Several weeks ago a broken 73-year-old man applied to the British Government for an old-age pension of $1.71 weekly. Fortnight ago it was refused. London editors glanced at the name below the application and sent reporters scurrying to the free ward of Middlesex Hospital. The name was Horatio William Bottomley.∙
Propped up behind a white hospital screen the flabby old gentleman gave his last newspaper interview.
"I have been several kinds of a fool," said he. "But I might not have come off so badly had I not been so loyal to my friends. That is one of my very few principles and virtues—loyalty to my friends.... I cannot really believe that Mr. H. B. is going to end like this. I could have got anywhere and been anything if I had not made a fool of myself."
Last week, still in the hospital ward, he died. By his bedside was a friend as loyal as his own boast, the darling of his salad days and toast of the old Savoy. Peggy Primrose, now plump Mrs. Peggy Lowe. His last gesture was to refuse an allowance of £1 a week from the bitter, hollow-cheeked printer who sent him to jail and smashed his career: Reuben Bigland.
No history of Britain's part in the World War is complete without a chapter on Horatio Bottomley. He was worth a regiment of recruiting sergeants in the early days of the War. He breakfasted with David Lloyd George regularly at Downing Street, reviewed the Grand Fleet from Admiral Lord Beatty's flagship, earned the title of Britain's Unofficial Prime Minister. Nervous over the introduction of conscription, the Asquith Cabinet demanded just one thing: the support of Horatio Bottomley.
Where he was born no one is certain, but it was in 1860 and the parents were Elizabeth Holyoake and William King Bottomley. His parents had a pathetic desire to make an artist of him. Horatio ran away to earn his living as a day laborer. He studied shorthand, became a court stenographer, studied law and though never admitted to the bar, used to boast that he was "the best lay lawyer in England.'' At various times he was connected with some 20 or 30 different companies which failed, successively for about $90,000,000, but publishing was his real forte. At the age of 25 he founded the Financial Times, then bought The Sun. His greatest success was a weekly which with a flash of inspiration he called John Bull. Pudgy, pompous, curly-haired, Horatio Bottomley looked like John Bull. To millions of Britons he was John Bull. His editorial policies paralleled those of long-faced William Randolph Hearst: sensationalism, flaring headlines, ultranationalism. Again like Hearst, he kept a convenient goat to blame for everything: in his case the U. S.
He won his first seat in Parliament in 1906: another bankruptcy forced him to resign in 1912. In 1918 he was back again with a plurality big enough to cause serious concern that he was about to become Britain's next Prime Minister.