Read The Man Who Bought London for Free Online

originally staked, but half a million pounds in addition as evidence of his faith, his overtures were rejected. Another small man wasMorris Lochmann, who subscribed roughly 600,000 pounds – and there were several of his kind. The ‘L Trust’, as it called itself, was autocratic to a degree. Men who came in with inflated ideas as to their importance were quashed as effectively as a fly is swotted. Hermann Zeberlieff was one of these. He was a big man in a small place, one of the little kings of industry, who measured themselves by the standard of local publicity. He threw some 1,200,000 pounds into the pool – but he talked. The fever for notoriety was so strong in him that he committed the unpardonable crime of having a photograph of ‘this mammoth cheque’ (so the letterpress typed on the back of the picture called it) sent to all the papers.
    The cheque was never presented. He had jeopardized the success of the project by alarming a public too ready to be scared by one of two words – ‘trust’ and ‘conscription’.
    Zeberlieff was a large holder of United Western Railway stock. On the morning the photograph appeared the stock stood at £23 per share in the market. By the next afternoon it had beaten down to £12 10s. On the following day it slumped to £8 – a sensational drop. The most powerful group in the world had ‘beared’ it. Hermann crawled out of the mess with a loss of £800,000.
    ‘What can I do?’ he wailed to Bolscombe Grant, that gaunt man of money.
    ‘I guess the best thing you can do,’ said Mr Grant, chewing the end of his cigar thoughtfully, ‘is to send a picture of yourself to the papers.’
    It was the first hint to Hermann Zeberlieff that he was the subject of disciplinary measures.
    It was typical of the Trust that it made no attempt to act collectively in the sense that it was guided by a majority. It delegated all its powers to one man, gave him a white card toscribble liabilities; neither asked for explanations nor expected them. They found the money, and they placed it at the disposal of King Kerry because King Kerry was the one man of their number who understood the value of real estate properties. They worked on a simple basis. The rateable value of London was £45,000,000. They computed that London’s income was £150,000,000 a year. They were satisfied that with the expenditure of £50,000,000 they could extract ten per cent of London’s income.
    That was roughly the idea, and to this was added the knowledge that vast as was the importance of the metropolis, it had only reached the fringe of its possibilities. London would one day be twice its present size, and ground value would be enormously increased. Its unique situation, the security which came from the geographic insularity of England and the strength of its navy, the feeding quality of its colonies, all combined to mark London as a world capital.
    ‘I see London extended to St. Albans on the north, Newbury on the west, and Brighten on the south,’ wrote King Kerry in his diary. ‘It may even extend to Colchester on the east; but the east side of any township is always an unknown quantity in a scheme of development.’
    There were difficulties to overcome, almost insuperable difficulties, but that was part of the game and made the players keener. Patience would do much: judicious pressure tactfully applied would do more.
    King Kerry wanted to buy the big block of buildings comprising Goulding’s Universal Stores. Goulding’s stood out, so Kerry bought the next block, which was Tack and Brighten’s.
    Elsie Marion presented herself at ten o’clock punctually at the modest suite of offices which the ‘L Trust’ occupied inGlasshouse Street. It was unusual that a great financial corporation should be habited so far west, but a peculiarity of the Trust and its operations was the fact that never once did it attempt to handle property in the area between Temple Bar and Aldgate Pump. It was not in the scheme of