Most Deliberate Swindle

Mick Hamer

Description

On a warm April morning in 1906 a crowd of expectant correspondents from London's leading newspapers gathered at the Hotel Cecil in the Strand to view the new wonder of the age - the electrobus.This clean, green machine was gearing up to take on the noisy, polluting petrol vehicle, which was just starting to replace the horse-drawn omnibus and surely had the potential to be a game changer in terms of what it would mean to Londoners and other city-dwellers who were already choking on petrol fumes.Disastrously though, the London Electrobus Company was in the grip of a gang of greedy and fraudulent financiers, who systematically conned shareholders, looted the company's coffers and drove the promise of the electrobus into the ground.Rammed with fascinating characters and vividly capturing the Edwardian era, A Most Deliberate Swindle uncovers one of the biggest frauds in history and reveals why a century later this historic scam has left us all gasping for breath.

Informations

• Publié par: RedDoor Publishing
• Date de parution: 28 septembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912317288
• Langue: English

Extrait

‘That London could have had electric buses a hundred years ago is extraordinary enough, but as Mick Hamer recounts with great panache, the reason it didn’t is even more extraordinary. This is a great tale, expertly told’
Michael Palin, January 2017
‘It is a remarkable story – on one level a ripping yarn, but on another a grim reminder of how we let the internal combustion engine run riot for more than a century’
Walt Patterson
Associate Fellow, Energy, Environment and Resources, Chatham House
‘Mick Hamer has meticulously pieced together a fascinating tale of intrigue and deception that may have killed off the electric bus for a century, a most unwelcome consequence from which we have all suffered in terms of air pollution ever since. A good read even if you are not interested in buses’
Norman Baker
Managing Director The Big Lemon and Transport Minister 2010-2013
Taken for a ride: the electrobus pauses for the cameras on the day of the press launch in April 1906. Sitting inside the bus to the left of the driver is the brains behind the swindle, Dr Edward Ernest Lehwess.
A MOST
DELIBERATE
SWINDLE
HOW EDWARDIAN FRAUDSTERS PULLED THE PLUG ON THE ELECTRIC BUS AND LEFT OUR CITIES GASPING FOR BREATH
MICK HAMER
Published by RedDoor www.reddoorpublishing.com
© 2017 Mick Hamer The right of Mick Hamer to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Every effort has been made to trace and contact all holders of copyright material. Any inadvertent omission will be corrected at the earliest opportunity
ISBN 978-1-912317-28-8
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover design: Patrick Knowles www.patrickknowlesdesign.com
Typesetting: Tutis Innovative E-Solutions Pte. Ltd
This book has its own website: www.mostdeliberateswindle.com . The website has updates about the electrobus swindle, fuller information about the sources used and a readers’ forum for comments, queries and clarifications. Any significant amendments will be incorporated in future editions.
To the unknown journalist who first stumbled on the electrobus swindle
Contents
Introduction
1. The First Electrobus
2. A Bogus Patent
3. The Lure of Siberian Gold
4. Two Criminal Convictions
5. A Most Deliberate Swindle
6. The Dress Rehearsal
7. Post Office Motors
8. A Transatlantic Con
9. A Fresh Start
10. A Brawl in The Edgware Road
11. Enter the Black Prince
12. The Other Brighton Run
13. The French Sailors
14. A Black Hole
15. The Sell-Off
16. A Veil of Secrecy
17. The Greek Adventurer
18. The Whistleblower
19. A Franchise in Fraud
20. The Battle of The Buses
21. Boom, Bounce and Bust
22. The Master Blackmailer
23. The Trendsetter
24. A New Tipping Point
Epilogue
Notes and References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Index
Introduction
I first came across the electrobus when I was learning to read. The only picture book in my parents’ house was the Pageant of the Century , a chronological review of events in the first third of the 20th century, with big pictures and short captions. 1 It was not only a good way of learning to read, it was also a history lesson.
The editors of the Pageant of the Century had picked 25 photographs to illustrate the most important events of 1907. There was a dramatic shot of a church tower on the point of toppling over during the great earthquake that devastated Jamaica and killed 1000 people. There was the Kaiser reviewing the German battle fleet at Kiel. And there were the great and good in all their finery watching the racing at Ascot – and failing to spot the daring theft of the Ascot gold cup from a table in full view of the grandstand. Prominent among these momentous events was the debut of the electrobus.
Fast forward to 2007. By now I was a freelance journalist and casting around for story ideas, when I remembered the electrobus. The centenary was a topical peg and I knew exactly what the story was. Or at least I thought I did. It was a brave attempt to introduce environmentally benign transport in London, with clean and quiet buses. But it was doomed to fail. Vehicles that run off batteries, like the electrobus, have a fundamental drawback. Lead-acid batteries, which until recently were the most common type of battery, are heavy. Weight for weight, petrol packs far more power than a battery. So electric vehicles are heavy, slow and have a limited range. It was a contest that petrol would always win. And that, according to the received wisdom, was why the electrobus failed. 2
