John Bull and his editor Horatio Bottomley were worlds apart

 

I GREW up in London learning to be proud of my city, its heritage and its heroes. Great names were banded around our house in Dollis Hill by my family and their friends: Nelson, Wellington, Churchill, Montgomery, Nightingale to name but a few.

 

So, it came as a great disappointment to me when I learned in later life that the man behind the name that symbolised the epitome of Britishness, patriotism, courage and honesty was in fact a drunken swindler, gambler and sexual predator who cheated his nation.

 

John Bull was identifiable worldwide, strutting along with his English bulldog, a stout squire from the Shires in a tailcoat with breeches and a Union Jack waistcoat. He wore a topper and had a tummy and glow of a man whose apparent beef and ale gluttony represented prosperity in a Victorian age where rosy cheeks and plump faces were a sign of good health.

 

During the Napoleonic Wars he became the national symbol of freedom, of loyalty to king and country, and of resistance to French aggression. He was the man in the street, who would fight Napoleon with his bare hands if he had to.

 

But was he real? Of course not, he was a fictional character. Except that many people thought he was, as I did as a boy. In real life, his name was Horatio Bottomley, and he was the editor of Britain’s most popular magazine in 1906, the John Bull magazine, published at 40 Fleet Street (site of the Punch Tavern). It sold two million copies during the First World War.

 

“Pudgy, pompous, curly haired,” Time magazine claimed. “Bottomley looked like John Bull. To millions of Britons, he was John Bull.”

 

But secretly he was nothing like him. He was a crooked editor who loved horse racing, gambling, drinking and married women.

 

John Bull’s original creator was Scotsman John Arbuthnot, a scientist, doctor and political satirist. who drew Bull in a series of cartoons and by 1762 the fictional country squire was so well known as the quintessential Englishman, he appeared in cartoons for Punch magazine.

 

Bottomley, born in 1860, was a failed financier, who grew up in a Birmingham orphanage and worked as a barrow boy, as a clerk for a bent solicitor and an engraver for the Illustrated London News – his first brush with Fleet Street.

 

He went on to launch magazines, close them when they went bust without paying off debts and borrowing to start more. He also set up firms to dig for gold in Australia but never seriously mined for any.

 

He lived in a luxury apartment in Pall Mall, rented London flats for his mistresses, owned racehorses (winning The Cesarewitch at Newmarket) and built a country mansion.

 

By 1906 he was bankrupt.

 

But he landed on his legal feet when he became an MP that year and published John Bull magazine in Fleet Street. The money rolled in again.

John Bull campaigned relentlessly against the “Germhuns”, and against British citizens carrying German-sounding surnames. The danger of “the enemy within” was a persistent Bottomley theme. He sparked riots against German families in British streets.

 

However, between 1918 and 1922, he set up a scam ‘Victory Bond Club’ offering shares supposedly tied to one-fifth of the government’s postwar Victory Bonds for £1 each.

 

Bottomley took around £1.1 million in Club memberships, using it to pay off his debts to his horse trainers, MPs he owed money to and various pestering mistresses. The rest went on drink and having a good time. It all ended in tears when the successful press magnate and politician was tried for fraud over his bond scam in 1922 and sentenced to seven years’ jail.

 

Ironically, the corrupt Liberal Party MP for Hackney and later an Independent denounced Parliament in the pages of John Bull as a “musty, rusty, corrupt system.” that urgently needed replacement.

 

He died in poverty aged 73, in 1933.

 

BEAVER KEEPS HIS RIVER VIEW

The Beaver can still see the river from his ashes in his monument

WHEN Lord Beaverbrook died of cancer aged 73, in 1964 in Leatherhead, Surrey, the local council in Newcastle, Canada, where he grew up, wanted his ashes to be buried in their town square. But the Beaver had been worried about the request because the pigeons would poop on him.

 

So, he arranged to have a cairn and bust of himself erected where his ashes would be interred. It was near where he sold newspapers as a boy by the waterside and the ashes would be in the plinth.

 

When he flew out to see the plot, he discovered a large house was blocking the beautiful view from the cairn up the Miramichi River.

So, he purchased the house, and had it bulldozed to the ground, satisfied that when his ashes were interred, he had a good view of the water.

 

WATCH OUT THERE’S A BOMB ABOUT!

 

I have found a wonderful story from Londoner Elsie Penny during the Fleet Street Blitz, from an archive of WWII memories. And a reminder of the spirit of Brits during the day.

 

She writes: “My father, who worked nights at the Evening News offices, had come home just as I was about to leave for the City, where I worked near St Paul’s. He told me that my building where I was a bookseller and newsagent, had been bombed during the night in one of the worst raids and many people had died.”

 

Elsie’s mum was concerned that the shops and cafes wouldn’t be open and suggested she took a flask of tea and some sandwiches. When Elsie got to Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill, she found the streets covered in rubble and firehoses.

 

“Many of the buildings were made of wood and still smouldering,” she says, “it was like being in Dante’s inferno. Wardens were still searching for bodies.

 

“Miraculously, thanks to the fire watchers on the roof, who alerted firemen, St Paul’s Cathedral was O.K. I got chatting to them and discovered they had been on the job for many hours and didn’t know how much longer they could remain on duty.”

 

They told Elsie the WVS were unable to get around with hot drinks and food for them. And so, she gave them her tea and sandwiches. One morning, a few days later she unlocked her office door leading into the yard and was shocked to find an unexploded incendiary bomb from the raid lying on the ground. She had to do something and so she put it into a fire bucket and took it in to show the boss.

 

“Get rid of it!” he ordered. “So off I went with bucket and bomb to find a policeman. Unfortunately, then as now (2003 when writing), there wasn’t a Bobby to be seen. There I was, me, four foot ten of nothing, wandering the streets with an unexploded incendiary bomb!

 

“Eventually, I found an ARP Warden and gratefully handed it to him; then much relieved I hurried back with my empty bucket, to the shop, where the boss gave me a very welcome cuppa.”

 

*Elsie’s Blitz hit at the heart of the publishing trade for books, magazines and newspapers. It was targeted by the Luftwaffe because of all the stationery and oil-based printing inks stored along Fleet Street and the Strand – from St Paul’s to Charing Cross.

 

Most of the buildings had flat roofs and the area was easy to identify because the nearby Thames could clearly be seen from the air.

 

The raid was personally ordered by Hitler who had started burning books in 1933 because there was too much anti-Nazi publicity.

 

BERT HARDY’S FIRE CRACKER

Picture Post, February 1,1941 

 

A cracking example of photojournalism by the iconic camera ace Bert Hardy. Inside is his photo story of London’s firefighters during the Blitz.

 

It won him his first picture credit in the magazine. The editor had never credited snappers before because many of them had fled from the Nazis and faced being interned.

 

Inside, the editor wrote: “From our rule of anonymity we make an exception of these pictures. They were taken by A. [Albert] Hardy, one of our own cameramen.

 

TERRY MANNERS

 

24 February, 2025