Anne Margaret Wright

The Threadbare Plea Anne Margaret Wright

The man standing with his co-defendants in the dock was well-educated, well-connected and rich beyond the dreams of ordinary Britons. His wealth was reputed to be in the region of tens of millions, while his house in Great Stanhope Street, with its ballroom, swimming-pool, and staff of fourteen servants, was described by contemporaries as a palace. He entertained lavishly, he gave generously to the poor, and his financial acumen was lauded by the popular press. He had successfully launched or amalgamated company after company and, on the eve of the Wall Street Crash, had been about to carry out his greatest challenge so far - the amalgamation of 60% of British heavy steel producers into the Steel Industries of Great Britain Limited. So what had gone wrong? What had left Clarence Hatry facing the might of the legal establishment, the wrath of the press, and thirty-nine counts of fraud and forgery? Had he over-reached himself and then chosen a disastrous solution to avert the collapse of his company? Or was he - as the trial judge claimed - no different from a dishonest clerk who was caught with his fingers in his employer's till?Although only dimly remembered today, Clarence Hatry was one of the best-known figures in the City of London in the 1920s. This biography of Hatry (the first ever published) traces his rise and fall, revealing new details about his early life and his bankruptcy before the First World War. It shows Hatry's activities in the post-Armistice boom and the sudden collapse of his corporate empire in the early 1920s. How he was able to recover from these disasters and build an apparently successful business is a fascinating story in its own right, but the main emphasis of The Threadbare Plea is on the epic legal battle which took place at the Old Bailey, as the Attorney-General strove to prove that Hatry was a crook and a forger.