Horatio Bottomley and the Far Right Before Fascism (Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right)

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Bottomley’s origins were not altogether auspicious. He was born in Bethnal Green in the East End of London in 1860. His father was a tailor’s cutter who drank heavily, had once been admitted to a lunatic asylum probably with delirium tremens, and died of a recurrence when Horatio was three. His mother died not long after, and by the age of four Horatio was an orphan. In March 1922 he was charged with fraud. Tried before Mr Justice Salter at the Old Bailey, Bottomley was found guilty on twenty-three out of twenty-four counts and sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. His legal appeal was rejected and he was expelled from the House of Commons. He was released from Maidstone Prison in July 1927 after serving five years. In May 1915, Churchill suggested that Bottomley should be asked to pay visits to munitions workers, and there were visits of this sort through the spring and summer.

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

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Among Holyoake's close associates was Charles Bradlaugh, who founded the National Republican League and became a controversial Member of Parliament. [5] A longstanding friendship between Bradlaugh and Elizabeth Holyoake led to rumours that he, not William Bottomley, was Horatio's biological father—a suggestion that Bottomley, in later life, was prone to encourage. [6] The evidence is circumstantial, mainly based on the marked facial resemblance between Bradlaugh and Bottomley. [7] [8] Taylor, Miles (2004). "Bull, John (supp. fl. 1712–)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/68195. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) S. Theodore Felstead Horatio Bottomley: A Biography of an Outstanding Personality (London, 1936), ch. 1. That Sir George Makgill was active within this complex network of inter-related organisations is however beyond doubt. In the London telephone directory for 1917 he is listed as the Honourary Secretary of the British Empire Union based at 346 Strand Walk (the office of the Diehard newspaper "The Morning Post"). In 1918 the "business secretary" of the British Empire Union was listed as Reginald Wilson, who was later associated with National Propaganda, and its successor the Economic League. Makgill was also, in the same years, the General Secretary of the British Empire Producers' Organisation, which had certainly been courted by the BCU as a potential sponsor, as early as 1917. A further link with this Diehard, anti-socialist network around National Propaganda, is suggested by an entry in The Times on December 17th 1920, in which it was announced the Makgill was standing as a candidate for Horatio Bottomley's People's League in a Parliamentary election in East Leyton. Bottomley was a jingoistic, right wing populist closely associated with the diehards. His group was one of the more successful "patriotic labour" movements which sprang up after the extension of the franchise to attract and encourage anti-socialist working class votes. (8) Henry J. Houston, The Real Horatio Bottomley (1923)