anyone can call themselves a patriot, horatio bottonmley did just that, and was actually engaging in criminal.activitie

On 14 January 1915, 6 months into World War I, the Royal Albert Hall played host to the ‘Great Patriotic Rally’ – one of the most memorable public meetings in the venue’s history.

The Great Patriotic Rally was organised by the proprietor of the hugely popular John Bull magazine, Mr Horatio Bottomley: a convicted swindler and disgraced ex-Liberal MP who was forced to resign from his seat after filing for bankruptcy in 1912.





His John Bull magazine claimed a circulation in excess of 2 million by 1914, making it by some distance the best-selling news weekly of its day, and promoted itself as the most patriotic publication of a patriotic era. It called on its readers to hate the “Germ Huns” and “Austrihuns”, against whom Britain was fighting.


Horatio Bottomley

This rally at the Hall saw Bottomley depict the war as a struggle to the death between the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic races, declaring:

“We are fighting all that is worst in the world, the product of a debased civilization”.

The Hall’s management had underestimated how many people would try to attend and chaos ensued as 12,000 people tried to pack themselves into the auditorium to hear the charismatic speaker. It reportedly took Bottomley over 2 hours to reach the stage before he could even start the meeting!



In this extract from Bottomley’s speech made on the day we get a flavour of the rhetoric used:

“I cannot think of any prouder boast for any Britisher to make when the war is over — that he took an active and vital part in ridding England and the world of a great, a hideous menace, which, but for his intervention, might have wiped out the civilization of our past ages and everything worth living for or dying for on the earth.

I ask those young men if they do not really feel that there is a call to them. I ask them if they cannot hear their comrades calling to them from the trenches, calling to them from the hospitals, calling to them from the decks of the sea-dogs who are guarding our shores day in and night in. If they do not hear that call they are unworthy to claim the name of Englishman.”