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HOOLEY’S RISE AND FALL.

“THE SPLENDID BANKRUPT.” MAN WHO DEALT IN MILLIONS. London, April 16. Ernest Terah Hooley, who was sentenced to the Old Bailey on Saturday to three years’ penal servitude for conspiracy to defraud in connection with the promotion of the Jubilee Cotton Mills, Ltd., was at the summit of his career in the Diamond Jubilee year, 1897. The great Dunlop tyre “deal” of £5.000,000 had brought him into prominence, and it is probable that on the eve of setting out for London he was worth £950,-000. Born 63 years ago r.i Nottingham, Hooley was withdrawn from school at 13. His father was a former “twist” worker in a lace factory, who set up in a small way on his own account at Long Eaton. Young Hooley worked first at the lace machines and then as a salesman. His first flotation was the conversion of his father’s business into a limited liability company. Later he set up as a stockbroker in Nottingham. He arrived in London in April, 1896. He was a young man from Nottinghamshire who had come upon the city like a whirlwind. He installed himself in a suite of eight rooms, for which he used to say that he paid £2OO a week. Here he received his court, peers and commoners, city men of all grades of wealth and respectability—anyone in fart who was still not too rich to want to make a bit more. From 1894 to 1898 he floated 26 companies having a total nominal capital of £18,610,000. Fifteen of these were cycle companies with a total nominal capital of £10,035,000.

r £5,000,000 IN FOUR YEARS. Of those 18J millions £14,132,442 went to his account as his “consideration,” as his sale price to the companies of the properties that they took over from him. For these properties he had paid £9,103,534. On the figures he made £5,028,908 on the deal, not a bad four years’ work for a man of 28. Yet the net result so far as Ernest Terah Hooley was concerned, was on the wrong "side of the ledger. His methods of promoting were such that of his little more than five millions of gross profits, £4,097,781 was disbursed. At the time of his spectacular smash he gave simple “promotion expenses" at £945,912. Many companies which Hooley promoted have remained first-class companies.’

“I have never said,” he remarked once, ‘‘that I can manage, a business. That is not my line. I am a dealer, a born dealer. "My affair is to buy a business and sell a business, and when it is bought and sold I have nothing further to do with it.”

RECKLESS PRODIGALITY. He had the reckless prodigality of a born optimist. Even as a bankrupt he reckoned he was living at the rate of £12,000 a year. Small wonder that he was called “the splendid bankrupt.” While he was solvent, living at the rate of a million a year, he seems to have had the capacity of spending all he made. He bought great country estates. One little item was £10.(X)"O to stock the wine cellars of one of them. He bought a beautiful yacht. He made a magnificent gift of gold plate to St. Paul’s Cathedral, a gift which later on was found rather embarrassing. Lastly there was the fund of £400,000 which he announced he had invested for charities. So the money went. There followed in July, 1898, bankruptcy proceedings with liabilities of about £700,000. Hooley has made many reappearances since that spectacular fall of 1898; but they have been pale reflections of those crowded three years of feverish life. In February, 1912, he was sentenced at the Old Bailey to twelve months in the second division for obtaining £2OOO from a young mechanical engineer of Rochdale by false pretences in stating that a particular estate which he was selling was not epeumbered. Otherwise during the years following his decline he has lived at Risley Hall, in Derbyshire or Papworth Hall, in Cambridgeshire, which, he stated on one occasion publicly, friends had bought after his bankruptcy and given to his wife.

Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/TDN19220708.2.87

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

Taranaki Daily News, 8 July 1922, Page 9

Word count
Tapeke kupu
685

HOOLEY’S RISE AND FALL. Taranaki Daily News, 8 July 1922, Page 9

HOOLEY’S RISE AND FALL. Taranaki Daily News, 8 July 1922, Page 9

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