page_title: Horace de Vere Cole
section_title: Pranks
hierarchical_section_title: Horace de Vere Cole / Pranks
caption_attribution_description: Photograph taken at the Lafayette studio. le, Anthony Buxton (seated), Adrian Stephen, Guy Ridley [1].
context_page_description: William Horace de Vere Cole was an eccentric prankster born in Ballincollig, County Cork, Ireland.
context_section_description: As an undergraduate at Cambridge, Cole posed as the uncle of the Sultan of Zanzibar—who was visiting London at the time—to make a ceremonial visit to his own college, accompanied by his friend Adrian Stephen (the brother of Virginia Woolf).
  Cole's best-known trick was the Dreadnought hoax on 7 February 1910, when he fooled the captain of the Royal Navy warship HMS Dreadnought into taking him and a group of his friends, including Virginia Woolf, for an official Abyssinian delegation.
  On occasion, Cole would wander the streets with a cow's udder poking through the fly of his trousers; once he judged he had caused optimum outrage he would cut off the offending protrusion with a pair of scissors.
  On honeymoon with his first wife in Italy, on April Fools' Day 1919, Cole dropped horse manure onto Venice's Piazza San Marco—a city with no horses that could be reached only by boat.
  Spending most of his later life in London, Cole executed a series of bold jokes and escapades principally aimed at deflating pompous figures of authority. His targets included members of parliament, city businessmen, and naval officers. On one occasion he directed a group of like-minded friends dressed as workmen as they dug a trench across Piccadilly. On another, he challenged an old schoolfriend from Eton, the newly elected Conservative Member of Parliament Oliver Locker-Lampson, to race him on a London street to the nearest corner, giving him a 10-yard head start. Cole had already slipped his gold watch into his friend’s pocket, and with Locker-Lampson running ahead at full speed Cole waited till they were passing a policeman and began to yell "Stop thief!" Locker-Lampson was promptly arrested and the watch found. After savouring the moment, Cole explained that it was all a joke, and both men were told to go on their way. Unfortunately, Cole then began waving his stick in a dangerous manner, as though conducting an imaginary band, and both men were arrested and taken into custody. No charge was brought against Locker-Lampson, but Cole was found guilty of a breach of the peace and fined £5.
  According to legend, Cole once hosted a party at which the guests discovered that they all had the word "bottom" in their surnames.  According to another story he bought tickets for particular seats at a theatrical performance he considered pretentious and distributed them to eight bald men whose heads, painted with a single letter, spelled out the word "B-O-L-L-O-C-K-S" (another source claims it was four men's heads making the word F-U-C-K), which was legible from the circle and boxes above.
  With his mane of hair and bristling moustache, in the 1920s Cole was sometimes mistaken for the Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, causing dismay when Cole launched into a fierce public attack on Labour. His sister Annie married the future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who was asked by Annie what he thought of Cole, and later commented "I was obliged to say what I did think, but fortunately it appeared that was her opinion too and she was not at all inclined to be proud of her brother's exploit... I think he must be a little mad."
  Cole has also been suspected of the Piltdown Man hoax.
caption: The Dreadnought Hoaxers in Abyssinian regalia; from left, Virginia Stephen (later Virginia Woolf, seated), Duncan Grant, Horace, Adrian Stephen, Anthony Buxton (seated), Guy Ridley.
exif: {}