APRIL FOOLS' DAY leaves a lot to be desired. No one gets a day off work when it falls on a weekday. And work is harder when you find yourself doing whatever you do with your shoelaces tied together.
But the real problem, as the other spring holidays make clear by contrast, is that there's no personality attached to April Fools' Day. Just look at the celebrations you can build around an Irish missionary or a somnolent rodent, to say nothing of a messiah or a plague-wielding patriarch. What April 1 needs is a patron saint of the practical joke.
Fortunately, there's a clear choice for the job. It's hard to say whether the Anglo-Irish prankster Horace de Vere Cole's birth in May 1881 really occurred at Blarney, in County Cork, as he would later maintain. But the claim was (as James Frey said to Oprah Winfrey) "essentially true."
Cole's family must have seen his foolish streak early on, and it seems they tried to squash it with education, first at Eton and later at Cambridge. But Cole's inner jester only flourished. At Cambridge, for example, when Cole and his friend Adrian Stephen learned that the Sultan of Zanzibar was touring England, they had themselves made up in "oriental" garb and sent a telegram to the mayor, announcing the sultan's imminent arrival.
The Cambridge town clerk met their train at the station and escorted the royal party, with full pomp, to the Guildhall, where the mayor gave them a formal reception. Cole and Stephen spent the day touring the town and its colleges, dodging a retired missionary who tried to speak with the sultan in his native language. Cole, posing as the sovereign's bilingual uncle, finally informed the woman that she was not permitted to address the sultan unless she wanted to join his harem.
When the Cambridge entourage finally ushered the two back to the station, there was nothing left to do but hike up the skirts of their costumes and dash away through the crowd.
The Sultan of Zanzibar episode was but a dry run for a much bigger escapade a few years later, when Britain and Germany were engaged in an arms race that would soon flare into war. In 1906, the British Navy launched the Dreadnought, a fast, heavily armed behemoth that changed naval warfare. Its awesome power was the focus of attention abroad, just as its shocking expense was a point of debate at home. In 1910, Cole decided it was worth a look.
He recruited a crew of pranksters from his Bloomsbury set, including Stephen, the painter Duncan Grant, and Stephen's sister Virginia, later Virginia Woolf. Posing as a member of the Foreign Office, Cole then wired the Admiralty to announce that the Emperor of Abyssinia would soon arrive to inspect the Home Fleet.
Virginia, Grant and a few others were made up in beards and blackface, and the group boarded the train for Weymouth, where the fleet was docked. On the way down, Stephen, who would play the role of translator, worked up a few words of Swahili from a missionary grammar, on the assumption that one African language would sound like another to the officers of the British Navy.
Once again Cole's party was met by an official entourage, this time in full military regalia. The emperor was invited on board the Dreadnought and shown the ship's innovations. Stephen, who had already forgotten his Swahili, carried off the translator's duties by garbling the pronunciation of Greek and Latin passages from Homer and Virgil.
After inspecting the honor guard and watching the guns swivel for a while, the party declined lunch on the ground that, as Stephen later put it, "the religious beliefs of Abyssinia made it impossible for the royal family to touch food unless it was prepared in quite special ways." As the royal party disembarked, the Navy bandmaster, explaining that the music for the Abyssinian national anthem was unavailable, launched into the Zanzibar anthem, a more appropriate choice than he knew.
The prank started to unravel some weeks later. Some reports maintain that the Navy investigated after a young officer petitioned for permission to wear on his uniform a medal Cole had presented him. It's more likely that Cole himself sent the story to The Daily Mirror, along with a photo of the emperor and his party. It's unclear where the Mirror reporter got the idea that the fake Abyssinians had used the phrase "Bunga, bunga," but after the account appeared, the words soon turned up in music hall songs, and boys used them to taunt naval officers on the streets. Although the Navy never took official action against the hoaxers, a group of officers showed up at Cole's house and gave him a ceremonial whipping.
According to Virginia Woolf, when the real Emperor of Abyssinia arrived in London weeks later, wherever he went, "the street boys ran after him calling out 'Bunga, bunga.' " And when the emperor asked if he could look at the British fleet, the first lord of the Admiralty "replied that he regretted to inform his majesty that it was quite impossible."
Although Cole would never again match the hoaxing perfection of the Dreadnought affair, he continued to pursue his art on a smaller scale. In London, he arranged a party at which the guests, on introducing themselves, realized with embarrassment that they had all been invited because their surnames included some form of the word "bottom." He bought tickets for particular seats at a theatrical performance and distributed them to bald men whose heads spelled out an expletive that was legible from the balcony above.
Wearing workman's clothing he set up barriers on Piccadilly Circus and tore up the road while hoodwinked policemen rerouted traffic. On his honeymoon in Venice, Cole left his new wife in the middle of the night to collect horse manure on the mainland, which he then spread around the Piazza San Marco. The next morning, April 1, the residents, who knew there were no horses in the city, were confused to find this evidence of a nighttime visit.
In later life, Cole fell on hard times. His first wife left him when he lost his money in a real estate scheme. Her successor had a child with one of Cole's friends, the painter Augustus John, while she was still married to Cole. In the end even the strategies of subterfuge that had seen Cole though a lifetime of practical joking began to betray him. The ordinarily restrained Dictionary of National Biography reports that Cole's "advanced deafness prevented him from realizing that his carefully timed coughing was inadequate to cover his explosive breaking of wind."
Cole died in 1936 in France, where his high jinks went unappreciated. Over the years admirers have occasionally cropped up to trumpet his accomplishments or to give him credit for unsolved mysteries like the Piltdown Man hoax. But his achievements are largely forgotten. April Fools' Day is the perfect occasion for restoring him to his rightful post as jester in chief. As you wind your way through the ranks of today's lesser pranksters, remember Horace de Vere Cole. If you're planning practical jokes of your own, you'd do well to keep his high standard in mind.
Wes Davis, an assistant professor of English at Yale, is writing a book about modern literary hoaxes.
(This article was published in the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on April 1, 2006)
first published:September 28, 2006, 22:02 ISTlast updated:September 28, 2006, 22:02 IST
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This is not an original article. It was written by WES DAVIS for NY Times.
APRIL FOOLS' DAY leaves a lot to be desired. No one gets a day off work when it falls on a weekday. And work is harder when you find yourself doing whatever you do with your shoelaces tied together.
But the real problem, as the other spring holidays make clear by contrast, is that there's no personality attached to April Fools' Day. Just look at the celebrations you can build around an Irish missionary or a somnolent rodent, to say nothing of a messiah or a plague-wielding patriarch. What April 1 needs is a patron saint of the practical joke.
Fortunately, there's a clear choice for the job. It's hard to say whether the Anglo-Irish prankster Horace de Vere Cole's birth in May 1881 really occurred at Blarney, in County Cork, as he would later maintain. But the claim was (as James Frey said to Oprah Winfrey) "essentially true."
Cole's family must have seen his foolish streak early on, and it seems they tried to squash it with education, first at Eton and later at Cambridge. But Cole's inner jester only flourished. At Cambridge, for example, when Cole and his friend Adrian Stephen learned that the Sultan of Zanzibar was touring England, they had themselves made up in "oriental" garb and sent a telegram to the mayor, announcing the sultan's imminent arrival.
The Cambridge town clerk met their train at the station and escorted the royal party, with full pomp, to the Guildhall, where the mayor gave them a formal reception. Cole and Stephen spent the day touring the town and its colleges, dodging a retired missionary who tried to speak with the sultan in his native language. Cole, posing as the sovereign's bilingual uncle, finally informed the woman that she was not permitted to address the sultan unless she wanted to join his harem.
When the Cambridge entourage finally ushered the two back to the station, there was nothing left to do but hike up the skirts of their costumes and dash away through the crowd.
The Sultan of Zanzibar episode was but a dry run for a much bigger escapade a few years later, when Britain and Germany were engaged in an arms race that would soon flare into war. In 1906, the British Navy launched the Dreadnought, a fast, heavily armed behemoth that changed naval warfare. Its awesome power was the focus of attention abroad, just as its shocking expense was a point of debate at home. In 1910, Cole decided it was worth a look.
He recruited a crew of pranksters from his Bloomsbury set, including Stephen, the painter Duncan Grant, and Stephen's sister Virginia, later Virginia Woolf. Posing as a member of the Foreign Office, Cole then wired the Admiralty to announce that the Emperor of Abyssinia would soon arrive to inspect the Home Fleet.
Virginia, Grant and a few others were made up in beards and blackface, and the group boarded the train for Weymouth, where the fleet was docked. On the way down, Stephen, who would play the role of translator, worked up a few words of Swahili from a missionary grammar, on the assumption that one African language would sound like another to the officers of the British Navy.
Once again Cole's party was met by an official entourage, this time in full military regalia. The emperor was invited on board the Dreadnought and shown the ship's innovations. Stephen, who had already forgotten his Swahili, carried off the translator's duties by garbling the pronunciation of Greek and Latin passages from Homer and Virgil.
After inspecting the honor guard and watching the guns swivel for a while, the party declined lunch on the ground that, as Stephen later put it, "the religious beliefs of Abyssinia made it impossible for the royal family to touch food unless it was prepared in quite special ways." As the royal party disembarked, the Navy bandmaster, explaining that the music for the Abyssinian national anthem was unavailable, launched into the Zanzibar anthem, a more appropriate choice than he knew.
The prank started to unravel some weeks later. Some reports maintain that the Navy investigated after a young officer petitioned for permission to wear on his uniform a medal Cole had presented him. It's more likely that Cole himself sent the story to The Daily Mirror, along with a photo of the emperor and his party. It's unclear where the Mirror reporter got the idea that the fake Abyssinians had used the phrase "Bunga, bunga," but after the account appeared, the words soon turned up in music hall songs, and boys used them to taunt naval officers on the streets. Although the Navy never took official action against the hoaxers, a group of officers showed up at Cole's house and gave him a ceremonial whipping.
According to Virginia Woolf, when the real Emperor of Abyssinia arrived in London weeks later, wherever he went, "the street boys ran after him calling out 'Bunga, bunga.' " And when the emperor asked if he could look at the British fleet, the first lord of the Admiralty "replied that he regretted to inform his majesty that it was quite impossible."
Although Cole would never again match the hoaxing perfection of the Dreadnought affair, he continued to pursue his art on a smaller scale. In London, he arranged a party at which the guests, on introducing themselves, realized with embarrassment that they had all been invited because their surnames included some form of the word "bottom." He bought tickets for particular seats at a theatrical performance and distributed them to bald men whose heads spelled out an expletive that was legible from the balcony above.
Wearing workman's clothing he set up barriers on Piccadilly Circus and tore up the road while hoodwinked policemen rerouted traffic. On his honeymoon in Venice, Cole left his new wife in the middle of the night to collect horse manure on the mainland, which he then spread around the Piazza San Marco. The next morning, April 1, the residents, who knew there were no horses in the city, were confused to find this evidence of a nighttime visit.
In later life, Cole fell on hard times. His first wife left him when he lost his money in a real estate scheme. Her successor had a child with one of Cole's friends, the painter Augustus John, while she was still married to Cole. In the end even the strategies of subterfuge that had seen Cole though a lifetime of practical joking began to betray him. The ordinarily restrained Dictionary of National Biography reports that Cole's "advanced deafness prevented him from realizing that his carefully timed coughing was inadequate to cover his explosive breaking of wind."
Cole died in 1936 in France, where his high jinks went unappreciated. Over the years admirers have occasionally cropped up to trumpet his accomplishments or to give him credit for unsolved mysteries like the Piltdown Man hoax. But his achievements are largely forgotten. April Fools' Day is the perfect occasion for restoring him to his rightful post as jester in chief. As you wind your way through the ranks of today's lesser pranksters, remember Horace de Vere Cole. If you're planning practical jokes of your own, you'd do well to keep his high standard in mind.
Wes Davis, an assistant professor of English at Yale, is writing a book about modern literary hoaxes.
(This article was published in the Op-Ed page of the New York Times on April 1, 2006)
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