ABSTRACT
“Company Promoter, Bucket-Shop Keeper” shows how Bottomley following his acquittal was able to make a fortune speculating on the shares of Australian mining companies. This was to some extent a reversion into Bottomley’s father, for a maternal uncle Horatio Holyoake had emigrated to Australia and taken part in the gold boom. It describes his relationship to other prominent fraudsters of the age including Ernest Torah Hooley, the promoter of Dunlop, Raleigh, Schweppes, and later Bottomley’s chief accomplice in extracting money from gullible clients. After 1905, this became Bottomley’s focus – no longer the slow accumulation of money through at least the semblance of some actual business – rather targeted thefts, in which he and Hooley identified some weak-minded investor and extracted their money from them.
