March 23

Some rather annoying people are born with silver spoons in their mouths. Horatio William Bottomley was not one of those however. He was born on the 23rd in 1860 in London, England. He spent the first 14 years of his life in an orphanage. Nevertheless, the experiences of his youth had imbued him with a strong desire to improve his situation in life and he pursued it with an unyielding sense of purpose. He founded a journal, John Bull, which became a platform for his rather self-serving patriotism. In the course of time, he ended up as a Member of Parliament, an Independent representing Hachney South. He succumbed however, as many politicians do, to the many temptations for unjust enrichment that he encountered. In 1921, he was convicted of fraud, perjury and false accounting, sentenced to seven years in jail and expelled from Parliament. One of the nicer comments made about his character was one made by Matthew Engel, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, who pointed out that Bottomley was “irredeemably, utterly, psychotically corrupt. He built a string of other businesses on nothing more than fresh air: but there were always useful and distinguished idiots on the board, so he could tell the shareholders' meeting: "I would love to pay you a dividend, but my directors won't let me."