May 10, 2017 • 34 mins
Cole was a lifelong prankster, but none of his stunts could compare with his scheme to gain access to the HMS Dreadnought by getting his friends -- including Virginia Woolf -- to pretend they were Abyssinian royalty.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson. So Um. Recently,
Tracy sent me and I am and in some message
(00:23):
and said, everything I'm working on is horrible and sad.
Please tell me you're picking something lighter. That's true story,
And I had not finally decided on what I was
doing for this particular recording yet, but one of the
things on my list was a bit of relative hilarity
and fairly harmless stuff called the Dreadnought Hoax. It sounds
(00:44):
like it could be ominous, but it's not. It's funny.
Uh yeah, So we're using this as a bit of
lighter fair to balance all the dark stuff that's been
pretty common as of late. And really, the more I
read about this, and there are several articles that I
found that were written throughout the years on April Fool's
Day to kind of laude this particular man that we're
talking about, the spearheaded This is like the perfect patron
(01:05):
saint of April Fool's Day. Um, but I don't want
to wait a whole other year to do him. Because
he's funny so well, and it's so rare for our
show to actually fall directly on the day to you,
which always, I don't know, always makes me feel weird
doing a specifically April Fools episode when our episodes are
coming out on like the third and the fifth that
week or something. Yeah, because so many listeners aren't necessarily
(01:30):
listening on the day of publish. It just is a
little bit tricky. So anyway, we're getting tom Foolery in May.
We're talking about William Horace de Vere Cole and the
Dreadnought Hoax. To start this prank's story, we have to
start out with the prankster Holly just mentioned who was
at the head of it, because he's one of the
most infamous pranksters in history. Pranking people seemed like it
(01:54):
was his life's calling. Yeah, William Horace de Vert Cole,
as I said, who went by Horace, and usually he's
referred to anytime someone's writing about him, like even his
friends as just. Cole was born in Ireland on May five,
eighty one into a wealthy family. As a consequence, uh,
he is one of those children of wealth who did
not really have to take on a real profession, which
(02:17):
is probably why he had so much time for pranking.
His mother was Irish and his father was an officer
in the third Dragoon Guards, which was a British Army
cavalry regiment. He attended Eaton as a boy, and while
he was there, about of diphtheria at the age of
ten permanently damaged his hearing, which left him very frustrated
as he struggled to hear his teachers. His hearing impairment
(02:40):
also kept him from joining the army, so he attended
Cambridge instead of pursuing a military career as his father
had done. And while he had always been a practical
joker as a kid, his more low key like characteristics
really came into their own while he was at Cambridge,
and it was there that what would be considered the
predecessor prank to the Dreadnought Hoax was hatched. During his
(03:04):
time at Cambridge, Cole and his close friend Adrian Stephen
decided to masquerade as royalty. At the time, the Sultan
of Zanzibar was in England on a tour, so Cole
decided that Steven should pose as the Sultan and that
he should play the part of the Sultan's uncle and translator,
and they would see who they could full. So he
(03:26):
and his friend got themselves into costume and they telegrammed
the Cambridge Mayor's office that the Sultan was about to arrive.
So the Mayor's office quickly rallied to accommodate and properly
greet their noteworthy guest. When Cole and his friend arrived
at the Cambridge train station, the town clerk was waiting
for them. They were taken to a formal reception with
(03:48):
a mayor that was arranged in honor of the Sultan,
and then they were given a tour of the town.
They visited academic institutions and they were introduced to prominent
members of the community. Yeah, they were basically given tours
of the school they attended and had to pretend that
it was all amazing and new to them. Uh. They
almost ran into a little bit of trouble when a
(04:10):
woman who had been a missionary attempted to speak with
the Sultan in his native language, which neither Cole nor
Stephen knew, and they managed to dodge this well meaning
lady by telling her that she should only address the
Sultan directly if her intention was to become part of
his harem, and that pretty quickly ended that conversation. I
like how a lot of the success of several of
(04:33):
their pranks relies on like the lack of cultural literacy
completely around them. So, after this long day of tours
and receptions and meet and greets, Cole and Stephen were
taken back to the train station, where they vanished into
the crowd of travelers. The mayor and his colleagues were
none the wiser that they had spent their day being
(04:53):
duped by college students UH and he UH. Cole and
Adrian Stephen with him played all manner of pranks throughout
Cole's life on a variety of scales. So I put
together a list of a handful of them. Once he
threw a lavish party but only invited guests who had
(05:13):
the word bottom in their names, And that was something
that none of them realized until they were actually there
and started introducing themselves. I'm just imagining that the introductions
themselves were also comical. And apparently he if he attended
that party, I think he was incognito. He wasn't there
like as the host. He just kind of watched it
(05:34):
all uh in in anonymity. At another point, he challenged
a member of parliament to a foot race for fun,
and he even offered the man a head start, and
once that gentleman had started running, Cole started calling for
the police, who stopped that man and found Cole's watch,
which had been planted on that poor unsuspecting politician, in
(05:56):
his pocket. So that one is a little bit um mean.
I mean, it's more than a little bit mean, But
some of his do take on a slightly um cruel
tone rather than just being funny. I also feel like
today that would be a much more dangerous prank. Yes,
for sure. On another occasion, he purchased strategically selected seat
(06:20):
theater seats for an event, and he gave those tickets
to bald men, so from the balcony seats, audience members
could clearly see that their heads spelled out an expletive.
That to me is one of those things that is
so um. It takes a lot of forethought on that
(06:40):
one to like figure out which seats you would have
to purchase to spell out a dirty word. So he
gets points for ingenuity on that. He definitely was smart.
Uh And in another somewhat daring stunt. He disguised himself
as a workman and with several similarly attired friends. Some
accounts indicate eight that these were not his friends, but
(07:02):
people who UH were actually workmen that he had duped
into it, and other accounts suggest that he had basically
gone to a bar and found some inebriated men and
and said he was giving them work. The thing with
pranksters and the stories around them is that they get
told by a lot of different people and the details
get very shifty. But we do know that he UH
(07:23):
and a number of people disguised as workmen strolled onto
the street at Piccadilly Circus and set up barricades around
the heavily traffic junction. And then he and his fellow
pranksters then proceeded to dig up the street and a
policeman was rerouting cars around them, presuming that he and
the rest of them were city workers. And after digging
a trench across the busy road, he and these other
(07:45):
people retreated, at least in the versions where it's his friends.
They were with him to a nearby hotel room that
had a view of Piccadilly Circus so they could watch
the chaos below as municipal workers sorted this confusing situation out.
