HOAXES

See Also: HORACE DE VERE COLE; ECCENTRICITY; MENU

The Formosan

The Formosan was questioned by Edmund Halley (1656-1741) about why he had such white skin. George Psalmanazar (c.1679-1763) response was that Formosans lived underground. Halley asked a questioned sunlight passing down a chimney. The Formosan replied that their chimneys were corkscrew-shaped.

Theodore Hook

In 1810 the writer Theodore Hook bet his friend the architect Samuel Beazley that he could make any house the most talked about talked about address in London. He did this by sending out thousands of letters to a wide variety of trades people. These asked them to attend the home of Mrs Tottenham so that she could avail herself of their services. The steady stream of visitors attracted onlookers, who swelled to such numbers that traffic found it difficult to pass through the neighbourhood.¹

Location: 54 Berners Street, W1T 3NG. Mrs Tottenham s home. (red, yellow)

¹. Samuel Taylor Coleridge held Hook in high regard. Thackeray used him as the model for Mr Wagg in the novel Vanity Fair (1848).

The Natural History Museum

Location: Cromwell Road, SW7 5BD (blue, red)

The Pickled Dragon

In 2004 a Mr David Hart unearthed a jar in his Oxfordshire garage. This had belonged to his grandfather Frederick Hart, who had been a porter at the Natural History Museum. The vessel contained, preserved in formaldehyde, the corpse of a 30cm-long dragon . It was believed that this had been sent to the museum in the 1870s by a group of German scientists as a hoax. At the time, there had been an intense rivalry between the two countries scientific communities.

Piltdown Man

Charles Dawson was a country solicitor and amateur archaeologist. In 1912 he unearthed a skull in a gravel pit at Piltdown in Sussex. This seemed to furnish evidence of there having been a missing link between apes and men. In the 1950s it was established that the cranium had come from a modern man and the jaw from an orang-utan. The effect of the hoax was to muddy the waters of evolutionary anthropology.

Martin Hinton, a Curator of Zoology at the Natural History Museum, is the generally favoured candidate for the creation of the Piltdown Man. He was known both to have carried out a number of hoaxes and to have developed a grudge against Arthur Smith Woodward, the Museum s Keeper of Palaeontology.

Another candidate for the hoaxer is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He owned a country house was sited near to Piltdown.

The Spaghetti Harvest Failure

On 1 April 1957 the B.B.C. Television current affairs programme Panorama broadcast a spoof documentary on the supposed failure of the spaghetti harvest due to a late frost. The report s authenticity was lent considerable weight by the fact that it was narrated by Richard Dimbleby, the foremost broadcast journalist of the era, he had been the person who, four years earlier, had provided the commentary for Queen Elizabeth II s coronation.

It is still possible to find Britons who are not altogether sure that pasta does not grow on trees, while others believe that it is best when it comes out of a tin.

See Also: ITALIAN FOOD Olive Oil

David Backhouse 2024