A Most Deliberate Swindle: How Edwardian fraudsters pulled the plug on the electric bus and left our cities gasping for breath by Mick Hamer

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._x000D_ _x000D_ 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._x000D_ _x000D_ 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._x000D_ _x000D_ 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.