ABSTRACT
Soon after his release, Hatry bought Hatchards, the bookshop in Piccadilly. As the war wore on, book sales boomed and Hatchards thrived under its professional management, leaving Hatry to concentrate on buying businesses which had lost premises through enemy action.
By the end of the war, the professional managers had moved on, leaving Hatry in charge of management. Spurred by ideas of vertical integration, Hatry made a series of acquisitions which added little to the Hatchards group. Within five years of the end of the war, the group had become unsustainable and was being dismembered in a series of frenzied transactions. The directors, who had not been kept informed of Hatry’s many deals, accused him of fraud and he was obliged to withdraw.
Subsequent investigations by the Metropolitan Police and the Board of Trade could not disentangle the many transactions through which Hatry had tried to save the Hatchards group and failed to find evidence of fraud.
