| James Whitaker Wright | |
|---|---|
Cartoon of Whitaker Wright by Harry Furniss |
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| Born | 09 February 1846 Stafford, England |
| Died | 26 January 1904 London |
| Charge(s) | Fraud |
| Conviction(s) | 26 January 1904 |
| Status | Dead (suicide) |
| Spouse | Anna Edith Weightman |
| Parents | James Wright, Matilda Whitaker |
James Whitaker Wright (9 February 1846 - 26 January 1904) was an exceptionally wealthy English mining company owner. He became infamous when he committed suicide at the Royal Courts of Justice in London immediately following his conviction for fraud.
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The eldest of five children, he was the son of James Wright, a Methodist Minister, and Matilda Whitaker, a tailor's daughter. Born in Stafford, England he spent his early years in various parts of England with his father. In 1861, according to the census of that year, he was a printer in Ripon. Between 1866-1868, he was a Methodist preacher himself, but retired due to ill-health. He was also the elder brother of John Joseph Wright, who invented the reversible trolley pole in Toronto, Canada.
On the death of his father in 1870, the family emigrated to Toronto, Canada. Wright then travelled to Philadelphia, where he met and married Anna Edith Weightman in 1878. Wright made a fortune by promoting silver-mining companies in Leadville, Colorado and Lake Valley, New Mexico, although none of the companies made money for the shareholders.[1]
Wright returned to England, and promoted a multitude of Australian and Canadian mining companies on the London market.
Wright's career as a master financial swindler peaked in the 1890s, when he formed the London and Globe Company which floated a variety of stock and bond issues dealing with mining. Wright purposely called some of these stocks "consols", which was a sharp style of dealing with the public, as "consols" were the term used by the British government for state bond issues that were solid and reliable. It was not the only bit of sharp practice subsequently brought up against him. He loaded the directorships of his companies with titled peers. For instance, the Chairman of the London and Globe Company was the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, a former Viceroy of India. The question will always be whether this was sharp practice by Wright to gull the public or a way of attracting posh investors. Probably a bit of both, as Wright was definitely trying to cut a splash in late Victorian, early Edwardian English Society. Besides the mansion at Lea Park Wright also owned the yacht Sybarita which beat the yacht Meteor (which belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany) before the Royal Yacht Squadron.
Wright had an ability to meet and mingle with the best people. He became a friend and financial advisor to Sir James Reid, the personal physician to Queen Victoria. In fact Wright was able to get Reid to become the trustee for Mrs. Wright in the financier's will. Later this would lead to financial difficulties for the physician for neglecting her interests in the events connected to Wright's fall. Reid eventually had to pay Mrs. Wright 5,000 pounds.
It is just possible that Wright's fall was due to his ego. Everything apparently was working properly in his empire, until 1900 when he took it upon himself to try to float the bond issue for the building of the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway (now the London Underground's Bakerloo line). The line had been a difficult and costly one to construct. Why Wright decided to get involved in this is hard to explain. Although an engineer, he was a mining engineer, not a construction or railroad engineer. It is more likely that Wright figured if his gamble worked he would be able to cap his career in City finance by getting knighted for his public spirited activity. In any case the bond issue was a disaster - Wright found it strained his resources, and few people were willing to take part of it off his hands. It started the spiral downward for the entire Wright group.
It was here that Wright made his criminal error. To maintain an image of solvency and success Wright kept pushing thousands and thousands of pounds from one of his companies to another in a series of "loans". This led to some fooling around with balance sheets. But when he announced, despite the apparent prosperity of his group, there would be no dividends, people became suspicious. Shortly, in December 1900, the companies collapsed, and in a symbolic moment, one of the large stones at Stonehenge also toppled over. Wright fled, but was brought back to stand trial.
The shock waves led to a panic in London's exchange. There were other losses. The humiliated Marquess of Dufferin and Ava died in 1902 in the midst of the investigation.
The trial occurred in January 1904. Tried before Mr. Justice Bigham, the prosecution was led by one of the best barristers of the day Rufus Isaacs. For Wright this pairing was bad, as Bigham was one of the most astute corporate law experts in England, and Isaacs was an expert in stock market procedure because he had worked as a broker. It was necessary to do this, for the government (when studying the confusion of Wright's paper trail) could not see a successful government prosecution. Instead the prosecution was from the stockholders, which made it look like a vendetta. However, with a prosecutor simplifying the various financial tricks that Wright pulled for the jury, and a jurist patiently explaining points about finance, Wright's attempts at obfuscation were slowly defeated.
On 26 January 1904, Wright was convicted of fraud at the Royal Courts of Justice and given a seven year prison sentence. He committed suicide by swallowing cyanide in a court anteroom immediately afterward. The inquest also revealed that he had been carrying a revolver in his pocket, presumably as a backup. In spite of his financial errors, there was a great outburst of grief at his funeral at Witley where he is buried.
In 1890 Wright had purchased an estate named Lea Park in Haslemere, Surrey and the adjacent South Park Farm from the Earl of Derby, which included the Lordship of the Manor and control of Hindhead Common and the Devil's Punch Bowl. Whitaker Wright began to develop his new properties as a single estate named Witley Park and his wide-ranging landscaping works raised local concerns regarding the impact they were having on the natural landscape.
Following his death, his Witley Park estate was divided into lots for sale, and funds raised locally enabled the purchase of Hindhead Common, which was transferred to the National Trust.
Whitaker Wright was popularized along with his fictional great-grandson in a 2006 episode of Hustle titled Ties That Bind Us.
H. G. Wells was fascinated by the fall of Wright, and it influenced the writer's novels Tono-Bungay and The World of William Clissold.