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MARTYN DOWNER The Sultan of Zanzibar:
The Bizarre World and Spectacular Hoaxes of Horace de Vere Cole
The Author Nelson's Purse The Queen's Knight The Sultan of Zanzibar When I went on board a Dreadnought ship (Music Hall ditty, 1910, sung to the tune of ