| Horatio Bottomley |
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Horatio Bottomley was born in Bethnal Green , London , on 23 March 1860 . He spent 14 years growing up in an Orphanage , and then joined a firm of legal shorthand writers where he learnt something about the court system. His first personal experience of the courts was in 1885 where he personally defended a printing and publishing firm of his from Bankruptcy and the fact that substantial funds were missing from its accounts. He then moved on to promoting Western Australia n gold mining projects, some genuine, but others based on misrepresentation and fraud. He then moved on to British stocks. In 1888 , he founded the '' Financial Times '' and was its first Chairman as a means of puffing his projects. In 1908 he was charged with conspiracy to defraud, but the chaos of his record systems prevented a conviction, and instead he was forced into bankruptcy in 1912 , forcing him out of Parliament where he had been a Liberal MP since 1905 . In 1906 he established the patriotic journal '' John Bull '', spoke on many recruiting platforms (taking a large fee for doing so), pressed for a more aggressive prosecution of the war, and attacked anybody he deemed less patriotic than himself. In 1918 he returned to Parliament as an Independent MP for Hackney (with almost 80% of the vote). In May 1919 Bottomley founded The People's League hoping it would be 'a great Third Party' which would represent 'the People' against organised Labour and organised Capital . He created the "John Bull Victory Bond Club" (a forerunner of Premium Bond s) as a mechanism for small savers to lend money to the Government, receiving prizes rather than interest; again a combination of fraud and mismanagement sank the scheme in 1921 . He was charged with fraud, and the following year he was convicted, sentenced to seven years and expelled from Parliament. A famous story says that the prison chaplain of and, after parading himself around seedy Music-halls in a mawkish one-man show, died in penury on 26 May 1933 . QUOTES
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