This is the one where I hope they were all
his friends, because I don't like this prank very much
if it's like getting people who were just trying to
(08:06):
do their jobs in trouble right right. When Cole got
married in maybe us right, he had to keep the
date of their wedding a secret. This was because he
had made someone else's wedding into a prank and he
was afraid that something was going to happen to try
to get back at him for it. What he had
(08:28):
basically done was he stationed an array of young women
outside the church and had each of them fling themselves
at the groom when he arrived, begging him not to
abandon her. Yeah, every woman was like, don't leave me eddie,
which if you were a nervous group on your wedding
(08:50):
day or a nervous bride, could be both infuriating and
very upsetting. I think I would be real mad. Yeah,
it would depend on the person. I think there's some
people that could get away with that with me, and
others it could not. The timing of his wedding was
also perfect for Coal because it was right before April
Fool's Day, which would come up in a moment why
that was interesting. The just married couple traveled to Venice
(09:13):
for their honeymoon, but even then Cole was focused on pranking.
The night before April Fool's Day, he took leave of
his new wife and in cover of darkness, he got
a hold of a massive load of horse manure from
the mainland. He spent the night covering the Piazza San
Marco with it. The city did not have any horses,
but he basically created his own manure crisis as a joke,
(09:36):
and so when dawn came, the residents of Venice were
left wondering how in the world all that horse manure
got into their city. Yeah. Yeah, it counts vary from
whether people thought like some sort of mad stampede of
horses had come through, or if they thought some weird
thing had happened where someone had accidentally tried to fertilize
(09:57):
the square. There's a lot of you know, figuring out uh.
And next up we are going to talk about Cole's
friend group after they attended Cambridge, which was an unusually
talented and prank prone group. But first we're gonna pause
and have a quick little sponsor break. In the second
(10:19):
half of the first decade of the twentieth century, Cole
and Adrian Stephen, along with Clive and Vanessa Belle, Adrian's
sister Virginia, who would later be known as Virginia Wolf,
painter Duncan Grant, and other writers and artists formed this
social group, which eventually came to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group or the Bloomsbury Set. The name Bloomsbury came
from the district that they frequented near London. Most of
(10:42):
the members of the Bloomsbury Group had been friends since
their time at Cambridge, and many of them had also
been members of a semi secret club at Cambridge called
the Apostles. Truly unique in the story of the Bloomsbury
Crew is how many members went on to become noteworthy figures.
And addition to those that we already mentioned, the m Forster,
(11:03):
John Maynard, Keynes, uh and in even more loose connections
t s Eliott, Bertrand Russell and all this Huxley were
all linked to it over the course of its two
plus decades. Yeah, it wasn't like they officially said, hey,
we're forming a group. It was just basically a social
circle that happened to include some really amazing people. It
(11:24):
was sort of a moniker applied to them, correct and
this intellectual click routinely meant to socialize and discuss philosophy
and politics and art, etcetera. But they were unique in
some ways and that they were not precious about any
of it. They really maintained an attitude of irreverence when
they were discussing all these things, and that also made
them the perfect co conspirators for someone like Cole. Cole's
(11:47):
most famous prank involved a battleship, the Pride of the
British Navy. The British Navy had launched the launched this
new battleship in nineteen o six and called it the
h M S. Dreadnought. You've probably heard of the name
Dreadnought before to refer to a class of ships. When
I told my husband what Hollywood researching, he started talking
about his many sci fi stories of his to read,
(12:11):
where like, that's a commonly adopted name in the world
of science fiction. Uh, that name for the class of
ships came from this six vessel, And that's because the
HMS Dreadnought was a technological marvel of the time. It
was massive, a behemoth, and it was no joke when
it came to naval power. The Dreadnought was five hundred
and twenty six ft which is about a hundred and
(12:32):
sixty meters long. It was crewed by eight hundred men,
and it was powered via steam turbine, which was an
advancement over the steam pistons of earlier naval vessels, and
that gave it a significant speed boost, allowing it to
travel as fast as twenty one knots, which is about
twenty four miles per hour. And while that may not
sound especially speedy for a ship of that size, at
(12:54):
that time, it was an absolute marvel. The dreadnoughts firepower
was similarly groundbreaking. It was equipped with no close range guns. Instead,
it had five twin turrets, each of which housed two
twelve inch guns that's about thirty point five centimeters. There
were also five maximum machine guns, four torpedo tubes, and
(13:15):
twenty four three inch guns seven point six centimeters. Yeah. Basically,
it was a time when the Navy was shifting from
the idea of having to get close to your enemy
to basically saying no, we'll just hit them from a distance.
It's fine, and they had incredible firepower to do it,
and the HMS Dreadnoughts so advanced naval technology that those
(13:36):
advancements set the standard for more than three decades after
it uh was launched. It quickly doomed its predecessors to obsolescence,
and it drew a lot of attention from the public
as well as the military. While it's might was absolutely
uncontested as a marvel the world over, its high cost
was a slightly more contentious issue in Great Britain. Additionally,
(13:58):
Great Britain in Germany were in the middle of an
arms race, So while the Dreadnought was a point of pride,
the military was also keen on maintaining a level of
secrecy about its exact specifications and abilities. Yeah, they would
certainly do uh sort of showcase events with it, but
it wasn't like they were publishing what it really was
(14:19):
capable of, and a lot of people really wanted to
find out. Uh. So a few years into the Dreadnoughts life,
Cole and his friends from the Bloomsbury Set decided that
they would love to see this ship up close and personal,
and to accomplish this task, Cole and his cohorts launched
a prank very similar to the one that he and
Adrian Stephen had pulled at Cambridge years before. Allegedly, a
(14:41):
friend who was an officer on another ship, the HMS Hawk,
had also egged Cole on in this plan. On February seventh,
nineteen ten, twenty eight year old Cole led his friends
as they hatched their prank, which was incredibly brazen. This time,
Cole sent a wire to the Admiralty with information that
the Emperor of Abyssinia was en route and wished to
(15:03):
see the fleet. This prank had been carefully planned to
give the Admiralty no time to verify this information. The
wire was sent at three oh seven and said that
the Abyssinians would arrive promptly at four twenty. The Emperor
and his quadra were played by Duncan Grant, Virginia Wolf,
who dressed in full beard to hide her feminine features,
(15:25):
Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley and Adrian Stephen. Uh Those that
were playing the Abyssinians darkened their skin with makeup and
assembled what they felt would pass for Abyssinian Garb. Some
of the accounts I read suggested that they actually paid
an extremely high amount of money for Um, a theatrical
costume designer, to create these outfits for them, and that
(15:46):
to sell the prank, Cole insisted that they actually use
real jewels on all of their accouterments rather than using paste.
Cole introduced himself as Shalmandalay of the Foreign Office, who
was serving as escort to the foreign visitors. Andrean Stephen
was the quote translator. He looked up a handful of
(16:08):
Swahili words and an effort to sound convincing if he
needed to, although apparently when push came to shove, he
forgot everything he had crammed and instead performed the role
by stream together odd snippets of Latin and Greek that
he had learned while studying classical literature. Stephen would later
write of his gibberish language quote, I was provided by
(16:29):
my education then with a fine repertory of nonsense, and
did not have to fall back entirely on my own invention.
I had to take care that neither the Latin nor
the Greek should be recognized. So I broke up the
words and so mispronounced them that probably they would have
escaped notice even of the best scholar. Apparently Buxton was
extremely good at parenting the nonsense that Stephen came up with.
(16:52):
He would reuse some of the made up phrases throughout
the day to help cement this masquerade. Yes, so it
did start to say like a cohesive language to people
that were maybe with them for long periods of time,
but it was absolute nothingness. A full military greeting awaited
them at Weymouth when they arrived, including Admiral Sir William
Wordsworth Fisher in full formal dress. The Emperor uh and
(17:17):
we use their quotes every time and his entourage were
indeed invited aboard the Dreadnought for a tour, and there
was a live band to greet them, and African flags
were flown along with the Union jack. The disguises tricked everyone,
even one of the Stephen's cousins. He was stationed aboard
the Dreadnought. He did not recognize either Adrian or Virginia. Yeah,
(17:39):
he did not realize that his lady cousin was one
of the men he was talking to. The group was
also invited to lunch on the ship, but they declined.
The pranksters were presumably afraid that they might give themselves
away if they stayed too long, but the excuse that
they gave at the time was one of cultural specificity.
They claimed that the Royalty of Abyssinia could only eat
(18:00):
specially prepared foods for religious reasons, and their other motivation
for getting away before attempting a meal was their fear
that their fake beards were not going to hold up
to the rigors of chewing and wiping that would be
required if they sat through a full lunch. I would
also imagine that if you're not used to having a beard,
eating without getting your food in your beard might be challenging. Yeah,
(18:23):
those beards are a trick. In the late afternoon, the
weather posed an additional danger to these pranksters. The wind
started blowing and threatened to dislodge their fake facial hair.
It also started drizzling, which was in danger of making
their makeup runs, so they made a hasty exit with
the excuse that they had to get a train, and
as they left, the navy band played the Zanzibar national anthem.
(18:46):
After apologizing to the prank delegation that the Abyssinian anthem
could not be obtained in time. If you recall, Cole's
earlier prank at Cambridge involved a claim of being from Zanzibar,
so there was an extra layer of humor to the
particular choice, although the Navy certainly could not have known it.
When the visit was concluded, the Navy arranged for a
(19:07):
carriage to carry what they believed was the Abyssinian entourage
back to London. Even when they got on the train,
Horace was still keeping up the act and demanded that
the Princess of Abyssinia only be served by attendants wearing
white gloves. So while the train staff ran to purchase
said gloves, the rest of the train was delayed. And
(19:29):
we're about to get into what happened after the dreadnought hoax,
but first we're gonna pause and have a quick word
from a sponsor. Horace. Cole later wrote about the hoax
in a letter to a friend, quote it was glorious,
shriekingly funny. I nearly howled when introducing the four princes
(19:50):
to the Admiral and then to the Captain, for I
made up their names in the train, but I forgot
which was which, and I introduced them under various names,
but it did not matter. I was so mused at
just being myself in a tall hat. I had no
disguise whatever and talked in an ordinary friendly way to everyone.
The others talked nonsense. We had all learned some Swahili.
I said they were jolly savages, but that I didn't
(20:12):
understand much of what they said. It began to ring
slightly on the ship, and we only just got the
princes undercover in time. Another moment and their complexions would
have been running. Are you amused? I am? Yesterday was
a day worth the living. Exactly how this prank came
to light is a little bit hazy. There are two
primary accounts, and one an officer from the Dreadnought asked
(20:35):
if he could wear a metal that had been presented
to him by the quote Emperor with his uniform, which
unraveled the truth. But there's a high probability that Cole
himself actually spread the word of the prank by contacting
the papers, complete with a provided photograph of the pranksters
and costume. They had, in fact stopped into the Lafayette
(20:57):
Studios to have their portrait made in full regale Leah
before they got on the train. To Weymouth. Adrian Steven's
own account claims that he had no idea who leaked
the story, as the entire group had agreed that they
were not going to go public, but that once he
saw the photo of the papers, he just presumed it
was coal. The Daily Mirror ran the story complete with
(21:19):
the photo, recounting how the group of fake Abyssinians had
used the words bunga bunga as part of their faux
language while they utterly duped the HMS dread knots High command.
Bunga bunga would go on to have a small life
of its own. It appeared in songs and became sort
of a shorthand for teasing members of the Navy, as
this whole incident became a massive embarrassment for them. Yeah,
(21:46):
I'm trying to imagine like a similar modern day thing
where like one of our most important military assets is
kind of made into a laughing stock. You can imagine
the Navy would not be thrilled. Uh. And not long
after this prank, the Emperor of Abyssinia did travel to London.
This was within a few weeks of when they had
done this, and he did ask to see the Navy's fleet,
(22:07):
and he was, according to the account of Virginia Woolf,
turned down. Because the Navy's policies on guest tours had
been significantly tightened thanks to Cole and his coterie, there
was very little in the way of repercussions for the
Bloomsberry set, even though this. Even after this whole thing
became public knowledge, the Navy allegedly wanted some sort of
(22:27):
action taken against the group, but none of them were
ever formally charged with any crime. There are reports that
either Cole, who openly admitted that the plan was his,
or his collaborator Duncan Grant, was captured by several sailors
from the British Navy and caned as a form of
vigilante justice. But while there is some consistency in the
(22:47):
caning portion, we're gonna talk about that in just a moment.
Just who received it varies from account to account, but
Stephen's writing states pretty plainly that while members of the
Navy did show up at Cole's house to get some
sort of Jeff stice, Cole made a deal with them
they could cane him if he could then came them back.
So six ceremonial taps on the hind quarters were administered
(23:10):
by each side, and that was the end of it. Yeah,
it seems like in the end they all just kind
of had a bit of a laugh and could say, yes,
we punished him without really punishing him. Stephen also wrote
that he and Cole ran into one of the officers
from the battleship in the street after the hoax quote
one day, walking with Cole near the top of Sloane Street,
I saw the Dreadnought captain and his wife. He saw
(23:33):
us too, and recognized us, and pretended at first to
be horrified and then to call a policeman. After a
second or two, though, he began to laugh and in
fact took the whole affair in the best of good humors,
Horace de Ver. Cole, despite having achieved what could easily
be the most famous prank of his career in Tomfoolery,
continued this hobby for the rest of his life, including
(23:55):
some of those pranks we mentioned earlier in the episode.
One of his later in life bits of jokery stemmed
from the fact that he was often mistaken, particularly due
to his white mustache. For Ramsay McDonald, the first Labor
Party Prime Minister, and when Cole would realize that someone
thought he was McDonald, he would launch into public speeches
(24:16):
vehemently opposing the position of the Labor Party, simply to
enjoy the confusion it caused for everyone. Uh Not, everything
was jolly throughout his life, though undoubtedly the wealth and
station he was born to had protected him from serious
consequences for all of his pranking, even though a lot
of his pranks were kind of jerk moves that came
(24:37):
at the expense of other people, and his family was
not merely rich but also well connected. His sister Mary
of the politician Neville Chamberlain, he would eventually become Prime
Minister of Great Britain. Yeah, there's definitely like a degree
of privilege that protected him from ever having anybody really
punish him eight or ten to reason Pavilion, it's a
(25:02):
wide degree for sure. Yeah. He um. You know, if
somebody of a more middle class or lower class background
tried these same stones, I suspect it would not be
greeted with the same guffaws and good humor. But unfortunately
Cole's fortune and disdain for propriety and his love of
jokes could not protect him from the pitfalls of life.
