Harry Bensley, English businessman and adventurer (b. 1877)
Harry Bensley (1876 or 1877 – 21 May 1956) was an English rake and adventurer, best remembered as the subject of an extraordinary wager between John Pierpont Morgan and Hugh Cecil Lowther, 5th Earl of Lonsdale. How much of his story is based on fact is unclear.
Bensley was from Thetford in Norfolk, England. In 1904 he was sentenced to four years' penal servitude for bigamy and fraud: he had married a woman named Lily Chapman in 1903 even though he was already married to his first wife, Kate Green, whom he had married in 1898; he had also been defrauding people by posing as the son of a knight and claiming that he was due to inherit large estates in Norfolk. By 1907 he was a businessman and investor, working particularly in Imperial Russia and reputedly received an income of £5,000 a year.