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    Fortune's Spear: The Story of the Blue-Blooded Rogue Behind the Most Notorious City Scandal of the 1920s
    Unavailable
    Fortune's Spear: The Story of the Blue-Blooded Rogue Behind the Most Notorious City Scandal of the 1920s
    Unavailable
    Fortune's Spear: The Story of the Blue-Blooded Rogue Behind the Most Notorious City Scandal of the 1920s
    Ebook451 pages6 hours

    Fortune's Spear: The Story of the Blue-Blooded Rogue Behind the Most Notorious City Scandal of the 1920s

    By Martin Vander Weyer

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Gerard Lee Bevan was the model of an Edwardian swell - arrogant, smooth, well-connected and highly cultured. He married money and influence - his wife Sophie Kenrick was a cousin of the future prime minister Neville Chamberlain - and over the years he kept a string of showgirl mistresses. But his was a success built on fraud and deception, and eventually Bevan could sustain the fiction no longer. After a series of desperate swerves, he fled the country on 8 February 1922, abandoning his family and leaving his stockbroking and insurance empire in ruins. Thus began an extraordinary flight across Europe - disguised as a Frenchman, using a stolen passport, with his mistress at his side. His subsequent arrest in Vienna, and the Old Bailey trial that followed, would shock the entire country. 'Fortune's Spear' is a parable of the way in which the prospect of easy money draws risk-takers in every era into a spiral of greed and deceit. Bevan may have been forgotten, but he richly deserves to be remembered. Drawing on c ontemporary evidence and told with novelistic flair, Martin Vander Weyer's gripping biography brings him vividly to life.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElliott & Thompson
    Release dateNov 15, 2011
    ISBN9781907642326
    Unavailable
    Fortune's Spear: The Story of the Blue-Blooded Rogue Behind the Most Notorious City Scandal of the 1920s
    Author

    Martin Vander Weyer

    Martin Vander Weyer is business editor and columnist of The Spectator and a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph. He has been writing about business, entrepreneurship and social change throughout the national press since 1992, after a career in international banking. His previous books include Falling Eagle: The Decline of Barclays Bank (2000); Closing Balances: Business Obituaries from the Daily Telegraph (2006); Fortune’s Spear (2011), the biography of 1920s fraudster Gerard Lee Bevan; and Any Other Business: Life In and Out of the City (2014), a semi-autobiographical collection of his journalism. He lives in London.

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    Reviews for Fortune's Spear

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    • 5/5
      An account of the crash of the City Equitable insurance firm in the 1921-1922 period, engineered by Gerard Bevan, a scion of a well-known banking family (he was related to some of the Barclays of Barclay's Bank). The author does a very good job of marching through Bevan's career, and the aftermath thereof, including some interesting sidelights on how the affair turns up in literature (one of Galsworthy's Forsythe Saga novels, White Monkey). The author seems quite interested in Bevan's poetry, even though little of it has a direct bearing on the case; it's extensively quoted. The only real complaint I have about the book is that the author does engage in a lot of speculation in certain situations as to how things might have occurred, which can get mildly annoying at times. Some of the speculation is pure spitballing. But in general, it's a good book on financial finagling, especially since it touches on some of the other celebrated cases of the 1890-1930 period, like Hatry and Bottomley.