(25:24):
He actually lost that fortune in a real estate scheme,
and his wife, Mavis, whose own inheritance had also been
lost due to her husband's very poor financial decisions, left
him not long after. Cole did eventually remarry, but that
marriage was not ideal. His second wife had a child
with another man while she was still married to Cole.
(25:45):
Eventually he had to move to France, where he could
manage with far less money than his life in London
had required. Horace de Vere Cole died in Anfleur, France,
in nineteen thirty six, at the age of fifty five.
He was at that point destitute, having failed to regain
his financial standing. And remember that this was going on
in the late twenties and early thirties, so there were
(26:06):
some big financial things happening that would have made that
very tricky. But so famed were his exploits that even
though he died a popper, his many tricks were lauded
in his obituaries as great achievements, and they were in
very big newspapers throughout both Europe and North America. That
same year, Adrian Stevens published a brief memoir about his
friendship with Cole and their tomfoolery, but it's mostly about
(26:29):
the Dreadnought hoax. Yeah, he talks a lot about their
time at Cambridge, but it's all sort of as a
groundwork for this one big event that they pulled off.
In modern mentions, Cole's exploits actually played a small part
in uh Downton Abbey. In the fictional use of his handiwork,
the Dowager Countess threatens to expose Chamberlain as an accomplice.
In a number of Cole's pranks, there have also been
(26:51):
various like in the forties there was a comic written
about the Dreadnought hoax, and it's shown up in a
number of places, but the Downton Nabby one is the
most re an't. Yeah, I feel like it's shown up
in fiction that I'm I've read that I would be
hard pressed to tell you which specifically definitely has. I
wonder if word of this ever got back to Abyssinia
(27:13):
and how they felt about that, uh, because like we said,
like this whole thing really depended on like the stereotypes
that they made up and also other people not knowing
ye well, and remember that both in Victorian and Edwardian time,
(27:38):
there was this whole fascination with other cultures, but very
little setting of information, so people would just be like, oh, really,
that's how it is fascinating, I love it, and they
would never like do any deeper research. So there's no
telling how much like how many people were completely misinformed
(27:58):
as a consequence of this that maybe or realized they
had been pranked like that or the Zanzibar episode during
the Cambridge thing like did you know people from Zanzibar
blah blah? Yeah, did you know that you can only
wear white gloves serving the right? Yeah, it's very very Um,
it's weird that that part is very problematic, but um,
(28:24):
but mostly it is. It is funny. He lived a
life where he was very dedicated to amusing himself and others,
sometimes at the expense of a third party. But at
least for the most part, except maybe the part with
the workers in the street that the targets, we're not
(28:46):
people just generally trying to do their jobs. Yeah, and
nobody you know. Fortunately there was no violence, which makes
this one a little bit easier than some of our
recent episodes. Uh So, if people were hurt, it was
at least not physically. Uh. I have listener mail that
relates directly to my life. Yeah, it's from our listener Julia,
(29:10):
and she says, Hi, guys, my sister and I both
love your show. I like to listen while I'm painting.
It makes the hours fly by, and it's a great
way to squeeze some extra learning into my day. The
thirty eighth anniversary of the May eighth, nineteen eighty Mount St.
Helen's eruption is coming up, and I'd love to hear
your take on it. I recently moved to Perth, Western Australia,
from Washington State and I am missing home. Plus my
(29:31):
birthday is the day before the anniversary, so it would
be extra special podcast for me. I grew up under
the shadow of St. Helen's in Battleground, Washington, so it's
close to my heart. Aside from the usual tropes you
hear about the eruption, it is a fascinating geological site. St.
Helen's also happens to be the most active volcano in
the Cascade Range over the last four thousand years. There
are some really cool connections with indigenous history there too.
(29:53):
One of my history professors told us that Native people's
avoided settling near St. Helen's because oral histories in folklore
warned that it had an angry spirit. On the other hand,
nearby Mount Hood, one of the least active, was more
benign and therefore a safe place to live. Pretty interesting
and another reason to take oral testimony seriously, although please
fact check me anyway. Thanks for hearing me out. I
(30:14):
know you get lots of suggestions, keep it up. Thanks
for the fun and learning. I will never ever do
Mount St. Helen's, probably, which is not Sorry, Julia, I
don't mean to shut you down. I literally watched that
thing go off from the deck of my house as
a kid, so one it would make me feel terribly
old to talk about it as a historical event. But
(30:37):
to uh, kind of what we've talked about recently, like
with our move episode, we usually try to go a
little further back than that for our history pieces. Um uh,
not always, but usually, uh, you know, maybe when I'm
in my seventies, I'll talk about St. Helen's as a
(30:57):
historical event. I don't know. It was a very fascinating time, certainly,
and my impressions of it are still quite strong, and
I remember the various weird things about living there during
that time and ash all over everything we owned all
the time for months. Well. And that's also one of
the things that we talked about when we made an
exception to our general rule in our our move bombing episode.
(31:21):
UM was how it's it's kind of weird sometimes when
we do an episode that a lot of people are
likely to have personal memories of, Like the tenor the
tenor of our listener mail is very different from the
rest of the time. Um, but that is one that like,
I remember that happening and I left. I left. I
lived on the other side of the continent, not in
(31:45):
a volcanically active place, um, but like I vividly remember
footage on the news and all that kind of stuff,
and uh and wondering, maybe worrying. Maybe I was just
curious and kind of fascinated. There was a mountain near
us that had kind of volcanic volcanic shape. It's definitely
(32:06):
not a volcano, but I would just be like, but
but mom, what if it erupted. Yeah, that's pretty natural
I think for a kid to do. Yeah. My big fear,
because I was nine when it happened, was, um, what
about the animals? Yeah, uh, which you know, it took
(32:26):
a while for the mountain to sort of regain it's
it's flora and fauna, and I'm sure it's different than
it was before then. But anyway, so that's why we
will probably never talk about it. Sorry to dash your hopes, um,
but one, I don't want to feel like I'm a
million years old. And two, it's so close that so
many people have a really strong memory of it, um
that it would just be a little weird. It's kind
(32:49):
of like telling people what their memories are, which is yeah, yeah, yeah.
So if you want to write to us, you could
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(33:11):
how stuff works dot com. Type in almost anything you're
curious about into the search bar. There you're going to
get a wealth of information. You can visit me and
Tracy at missed in history dot com, where we have
all of our episodes ever that have happened since way
before Tracy and I were working on the show as
well as show notes. Now we have I think we've
probably transitioned over enough that it's not a huge surprice
(33:32):
to anyone. Our show notes and our show page are
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Uh and yeah, you should come and visit us there
at Misston history dot com and at house to Works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Wilson. So Um. Recently,
Tracy sent me and I am and in some message
(00:23):
and said, everything I'm working on is horrible and sad.
