Horatio Bottomley

Horatio Bottomley

Horatio William Bottomley (23 March 1860 – 26 May 1933) was an English journalist, newspaper proprietor, financier, Member of Parliament, and fraudster. His political career was ended by a five-year prison term.

Quotes

• Well, damn it all, it's only sixpence, I know, but I suppose he has to begin somewhere.
  • Robert Graves & Alan Hodge The Long Week-end (London, 1940), ch. 5, p. 67.
  • Of one of his office-boys who had been caught stealing a small postal order.

• I have not had your advantages, gentlemen. What poor education I have received has been gained in the University of Life.
  • Speaking at the Oxford Union, December 2, 1920; quoted in Beverley Nichols 25: Being a Young Man's Candid Recollections of his Elders and Betters (London, 1926), ch. 7, p. 69.
  • Sometimes said to have been the first usage of this now ubiquitous cliché, though in fact the phrase university of life had been in use for many years. Some early instances:
    • "The disciplined minds that go from [their university's] walls will be its jewels…It will worthily introduce them to the University of Life." ~ The New Englander and Yale Review (February 1853), p. 70.
    • "The late Professor Greenleaf…who, not born to affluence, and not bred up to scholarly studies, achieved an honorable scholarship in the university of life". ~ Cornelius Conway Felton An Address Delivered before the Association of the Alumni of Harvard College, July 20, 1854 (Cambridge, Mass., 1854), p. 7.
    • "But God be thanked…for the university of life where we may acquire, at the same time that we put in practice, the rules which are to fit us for, and conduct us through the eternities." Elizabeth D. Livermore Zoë (Cincinnati, 1855), p. 14.
    • "When our men go into the great university of life…there are few, indeed, who have practical reason to regret that so many years were spent in the severe but salutary discipline imposed by the University of Dublin." ~ The Dublin University Magazine (April 1858), p. 419.

• No, reaping.
  • S. Theodore Felstead Horatio Bottomley: A Biography of an Outstanding Personality (London, 1936), ch. 1.
  • To a prison visitor who, finding him stitching mailbags, asked "Sewing, Bottomley?"

Quotes about Bottomley

• Bottomley...was a genial rascal and took the line that people who were fools enough to be duped by his swindles deserved all they got.
  • Robert Graves & Alan Hodge The Long Week-end (London, 1940), ch. 5, p. 73.

• Since war is a vulgar business it was right that the leading unofficial recruiter should have been the greatest vulgarian of the day. Horatio Bottomley, editor of John Bull, was sufficiently moved by the spirit of 1914 to inform his friends that he was making a complete break with his 'sordid past'. His ambition was to be Director of Recruiting, preferably with a seat in the Cabinet, but he was tactfully assured by Asquith that he would be more use to the country in an unofficial capacity. The public who cheered the patriotic speeches of the People's Tribune were unaware of the high fees he received for delivering them (between £50 and £100 a meeting, sometimes more).
  • E. S. Turner, Dear Old Blighty (London 1980), p. 70.