Anything for a laugh

A hundred years ago, when Britannia still ruled the waves, the Royal Navy fell victim to a humiliating hoax, reports of which kept the public amused for a few wintry days in February 1910. Disguised as ‘members of the Abyssinian Royal family’, with woolly wigs, fancy-dress robes and burnt-cork complexions, a gaggle of young people managed to trick naval leaders into receiving them on an official visit aboard the state-of-the-art battleship Dreadnought, Britain’s proudest national emblem. The ridiculous party, which included Virginia Stephen (the future novelist Virginia Woolf), were conducted solemnly round the wonders of the newest naval technology, jabbering in a nonsense language and escaping just as the spirit-gum holding on their beards began to melt.

The prank’s mastermind was Horace de Vere Cole, the subject of this biography, who led the troupe, posing as a Foreign Office official. Once they were safely off the boat, the story quickly reached the press. The Navy was too embarrassed to retaliate, but William Fisher, the young Flag-Commander of the Dreadnought, who had been among those receiving the jokers — and was actually Virginia Stephen’s first cousin — felt the hurt acutely enough to attempt to horsewhip the (male) perpetrators. His efforts ended in absurdity, with Fisher and Cole laying about each other with canes.

Cole was an experienced — and lifelong — hoaxer. Five years earlier, he had fooled the Mayor of Cambridge in a similar escapade — a state visit to the city by the ‘Sultan of Zanzibar’. The Dreadnought affair was later commemorated in a book by Virginia Stephen’s brother, Adrian, and has earned Cole a benign footnote in Bloomsbury histories as a kindly, if sometimes tedious, deflater of public pomposity. Perhaps it would have been best to leave his memory at that, for although this new biography by Martyn Downer presents a friendly and humorous portrait of an extraordinary personality, the tale it unravels is distressing, and Cole emerges as a bullying egoist, pathetically unable to cope with reality.