Please tell me you're picking something lighter. That's true story,
And I had not finally decided on what I was
doing for this particular recording yet, but one of the
things on my list was a bit of relative hilarity
and fairly harmless stuff called the Dreadnought Hoax. It sounds
(00:44):
like it could be ominous, but it's not. It's funny.
Uh yeah, So we're using this as a bit of
lighter fair to balance all the dark stuff that's been
pretty common as of late. And really, the more I
read about this, and there are several articles that I
found that were written throughout the years on April Fool's
Day to kind of laude this particular man that we're
talking about, the spearheaded This is like the perfect patron
(01:05):
saint of April Fool's Day. Um, but I don't want
to wait a whole other year to do him. Because
he's funny so well, and it's so rare for our
show to actually fall directly on the day to you,
which always, I don't know, always makes me feel weird
doing a specifically April Fools episode when our episodes are
coming out on like the third and the fifth that
week or something. Yeah, because so many listeners aren't necessarily
(01:30):
listening on the day of publish. It just is a
little bit tricky. So anyway, we're getting tom Foolery in May.
We're talking about William Horace de Vere Cole and the
Dreadnought Hoax. To start this prank's story, we have to
start out with the prankster Holly just mentioned who was
at the head of it, because he's one of the
most infamous pranksters in history. Pranking people seemed like it
(01:54):
was his life's calling. Yeah, William Horace de Vert Cole,
as I said, who went by Horace, and usually he's
referred to anytime someone's writing about him, like even his
friends as just. Cole was born in Ireland on May five,
eighty one into a wealthy family. As a consequence, uh,
he is one of those children of wealth who did
not really have to take on a real profession, which
(02:17):
is probably why he had so much time for pranking.
His mother was Irish and his father was an officer
in the third Dragoon Guards, which was a British Army
cavalry regiment. He attended Eaton as a boy, and while
he was there, about of diphtheria at the age of
ten permanently damaged his hearing, which left him very frustrated
as he struggled to hear his teachers. His hearing impairment
(02:40):
also kept him from joining the army, so he attended
Cambridge instead of pursuing a military career as his father
had done. And while he had always been a practical
joker as a kid, his more low key like characteristics
really came into their own while he was at Cambridge,
and it was there that what would be considered the
predecessor prank to the Dreadnought Hoax was hatched. During his
(03:04):
time at Cambridge, Cole and his close friend Adrian Stephen
decided to masquerade as royalty. At the time, the Sultan
of Zanzibar was in England on a tour, so Cole
decided that Steven should pose as the Sultan and that
he should play the part of the Sultan's uncle and translator,
and they would see who they could full. So he
(03:26):
and his friend got themselves into costume and they telegrammed
the Cambridge Mayor's office that the Sultan was about to arrive.
So the Mayor's office quickly rallied to accommodate and properly
greet their noteworthy guest. When Cole and his friend arrived
at the Cambridge train station, the town clerk was waiting
for them. They were taken to a formal reception with
(03:48):
a mayor that was arranged in honor of the Sultan,
and then they were given a tour of the town.
They visited academic institutions and they were introduced to prominent
members of the community. Yeah, they were basically given tours
of the school they attended and had to pretend that
it was all amazing and new to them. Uh. They
almost ran into a little bit of trouble when a
(04:10):
woman who had been a missionary attempted to speak with
the Sultan in his native language, which neither Cole nor
Stephen knew, and they managed to dodge this well meaning
lady by telling her that she should only address the
Sultan directly if her intention was to become part of
his harem, and that pretty quickly ended that conversation. I
like how a lot of the success of several of
(04:33):
their pranks relies on like the lack of cultural literacy
completely around them. So, after this long day of tours
and receptions and meet and greets, Cole and Stephen were
taken back to the train station, where they vanished into
the crowd of travelers. The mayor and his colleagues were
none the wiser that they had spent their day being
(04:53):
duped by college students UH and he UH. Cole and
Adrian Stephen with him played all manner of pranks throughout
Cole's life on a variety of scales. So I put
together a list of a handful of them. Once he
threw a lavish party but only invited guests who had
(05:13):
the word bottom in their names, And that was something
that none of them realized until they were actually there
and started introducing themselves. I'm just imagining that the introductions
themselves were also comical. And apparently he if he attended
that party, I think he was incognito. He wasn't there
like as the host. He just kind of watched it
(05:34):
all uh in in anonymity. At another point, he challenged
a member of parliament to a foot race for fun,
and he even offered the man a head start, and
once that gentleman had started running, Cole started calling for
the police, who stopped that man and found Cole's watch,
which had been planted on that poor unsuspecting politician, in
(05:56):
his pocket. So that one is a little bit um mean.
I mean, it's more than a little bit mean, But
some of his do take on a slightly um cruel
tone rather than just being funny. I also feel like
today that would be a much more dangerous prank. Yes,
for sure. On another occasion, he purchased strategically selected seat
(06:20):
theater seats for an event, and he gave those tickets
to bald men, so from the balcony seats, audience members
could clearly see that their heads spelled out an expletive.
That to me is one of those things that is
so um. It takes a lot of forethought on that
(06:40):
one to like figure out which seats you would have
to purchase to spell out a dirty word. So he
gets points for ingenuity on that. He definitely was smart.
Uh And in another somewhat daring stunt. He disguised himself
as a workman and with several similarly attired friends. Some
accounts indicate eight that these were not his friends, but
(07:02):
people who UH were actually workmen that he had duped
into it, and other accounts suggest that he had basically
gone to a bar and found some inebriated men and
and said he was giving them work. The thing with
pranksters and the stories around them is that they get
told by a lot of different people and the details
get very shifty. But we do know that he UH
(07:23):
and a number of people disguised as workmen strolled onto
the street at Piccadilly Circus and set up barricades around
the heavily traffic junction. And then he and his fellow
pranksters then proceeded to dig up the street and a
policeman was rerouting cars around them, presuming that he and
the rest of them were city workers. And after digging
a trench across the busy road, he and these other
(07:45):
people retreated, at least in the versions where it's his friends.
They were with him to a nearby hotel room that
had a view of Piccadilly Circus so they could watch
the chaos below as municipal workers sorted this confusing situation out.
This is the one where I hope they were all
his friends, because I don't like this prank very much
if it's like getting people who were just trying to
(08:06):
do their jobs in trouble right right. When Cole got
married in maybe us right, he had to keep the
date of their wedding a secret. This was because he
had made someone else's wedding into a prank and he
was afraid that something was going to happen to try
to get back at him for it. What he had
(08:28):
basically done was he stationed an array of young women
outside the church and had each of them fling themselves
at the groom when he arrived, begging him not to
abandon her. Yeah, every woman was like, don't leave me eddie,
which if you were a nervous group on your wedding
(08:50):
day or a nervous bride, could be both infuriating and
very upsetting. I think I would be real mad. Yeah,
it would depend on the person. I think there's some
people that could get away with that with me, and
others it could not. The timing of his wedding was
also perfect for Coal because it was right before April
Fool's Day, which would come up in a moment why
that was interesting. The just married couple traveled to Venice
(09:13):
for their honeymoon, but even then Cole was focused on pranking.
