The government used Horatio’s influence over the masses to quell strikes and boost recruitment, though they never did grant his wish for a public position. Death of Horatio Bottomley". The Straits Times. 27 May 1933. p.13. Archived from the original on 14 July 2014 . Retrieved 5 July 2014. It was Bottomley’s boast that John Bull was the first paper to call Germans “Huns”. Bottomley disdained to allow any distinction between the country that Britain was fighting and the people of Germany, increasing numbers of whom would of course come to demonstrate their very opposition to war. “If by chance”, Bottomley told his readers, “you should discover one day in a restaurant that you are being served by a German waiter, you will throw the soup in his foul face, if you find yourself sitting at the side of a German clerk, you will split the inkpot over his vile head.”Few men took more genuine delight in the society of women, and it is impossible to understand the character of the man without a knowledge of his attitude towards them. In practice, if not in theory, he exemplified the Nietzschean philosophy that "man shall be educated for war, and women for the recreation of the warrior."

Paris 1918: The War Diary of the British Ambassador, the 17th Earl of Derby, ed. David Dutton, Liverpool University Press, p. 12S. Theodore Felstead Horatio Bottomley: A Biography of an Outstanding Personality (London, 1936), ch. 1. 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. 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 Mr Bottomley Expelled the House". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). Hansard online. 1 August 1922. pp.col. 1285–88. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016 . Retrieved 2 July 2016.