Share Trading, Fraud and the Crash of 1929

6    Arthur Collins to the rescue

For Hatry, salvation was to come in the unlikely form of Arthur Collins. In surviving photographs, he appears as a stout, confident, conventional man, in a three-piece suit, sporting a gold watch chain. His appearance is reminiscent of Alderman Joseph Helliwell, a character in J.B. Priestley’s play, When We Are Married, about how pillars of the community in a northern town deal with the unwelcome disruption of their satisfying, respectable lives by the discovery that their marriages were not legally valid. For most of the early part of his career, Arthur Collins lived and worked in northern towns, although he was never an alderman. He was, however, a local authority treasurer, one of a class of men renowned ...