The night before April Fool's Day, he took leave of
his new wife and in cover of darkness, he got
a hold of a massive load of horse manure from
the mainland. He spent the night covering the Piazza San
Marco with it. The city did not have any horses,
but he basically created his own manure crisis as a joke,
(09:36):
and so when dawn came, the residents of Venice were
left wondering how in the world all that horse manure
got into their city. Yeah. Yeah, it counts vary from
whether people thought like some sort of mad stampede of
horses had come through, or if they thought some weird
thing had happened where someone had accidentally tried to fertilize
(09:57):
the square. There's a lot of you know, figuring out uh.
And next up we are going to talk about Cole's
friend group after they attended Cambridge, which was an unusually
talented and prank prone group. But first we're gonna pause
and have a quick little sponsor break. In the second
(10:19):
half of the first decade of the twentieth century, Cole
and Adrian Stephen, along with Clive and Vanessa Belle, Adrian's
sister Virginia, who would later be known as Virginia Wolf,
painter Duncan Grant, and other writers and artists formed this
social group, which eventually came to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group or the Bloomsbury Set. The name Bloomsbury came
from the district that they frequented near London. Most of
(10:42):
the members of the Bloomsbury Group had been friends since
their time at Cambridge, and many of them had also
been members of a semi secret club at Cambridge called
the Apostles. Truly unique in the story of the Bloomsbury
Crew is how many members went on to become noteworthy figures.
And addition to those that we already mentioned, the m Forster,
(11:03):
John Maynard, Keynes, uh and in even more loose connections
t s Eliott, Bertrand Russell and all this Huxley were
all linked to it over the course of its two
plus decades. Yeah, it wasn't like they officially said, hey,
we're forming a group. It was just basically a social
circle that happened to include some really amazing people. It
(11:24):
was sort of a moniker applied to them, correct and
this intellectual click routinely meant to socialize and discuss philosophy
and politics and art, etcetera. But they were unique in
some ways and that they were not precious about any
of it. They really maintained an attitude of irreverence when
they were discussing all these things, and that also made
them the perfect co conspirators for someone like Cole. Cole's
(11:47):
most famous prank involved a battleship, the Pride of the
British Navy. The British Navy had launched the launched this
new battleship in nineteen o six and called it the
h M S. Dreadnought. You've probably heard of the name
Dreadnought before to refer to a class of ships. When
I told my husband what Hollywood researching, he started talking
about his many sci fi stories of his to read,
(12:11):
where like, that's a commonly adopted name in the world
of science fiction. Uh, that name for the class of
ships came from this six vessel, And that's because the
HMS Dreadnought was a technological marvel of the time. It
was massive, a behemoth, and it was no joke when
it came to naval power. The Dreadnought was five hundred
and twenty six ft which is about a hundred and
(12:32):
sixty meters long. It was crewed by eight hundred men,
and it was powered via steam turbine, which was an
advancement over the steam pistons of earlier naval vessels, and
that gave it a significant speed boost, allowing it to
travel as fast as twenty one knots, which is about
twenty four miles per hour. And while that may not
sound especially speedy for a ship of that size, at
(12:54):
that time, it was an absolute marvel. The dreadnoughts firepower
was similarly groundbreaking. It was equipped with no close range guns. Instead,
it had five twin turrets, each of which housed two
twelve inch guns that's about thirty point five centimeters. There
were also five maximum machine guns, four torpedo tubes, and
(13:15):
twenty four three inch guns seven point six centimeters. Yeah. Basically,
it was a time when the Navy was shifting from
the idea of having to get close to your enemy
to basically saying no, we'll just hit them from a distance.
It's fine, and they had incredible firepower to do it,
and the HMS Dreadnoughts so advanced naval technology that those
(13:36):
advancements set the standard for more than three decades after
it uh was launched. It quickly doomed its predecessors to obsolescence,
and it drew a lot of attention from the public
as well as the military. While it's might was absolutely
uncontested as a marvel the world over, its high cost
was a slightly more contentious issue in Great Britain. Additionally,
(13:58):
Great Britain in Germany were in the middle of an
arms race, So while the Dreadnought was a point of pride,
the military was also keen on maintaining a level of
secrecy about its exact specifications and abilities. Yeah, they would
certainly do uh sort of showcase events with it, but
it wasn't like they were publishing what it really was
(14:19):
capable of, and a lot of people really wanted to
find out. Uh. So a few years into the Dreadnoughts life,
Cole and his friends from the Bloomsbury Set decided that
they would love to see this ship up close and personal,
and to accomplish this task, Cole and his cohorts launched
a prank very similar to the one that he and
Adrian Stephen had pulled at Cambridge years before. Allegedly, a
(14:41):
friend who was an officer on another ship, the HMS Hawk,
had also egged Cole on in this plan. On February seventh,
nineteen ten, twenty eight year old Cole led his friends
as they hatched their prank, which was incredibly brazen. This time,
Cole sent a wire to the Admiralty with information that
the Emperor of Abyssinia was en route and wished to
(15:03):
see the fleet. This prank had been carefully planned to
give the Admiralty no time to verify this information. The
wire was sent at three oh seven and said that
the Abyssinians would arrive promptly at four twenty. The Emperor
and his quadra were played by Duncan Grant, Virginia Wolf,
who dressed in full beard to hide her feminine features,
(15:25):
Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley and Adrian Stephen. Uh Those that
were playing the Abyssinians darkened their skin with makeup and
assembled what they felt would pass for Abyssinian Garb. Some
of the accounts I read suggested that they actually paid
an extremely high amount of money for Um, a theatrical
costume designer, to create these outfits for them, and that
(15:46):
to sell the prank, Cole insisted that they actually use
real jewels on all of their accouterments rather than using paste.
Cole introduced himself as Shalmandalay of the Foreign Office, who
was serving as escort to the foreign visitors. Andrean Stephen
was the quote translator. He looked up a handful of
(16:08):
Swahili words and an effort to sound convincing if he
needed to, although apparently when push came to shove, he
forgot everything he had crammed and instead performed the role
by stream together odd snippets of Latin and Greek that
he had learned while studying classical literature. Stephen would later
write of his gibberish language quote, I was provided by
(16:29):
my education then with a fine repertory of nonsense, and
did not have to fall back entirely on my own invention.
I had to take care that neither the Latin nor
the Greek should be recognized. So I broke up the
words and so mispronounced them that probably they would have
escaped notice even of the best scholar. Apparently Buxton was
extremely good at parenting the nonsense that Stephen came up with.
