HORACE DE VERE COLE

See Also: HOAXES; THE HOUSE OF COMMONS Parliamentary Privilege; THE NAVY; WEST END THEATRES Seating Arrangements

Horace de Vere Cole s mother was a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. His father s family had made a fortune through having dominated the market for quinine. As a child he suffered from diphtheria. This left him almost deaf. He developed an attention-seeking personality. Having left Eton College, he served in the Boer War. During it he was badly wounded by a dum-dum bullet. This experience seems to have freed him from the fear of death. He then studied at the University of Cambridge. There, he and Adrian Stephen became great friends.¹

In 1905 the pair and a group of others pretended to be a delegation from Zanzibar that was visiting the town and university. They were taken at face value and were treated as honoured guests. The costumes that they used were furnished by William Clarkson, a West End-based theatrical costumier, whose clothes and make-up were to be central to the execution of many of the prankster s future hoaxes.

The Stephens were cousins of the Fishers. The former were literary and Bohemian, whereas the latter were bourgeois and conformist. William Fisher was a senior officer on H.M.S. Dreadnought, the Royal Navy s state-of-the-art battleship. In 1910 Adrian Stephen and de Vere Cole decided to perform a hoax that would be a variant of the Zanzibar one. It involved having an Abyssinian delegation visit the craft. Preparations for the jape were carried out at the Stephens townhouse in Fitzroy Square; once Adrian s sister Virginia - later Virginia Woolf - learnt of what was being planned she insisted that she should be a member of the party.² The telegram that informed the vessel s captain of the group s imminent arrival was sent a couple of hours prior to the party s appearance before the craft. Again, the hoaxers were taken at face value. They were given an inspection tour of the warship.

The deception had a political context. The previous year the Liberal government had introduced a Budget that had sought to furnish the financial means both to build four dreadnoughts and to establish a social welfare system. The programme had been rejected by the House of Lords, which was dominated numerically by supporters of the Conservative Party. This rebuff had prompted David Lloyd George the Chancellor the Exchequer to comment that the Navy could have one of the battleships for what it cost to keep two dukes in the state to which they were accustomed. The ministry had responded to the Upper House s action by calling a general election. The prank was carried out during the final stages of the contest.

William Fisher decided to seek revenge upon the male members of the hoax by caning them. The painter Duncan Grant had been one of the participants. A group of young naval officers abducted him from his family home while he was attired in a pair of pyjamas and a dressing gown. They seized him with the intention of taking him to a patch of waste ground in Hendon and there giving him a thrashing. During the journey the artist was so shocked by what was happening to him that Fisher felt moved to inquire as to whether he was unwell. Upon their arrival at the site, the man s disinclination to display any bravado made the sailors unwilling to carry out the beating. Therefore, to fulfil their honour, they each gently tapped him once with their sticks. They then offered him a lift back to his home. He declined this, opting to use the Tube instead.

Horace de Vere Cole became a regular at the Caf Royal. Upon one occasion there, the hoaxer triggered an hour-long fracas by shooting a stream of liquid from a soda fountain at a party of bookmakers. The incident resulted in a group of art students being banned from the establishment. They tended not to pay their bills, whereas Cole did.

The hoaxer once made a large bet that he could spend an hour lying on his back in one of London s major thoroughfares without being required to move on. He told the person with whom he made the wager where to stand in order to witness the feat. At the appointed time de Vere Cole drove up in a motor car. He stopped it, got out, and went to its front where he opened up its bonnet. He looked at the vehicle s engine with an expression of frustration. He then eased himself underneath the car as though he were going to inspect it from below. Once ensconced there he proceeded to stay put for the full sixty minutes that were required for him to win the bet.

Upon another occasion de Vere Cole and a group of his friends hired some workmen s overalls and some construction tools. They proceeded to place the latter opposite The Cavalry Club on Piccadilly. They then went to a local workmen s caff. There, they had a leisurely late breakfast after which they returned to their equipment. They proceeded to dig up one of the road s lanes and then a second one. As a result, its traffic became increasingly congested. The group then went for lunch - and did not return. Cole adjourned to a room that overlooked the thoroughfare. There, he drank champagne and admired the chaos that he and his associates had engineered.

In the years that followed the First World War, de Vere Cole came to know socially a range of contemporary artists. As a result, some of his later hoaxes became flavoured by elements of Absurdism and Futurism. For one of these he stood in a street with some surveying equipment. In one of his hands he held a piece of tape. He accosted a passer-by, explained that he was surveying the district, and stated that he would be grateful if the man could help him by holding the measure. The fellow agreed to do so. Cole then disappeared around the corner, trailing the tape behind him. He waylaid another person, repeated his story, and proffered the other end of the line. This was accepted. The prankster then made an excuse and walked away. Having changed his appearance, he went to a pub that was sited diagonally opposite the corner on the two sides of which the two men were patiently standing - each oblivious to the other - and watched them.

Throughout his adult life de Vere Cole had spent money freely, thereby diminishing his capital. His investments came to be nearly all in Canadian properties. During the Great Depression of the early 1930s there were few people who were willing to rent them. Therefore, through the need to pay local taxes and carry out maintenance, his assets became liabilities. His wealth imploded. He moved to France. There, he subsisted upon hand-outs from his family. He died living in what was effectively a hovel.

De Vere Cole s sister had married the Conservative politician Neville Chamberlain. As a result, the hoaxer s only child was raised in Downing Street, first at No. 11 and then at No. 10.

Location: The Cavalry & Guards Club, 127 Piccadilly, W1J 7PX. (Opposite) (orange, grey)

34 Cheyne Walk, SW3 5HJ. De Vere Cole s home. (purple, grey)

29 Fitzroy Square, W1T 6LQ. The Stephens home. (orange, pink)

41-43 Wardour Street, W1D 6PY. Willy Clarkson s premises. (purple, pink)

¹. De Vere Cole was to be on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group but was never an integral member of it.

². Woolf s literary achievements and suicide have tended to obscure the fact that at times she had a strong, mischievous sense of humour.

David Backhouse 2024