Ahead of next Tuesday’s Parliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Professor David Renton of SOAS/Garden Court chambers. On 31 October between 5.30 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., David will discuss his recent biography of Horatio Bottomley.

The seminar takes place on 31 October 2023, between 17:30 and 19:00. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Horatio Bottomley has gone down in popular memory as one of the great rogues of early twentieth century British history. Between 1918 and 1922, he organised a ‘Victory Bond Club’. Subscribers could buy shares which were supposedly tied to one-fifth of the government’s postwar Victory Bonds (‘Bonds’) for £1 each. Bottomley took around £1.1 million in Club memberships, paying off his various debts to his horse trainer, tame MPs, and various mistresses.

Bottomley was tried in 1922, convicted and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. It is this trial, above all else, for which Bottomley has been remembered ever since. He became, in effect, a symbol of the corruption of Lloyd George-era politics.

The theme of this seminar will be not so much Bottomley’s business career, however, as the political life which preceded it.

Bottomley was a successful press magnate and politician. He founded John Bull magazine, building it to the point where between 1914 and 1918 it had a regular paid sale of between one and two million copies per issue. It sold about ten times as many copies, in other words, as the most popular news weeklies in Britain today.

John Bull spoke constantly of ‘the people’, while excluding all Bottomley’s enemies: trade unionists, lesbians and gay men, suffragettes, and campaigners for Irish independence. When miners struck during the war, John Bull insisted that they should be ‘arrested, treated as deserters and punished according to martial law’. Of German civilians living in Britain, Bottomley wrote, ‘You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast – a human abortion – a hellish freak. But you can exterminate it’. As for German soldiers, he wrote, ‘I would put in the field an army of Zulus and Basutos and other native and half-civilised tribes – and let them run amok in the enemy’s ranks. I would give them all the asphyxiating gas they wanted’. Within days of that piece, riots had broken out against German civilians in London.

As an MP after 1918, Bottomley’s political career matched his journalism. At the height of his power, in his second stint in Parliament, he had the support of about 10-12 MPs in a loose party caucus of Independents. Several of them had been elected as ‘Anti-Waste’ MPs. He was trying to create a party outside the Conservatives and to their right.

But what is most interesting about Bottomley is not the right-wing end to his career, but the long period of left-wing radicalism which preceded it.

Bottomley’s family were secularists, indeed the ‘royalty’ of that movement: Bottomley’s uncle George Jacob Holyoake had founded secularism in the 1840s and 1850s, in the aftermath of the decline of Chartism. Bottomley’s mother Elizabeth was an active participant in a circle of social reformers. Bottomley himself began his public life as a radical Liberal, and a contributor to the secularist newspaper, The National Reformer.

In 1888-1889 Bottomley became the first Chairman of the Financial Times. He used the paper to report speeches delivered by his favourite politicians, principally the left-Liberal Charles Bradlaugh. Elected in 1906 as an MP, one of Bottomley’s first acts was to deliver a speech to the Bradlaugh Fellowship, recalling the bitter days of Bradlaugh’s isolation before he was vindicated: ‘Wasn’t he a dangerous and vulgar agitator, a man who knew no God, a Republican who had dared to impeach the House of Brunswick’?

On trial for his nefarious business practices, Bottomley liked to insist that he was a radical being persecuted by vested interests in the city and by their allies in government.

The questions the seminar will address include, How much of this public image was a pure pose? To what extent was Bottomley ever sincere in his radicalism? Were there mistakes made by his critics which might have held him to his left-wing roots?

Bottomley’s career shadowed the oft-described ‘origins of Labour’ – but in reverse. Bottomley attended the lectures of William Morris and H. M. Hyndman, but rejected them. He deprecated the New Unionism of the 1880s in his journalism. He responded to the emergence of trades councils across London by threatening to sue some of their leading participants. In Parliament, he always voted against Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie. Can we use Bottomley’s story, not as a case of individual failure, but to illustrate a collective story, and one which shapes public life to this day – the incompatibility between the Liberalism of mid-Victorian Britain, and the parliamentary socialism of the 1900s and beyond?

The seminar takes place on 31 October 2023, between 17:30 and 19:00. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.