(16:52):
He would reuse some of the made up phrases throughout
the day to help cement this masquerade. Yes, so it
did start to say like a cohesive language to people
that were maybe with them for long periods of time,
but it was absolute nothingness. A full military greeting awaited
them at Weymouth when they arrived, including Admiral Sir William
Wordsworth Fisher in full formal dress. The Emperor uh and
(17:17):
we use their quotes every time and his entourage were
indeed invited aboard the Dreadnought for a tour, and there
was a live band to greet them, and African flags
were flown along with the Union jack. The disguises tricked everyone,
even one of the Stephen's cousins. He was stationed aboard
the Dreadnought. He did not recognize either Adrian or Virginia. Yeah,
(17:39):
he did not realize that his lady cousin was one
of the men he was talking to. The group was
also invited to lunch on the ship, but they declined.
The pranksters were presumably afraid that they might give themselves
away if they stayed too long, but the excuse that
they gave at the time was one of cultural specificity.
They claimed that the Royalty of Abyssinia could only eat
(18:00):
specially prepared foods for religious reasons, and their other motivation
for getting away before attempting a meal was their fear
that their fake beards were not going to hold up
to the rigors of chewing and wiping that would be
required if they sat through a full lunch. I would
also imagine that if you're not used to having a beard,
eating without getting your food in your beard might be challenging. Yeah,
(18:23):
those beards are a trick. In the late afternoon, the
weather posed an additional danger to these pranksters. The wind
started blowing and threatened to dislodge their fake facial hair.
It also started drizzling, which was in danger of making
their makeup runs, so they made a hasty exit with
the excuse that they had to get a train, and
as they left, the navy band played the Zanzibar national anthem.
(18:46):
After apologizing to the prank delegation that the Abyssinian anthem
could not be obtained in time. If you recall, Cole's
earlier prank at Cambridge involved a claim of being from Zanzibar,
so there was an extra layer of humor to the
particular choice, although the Navy certainly could not have known it.
When the visit was concluded, the Navy arranged for a
(19:07):
carriage to carry what they believed was the Abyssinian entourage
back to London. Even when they got on the train,
Horace was still keeping up the act and demanded that
the Princess of Abyssinia only be served by attendants wearing
white gloves. So while the train staff ran to purchase
said gloves, the rest of the train was delayed. And
(19:29):
we're about to get into what happened after the dreadnought hoax,
but first we're gonna pause and have a quick word
from a sponsor. Horace. Cole later wrote about the hoax
in a letter to a friend, quote it was glorious,
shriekingly funny. I nearly howled when introducing the four princes
(19:50):
to the Admiral and then to the Captain, for I
made up their names in the train, but I forgot
which was which, and I introduced them under various names,
but it did not matter. I was so mused at
just being myself in a tall hat. I had no
disguise whatever and talked in an ordinary friendly way to everyone.
The others talked nonsense. We had all learned some Swahili.
I said they were jolly savages, but that I didn't
(20:12):
understand much of what they said. It began to ring
slightly on the ship, and we only just got the
princes undercover in time. Another moment and their complexions would
have been running. Are you amused? I am? Yesterday was
a day worth the living. Exactly how this prank came
to light is a little bit hazy. There are two
primary accounts, and one an officer from the Dreadnought asked
(20:35):
if he could wear a metal that had been presented
to him by the quote Emperor with his uniform, which
unraveled the truth. But there's a high probability that Cole
himself actually spread the word of the prank by contacting
the papers, complete with a provided photograph of the pranksters
and costume. They had, in fact stopped into the Lafayette
(20:57):
Studios to have their portrait made in full regale Leah
before they got on the train. To Weymouth. Adrian Steven's
own account claims that he had no idea who leaked
the story, as the entire group had agreed that they
were not going to go public, but that once he
saw the photo of the papers, he just presumed it
was coal. The Daily Mirror ran the story complete with
(21:19):
the photo, recounting how the group of fake Abyssinians had
used the words bunga bunga as part of their faux
language while they utterly duped the HMS dread knots High command.
Bunga bunga would go on to have a small life
of its own. It appeared in songs and became sort
of a shorthand for teasing members of the Navy, as
this whole incident became a massive embarrassment for them. Yeah,
(21:46):
I'm trying to imagine like a similar modern day thing
where like one of our most important military assets is
kind of made into a laughing stock. You can imagine
the Navy would not be thrilled. Uh. And not long
after this prank, the Emperor of Abyssinia did travel to London.
This was within a few weeks of when they had
done this, and he did ask to see the Navy's fleet,
(22:07):
and he was, according to the account of Virginia Woolf,
turned down. Because the Navy's policies on guest tours had
been significantly tightened thanks to Cole and his coterie, there
was very little in the way of repercussions for the
Bloomsberry set, even though this. Even after this whole thing
became public knowledge, the Navy allegedly wanted some sort of
(22:27):
action taken against the group, but none of them were
ever formally charged with any crime. There are reports that
either Cole, who openly admitted that the plan was his,
or his collaborator Duncan Grant, was captured by several sailors
from the British Navy and caned as a form of
vigilante justice. But while there is some consistency in the
(22:47):
caning portion, we're gonna talk about that in just a moment.
Just who received it varies from account to account, but
Stephen's writing states pretty plainly that while members of the
Navy did show up at Cole's house to get some
sort of Jeff stice, Cole made a deal with them
they could cane him if he could then came them back.
So six ceremonial taps on the hind quarters were administered
(23:10):
by each side, and that was the end of it. Yeah,
it seems like in the end they all just kind
of had a bit of a laugh and could say, yes,
we punished him without really punishing him. Stephen also wrote
that he and Cole ran into one of the officers
from the battleship in the street after the hoax quote
one day, walking with Cole near the top of Sloane Street,
I saw the Dreadnought captain and his wife. He saw
(23:33):
us too, and recognized us, and pretended at first to
be horrified and then to call a policeman. After a
second or two, though, he began to laugh and in
fact took the whole affair in the best of good humors,
Horace de Ver. Cole, despite having achieved what could easily
be the most famous prank of his career in Tomfoolery,
continued this hobby for the rest of his life, including
(23:55):
some of those pranks we mentioned earlier in the episode.
One of his later in life bits of jokery stemmed
from the fact that he was often mistaken, particularly due
to his white mustache. For Ramsay McDonald, the first Labor
Party Prime Minister, and when Cole would realize that someone
thought he was McDonald, he would launch into public speeches
(24:16):
vehemently opposing the position of the Labor Party, simply to
enjoy the confusion it caused for everyone. Uh Not, everything
was jolly throughout his life, though undoubtedly the wealth and
station he was born to had protected him from serious
consequences for all of his pranking, even though a lot
of his pranks were kind of jerk moves that came
(24:37):
at the expense of other people, and his family was
not merely rich but also well connected. His sister Mary
of the politician Neville Chamberlain, he would eventually become Prime
Minister of Great Britain. Yeah, there's definitely like a degree
of privilege that protected him from ever having anybody really
punish him eight or ten to reason Pavilion, it's a
(25:02):
wide degree for sure. Yeah. He um. You know, if
somebody of a more middle class or lower class background
tried these same stones, I suspect it would not be
greeted with the same guffaws and good humor. But unfortunately
Cole's fortune and disdain for propriety and his love of
jokes could not protect him from the pitfalls of life.
(25:24):
He actually lost that fortune in a real estate scheme,
and his wife, Mavis, whose own inheritance had also been
lost due to her husband's very poor financial decisions, left
him not long after. Cole did eventually remarry, but that
marriage was not ideal. His second wife had a child
with another man while she was still married to Cole.
(25:45):
Eventually he had to move to France, where he could
manage with far less money than his life in London
had required. Horace de Vere Cole died in Anfleur, France,
in nineteen thirty six, at the age of fifty five.
He was at that point destitute, having failed to regain
his financial standing. And remember that this was going on
in the late twenties and early thirties, so there were
(26:06):
some big financial things happening that would have made that
very tricky. But so famed were his exploits that even
though he died a popper, his many tricks were lauded
in his obituaries as great achievements, and they were in
very big newspapers throughout both Europe and North America. That
same year, Adrian Stevens published a brief memoir about his
friendship with Cole and their tomfoolery, but it's mostly about
(26:29):
the Dreadnought hoax. Yeah, he talks a lot about their
time at Cambridge, but it's all sort of as a
groundwork for this one big event that they pulled off.
In modern mentions, Cole's exploits actually played a small part
in uh Downton Abbey. In the fictional use of his handiwork,
the Dowager Countess threatens to expose Chamberlain as an accomplice.
In a number of Cole's pranks, there have also been
(26:51):
various like in the forties there was a comic written
about the Dreadnought hoax, and it's shown up in a
number of places, but the Downton Nabby one is the
most re an't. Yeah, I feel like it's shown up
in fiction that I'm I've read that I would be
hard pressed to tell you which specifically definitely has. I
wonder if word of this ever got back to Abyssinia
(27:13):
and how they felt about that, uh, because like we said,
like this whole thing really depended on like the stereotypes
that they made up and also other people not knowing
ye well, and remember that both in Victorian and Edwardian time,
(27:38):
there was this whole fascination with other cultures, but very
little setting of information, so people would just be like, oh, really,
that's how it is fascinating, I love it, and they
would never like do any deeper research. So there's no
telling how much like how many people were completely misinformed
(27:58):
as a consequence of this that maybe or realized they
had been pranked like that or the Zanzibar episode during
the Cambridge thing like did you know people from Zanzibar
blah blah? Yeah, did you know that you can only
wear white gloves serving the right? Yeah, it's very very Um,
it's weird that that part is very problematic, but um,
(28:24):
but mostly it is. It is funny. He lived a
life where he was very dedicated to amusing himself and others,
sometimes at the expense of a third party. But at
least for the most part, except maybe the part with
the workers in the street that the targets, we're not
(28:46):
people just generally trying to do their jobs. Yeah, and
nobody you know. Fortunately there was no violence, which makes
this one a little bit easier than some of our
recent episodes. Uh So, if people were hurt, it was
at least not physically. Uh. I have listener mail that
relates directly to my life. Yeah, it's from our listener Julia,
(29:10):
and she says, Hi, guys, my sister and I both
love your show. I like to listen while I'm painting.
It makes the hours fly by, and it's a great
way to squeeze some extra learning into my day. The
thirty eighth anniversary of the May eighth, nineteen eighty Mount St.
Helen's eruption is coming up, and I'd love to hear
your take on it. I recently moved to Perth, Western Australia,
from Washington State and I am missing home. Plus my
(29:31):
birthday is the day before the anniversary, so it would
be extra special podcast for me. I grew up under
the shadow of St. Helen's in Battleground, Washington, so it's
close to my heart. Aside from the usual tropes you
hear about the eruption, it is a fascinating geological site. St.
Helen's also happens to be the most active volcano in
the Cascade Range over the last four thousand years. There
are some really cool connections with indigenous history there too.
(29:53):
One of my history professors told us that Native people's
avoided settling near St. Helen's because oral histories in folklore
warned that it had an angry spirit. On the other hand,
nearby Mount Hood, one of the least active, was more
benign and therefore a safe place to live. Pretty interesting
and another reason to take oral testimony seriously, although please
fact check me anyway. Thanks for hearing me out. I
(30:14):
know you get lots of suggestions, keep it up. Thanks
for the fun and learning. I will never ever do
Mount St. Helen's, probably, which is not Sorry, Julia, I
don't mean to shut you down. I literally watched that
thing go off from the deck of my house as
a kid, so one it would make me feel terribly
old to talk about it as a historical event. But
(30:37):
to uh, kind of what we've talked about recently, like
with our move episode, we usually try to go a
little further back than that for our history pieces. Um uh,
not always, but usually, uh, you know, maybe when I'm
in my seventies, I'll talk about St. Helen's as a
(30:57):
historical event. I don't know. It was a very fascinating time, certainly,
and my impressions of it are still quite strong, and
I remember the various weird things about living there during
that time and ash all over everything we owned all
the time for months. Well. And that's also one of
the things that we talked about when we made an
exception to our general rule in our our move bombing episode.
(31:21):
UM was how it's it's kind of weird sometimes when
we do an episode that a lot of people are
likely to have personal memories of, Like the tenor the
tenor of our listener mail is very different from the
rest of the time. Um, but that is one that like,
I remember that happening and I left. I left. I
lived on the other side of the continent, not in
(31:45):
a volcanically active place, um, but like I vividly remember
footage on the news and all that kind of stuff,
and uh and wondering, maybe worrying. Maybe I was just
curious and kind of fascinated. There was a mountain near
us that had kind of volcanic volcanic shape. It's definitely
(32:06):
not a volcano, but I would just be like, but
but mom, what if it erupted. Yeah, that's pretty natural
I think for a kid to do. Yeah. My big fear,
because I was nine when it happened, was, um, what
about the animals? Yeah, uh, which you know, it took
(32:26):
a while for the mountain to sort of regain it's
it's flora and fauna, and I'm sure it's different than
it was before then. But anyway, so that's why we
will probably never talk about it. Sorry to dash your hopes, um,
but one, I don't want to feel like I'm a
million years old. And two, it's so close that so
many people have a really strong memory of it, um
that it would just be a little weird. It's kind
(32:49):
of like telling people what their memories are, which is yeah, yeah, yeah.
So if you want to write to us, you could
do so at History podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We are also available across the spectrum of social media
as at missed in History that includes Pinterest and Facebook
and Instagram and tumblr. Uh yeah, come and see us.
And you can also visit our parents site, which is
(33:11):
how stuff works dot com. Type in almost anything you're
curious about into the search bar. There you're going to
get a wealth of information. You can visit me and
Tracy at missed in history dot com, where we have
all of our episodes ever that have happened since way
before Tracy and I were working on the show as
well as show notes. Now we have I think we've
probably transitioned over enough that it's not a huge surprice
(33:32):
to anyone. Our show notes and our show page are
consolidated into one for one handy place to access everything.
Uh and yeah, you should come and visit us there
at Misston history dot com and at house to Works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff Works dot com.
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Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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