All I needed to do was to find out a little bit more about these electrobuses and flesh out the story to make it come to life. My first surprise was how little there was in the obvious sources. The comprehensive two-volume A History of London Transport , for example, has four sentences about the electrobus – while devoting a lengthy passage to another electric bus that never carried a paying passenger. 3 It felt as though the electrobus had been airbrushed out of history.
After a bit more digging I came across a reference to the electrobus in an obscure journal. ‘A certain amount of mystery appears to have surrounded the London Electrobus Company from its inception,’ said the article, which went on to say that a Dr Lewis ‘may have been responsible for some of the evident distrust with which the discriminating public have regarded the [electrobus] company’. 4 This struck a jarring note. It was at odds with everything that I had read about the electrobus and it implied that something dodgy had been going on. So what did happen to the electrobus? And who was the mysterious Dr Lewis?
Over the years journalists develop a nose for a story – a sixth sense that there is more to something than meets the eye. By now my journalistic nose was twitching – and I couldn’t resist finding out more. After a bit more delving I discovered that ‘Dr Lewis’ was a German lawyer called not Lewis but Lehwess – Dr Edward Ernest Lehwess. The confusion over the names was easy enough to explain away: the name had been anglicised. But was there a better story here than the one I had expected? Finally, an old Foreign Office file confirmed that I was on the right track. In the margin of one sheet of paper a civil servant has added a handwritten warning about Lehwess: ‘This man is a rogue.’ 5
What started as a simple story about the history of technology had morphed into a fraud investigation. Every journalist loves a scoop. And I had one – even if it was a hundred years after the event. Fraud had killed off the electrobus, not any technical shortcomings. And the mastermind behind the fraud was Lehwess. The story appeared in the Economist in 2007 to coincide with the centenary of the first electrobuses hitting the streets of London. 6 But inevitably there was much more to the story than the magazine had space for.
Investigative journalism is not new to me. I have worked on several lengthy investigations. But this one was different, in two important ways. First, I had never worked on an exposé where all the participants were dead. The last person to have first-hand knowledge of the electrobus swindle died in 1986. 7 That meant there was no living person to nudge me in the right direction – or to obstruct my enquiries.
Second, almost all investigative stories are bankrolled by a newspaper or a television programme – for the very good reason that they are extremely time-consuming. From long experience I knew that freelancers should avoid investigative journalism unless they had a backer. The only tangible reward from pursuing this story would be to get at the truth. The task, it turned out, was far bigger than I anticipated. The mundane need to earn a living meant that the story frequently languished on the back burner for extended periods. The research – leafing through dusty files of old court cases, police notes, returns of long-forgotten companies and press clippings – had to be carried out in my spare time.
As I dug deeper, the story grew better and better. The trail led to an improbable series of thieves, cheats, blackmailers, swindlers, rogues and impostors. The cast of characters included the nephew of the Greek prime minister and his astrologer, a leading Scottish judge who took kickbacks, a music-hall artist who acted as frontman for the swindle, a gunrunner, murky offshore companies, bent solicitors and accountants who could not be trusted to add up the pennies in a child’s piggy bank. On top of fraud, bribery and blackmail, there was champagne, sex, juicy divorce cases, a drunken brawl and motoring derring-do. This was no longer a simple story about an electric bus.
For the most part there was little risk of these chancers being caught. Prosecutions for fraud were rare – partly because the London police didn’t have a city-wide fraud squad until 1946 and partly because of a general assumption that thieves were drawn from the lower classes. Theft was a burglar making off with a bag marked swag not someone in a sharp suit plundering the life savings of parsons, publicans and postmistresses. 8
The fraudsters were often in league with corrupt journalists. In the days before radio the printed word packed a powerful punch. Amateur dabblers in the Stock Exchange could easily be seduced by self-serving stockbrokers’ circulars. For most people, the press was the only independent source of information.
This monopoly gave newspapers enormous power, which was often abused. Bribery was common and even the editors of respectable papers sometimes succumbed to the inducements they were offered. 9 On top