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A Most Deliberate Swindle
`That London could have had electric buses a hundred years ago is extraordinary enough, but as Mick Hamer recounts with great panache, the reason it didn`t is even more extraordinary. This is a great tale, expertly told` – Michael Palin On a warm April morning in 1906 a crowd of expectant correspondents from London`s leading newspapers gathered at the Hotel Cecil in the Strand to view the new wonder of the age – the electrobus. This clean, green machine was gearing up to take on the noisy, polluting petrol vehicle, which was just starting to replace the horse-drawn omnibus and surely had the potential to be a game changer in terms of what it would mean to Londoners and other city-dwellers who were already choking on petrol fumes. Disastrously though, the London Electrobus Company was in the grip of a gang of greedy and fraudulent financiers, who systematically conned shareholders, looted the company`s coffers and drove the promise of the electrobus into the ground.Rammed with fascinating characters and vividly capturing the Edwardian era, A Most Deliberate Swindle uncovers one of the biggest frauds in history and reveals why a century later this historic scam has left us all gasping for breath.