Hatry's Return

When swindler Clarence Charles Hatry was sentenced to 14 years in jail (two of them at hard labor), he lamented: "My name has become a byword, and I am irretrievably ruined."

That was in 1930, at the bar of London's Old Bailey. Hatry's name was indeed a byword--for financial juggling at its most spectacular. When all his Indian clubs clatter-banged down together in 1929, investors lost $145,000,000. Hatry's crash shook shaky Wall Street. But last week Clarence Hatry, out of jail, was far from irretrievably ruined. From the look of things he was building up another fortune--his third.

Hatry, now 56, rose from a West End clerkship to control of the Commercial Bank of London after World War I. Soon there was an un-British display of Hatry wealth: ornate bathrooms for his office suite, a swimming pool in his Mayfair home, a yacht, a racing stable. In 1924, his bank failed for $10,000,000.

Hatry pawned his wife's jewels (worth $2,500,000), borrowed from friends, turned his failure into an asset with the slogan "The Man Who Always Pays." Then, to support his new ventures (amalgamations of department stores, steel industries) in a weakening market, Hatry forged a series of municipal bonds, got caught, and went to jail.

As jail librarian, he developed an interest in books. Freed in 1939, he took a small, book-lined office off Fleet Street. Soon he was quietly advising several booksellers. He wrote in a trade magazine: "I am in the book trade because I like it. I knew that I was engaging in an industry in which there were no fortunes to be made."

But all of a sudden it looked as if Clarence Hatry was going to try anyway. Chairman Ernest Edkins of Wyman & Sons, one of Britain's largest chain bookstore companies, hastily clucked a warning to stockholders: Hatry was trying to buy up control of the company. Wyman & Sons stock, selling at 53 1/2 shillings, dropped five shillings next day, four more the day after. Hatry denied trying to get control. But if that was what he was up to, the drop in price made it easier to buy any stock he wanted.

The City gossiped that Hatry had bought into 20 other bookstores, a printing company (Simpkin & Marshal), a publishing house (Crosby Lockwood & Son), two magazines (Argosy, World's Press News). An integrated production-to-retailing organization seemed to be in the works. At week's end Hatry was mumchance. Secretaries had only one icy sentence for callers: "Mr. Hatry is not in."

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