Horatio Bottomley - Imprisonment and Death

Imprisonment and Death

Bottomley created the "John Bull Victory Bond Club" (a forerunner of Premium Bonds), purportedly 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, perjury and false accounting. Jeremiah Lynch (1888–1953), an Irish-born detective who had already earned a reputation for trapping wartime German spies, was instrumental in building up the case against Bottomley, and went on to become a founder member of the original Flying Squad. (The Times, Obituary, 15 July 1953). In 1922, Bottomley was convicted of fraudulent conversion of shareholders' funds, sentenced to seven years jail and expelled from Parliament.

A famous story says that the prison chaplain of Wormwood Scrubs found him making mail sacks and asked him "Bottomley! Sewing?" to which he replied "No, reaping". He also became again bankrupt. On one occasion when he attended the Bankruptcy Court from Wormwood Scrubs but dressed in his civilian clothes, a friend remarked on the creases in his coat. Bottomley replied, "Never Mind. When I get back, I change for dinner." He was released from gaol in 1927 and, after parading himself around seedy music-halls in a mawkish one-man show, died in penury on 26 May 1933, aged seventy-three, from a stroke after an operation at the Middlesex Hospital, London. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium and his ashes later scattered, according to his will, at Lower Dicker, near Alfriston, Sussex.