After working as a shorthand writer and court reporter, at 24 he founded his own publishing company, which launched numerous magazines and papers, including, in 1888, the Financial Times.

[2] William Bottomley's background is obscure, but Elizabeth belonged to a family of well-known radical agitators—her brother George Jacob Holyoake was a founder of the Secularist movement and in later life a leading figure in the growth of Co-operative societies.

He met Bradlaugh, who encouraged the young man to read more widely and introduced him to the ideas of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and John Stuart Mill.

[14] As Bottomley emerged from adolescence to maturity he began to show signs of the characteristics that would be much in evidence in his later life: greed for fleshly pleasures, a thirst for fame, spontaneous generosity, combined with a charm that, according to his biographer Julian Symons, could "tempt the banknotes out of men's pockets".

[15] They had a daughter, Florence, who married firstly American millionaire Jefferson Davis Cohn,[16][17][18] and secondly successful South African planter Gilbert Moreland.

[19] In the year of his marriage, Bottomley left his job to become a full-time shorthand writer for Walpole's, a firm that provided recording and transcription services for the law courts.

These included, among others, the Municipal Review, a prestigious local government publication; Youth, a boys' paper on which Alfred Harmsworth, the future press magnate Lord Northcliffe, worked as a sub-editor; and the Financial Times.

The essence of his argument was that he was the victim of machinations by the Official Receiver and the Debenture Corporation, who had been determined to win prestige by bringing Bottomley down and wrecking his company.

[37] He avoided the stigma of bankruptcy by arranging a scheme of repayment with his creditors,[38] and swiftly embarked on a new career promoting Western Australian gold mining shares.

[39] The discovery of gold in Kalgoorlie and adjoining areas in the early 1890s had created an easily exploitable investment boom; as Bottomley's biographer Alan Hyman observes, "A hole in the ground ... could be boosted into a very promising gold-mine, and investors only found that they had backed a loser after the mine had been floated as a public company and they had paid hard cash for their shares".

[45] By the turn of the 19th–20th centuries the boom in speculative shares had abated; some of Bottomley's fellow promoters, such as Whitaker Wright, were facing charges of fraud and misrepresentation.

Another feature was Bottomley's employment of celebrity guest editors for special editions; among these were the comedian Dan Leno, the cricketer Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji and the labour leader Ben Tillett.

[49][n 1][51] [I intend] to give the government an independent and, I hope, an intelligent support, so long as it proceeds on the lines of robust and healthy democracy, but I am also here to oppose all fads and 'isms and namby-pamby interference with the liberty and freedom of our common citizenship.

[59] Alongside his parliamentary duties, Bottomley was engaged in launching his biggest and boldest publishing venture, the weekly news magazine John Bull, half of the initial capital for which was provided by Hooley.

This situation was resolved when the entire management of the magazine, including the handling of all receipts and payments, was transferred to Elias,[63][64] leaving Bottomley free to concentrate on editing and journalism.

[65] In June 1906 Bottomley announced the John Bull Investment Trust, in which, for a minimum subscription of £10, investors could share "that special and exclusive information which is obtainable only as the result of extensive City experience".

[70] Despite the adverse publicity, Bottomley was returned by the electors of Hackney South at each of the two 1910 general elections; his tactics included recruiting men in boots tipped and heeled with iron, who marched outside his opponent's meetings and rendered the speeches inaudible.

[79] After leaving the House of Commons, Bottomley denounced Parliament in the pages of John Bull as a "musty, rusty, corrupt system" that urgently needed replacement.

[76] In 1913 Bottomley met a Birmingham businessman, Reuben Bigland, and together they began running large-scale sweepstakes and lotteries, operated from Switzerland to circumvent English law.

After the murder of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June in Sarajevo, allegedly with Serbian complicity, John Bull described Serbia as "a hotbed of cold-blooded conspiracy and subterfuge", and called for it to be wiped from the map of Europe.

[86] On 14 September 1914 he addressed a large crowd at the London Opera House, the first of many mass meetings at which he deployed his trademark phrase, "the Prince of Peace, (pointing to the Star of Bethlehem) that leads us on to God"—words which according to Symons moved many hearts.

[87][88] At the "Great War Rally" at the Royal Albert Hall on 14 January 1915, Bottomley was fully in tune with the national temper when he proclaimed: "We are fighting all that is worst in the world, the product of a debased civilisation".

[102][103] Bottomley described the committee as "a dodge for doctoring public opinion", and in January 1918 told Lloyd George, who had become prime minister in December 1916, that NWAC had failed in its purpose and should be replaced by a Director of Propaganda—but to no avail.

A payment of £34,000 in cash and bonds, and some hasty reorganisation of outstanding debts, was sufficient for an acquiescent Official Receiver to grant the discharge just in time for Bottomley to hand in his nomination papers in Hackney South.

Normally, these bonds cost £5; in Bottomley's club, subscribers bought units for a minimum payment of £1, and participated in an annual draw for prizes—up to £20,000, he said—funded from accrued interest.

[132] The weight of evidence suggested otherwise; Salter's summing up, described by a biographer as "masterly; lucid and concise, yet complete",[133] went heavily against Bottomley, and the jury required only 28 minutes to convict him on all but one of the charges.

The Leader of the House, Sir Austen Chamberlain, read out a letter in which Bottomley insisted that, however unorthodox his methods, he had not been guilty of conscious fraud; he accepted that his predicament was entirely his own fault.

[136] Bottomley spent the first year of his sentence in Wormwood Scrubs where he sewed mailbags,[n 6] and the remainder in Maidstone Prison where, although conditions were squalid, he was given lighter work.

[145] Bottomley's last public venture was an engagement at the Windmill Theatre in September 1932, where he performed a monologue of reminiscences that, according to Symons, puzzled rather than amused his audience.

A large crowd heard the Reverend Basil Bourchier express the hope that "no one here today will forget what Mr Bottomley did to revive the spirits of our men at the Front".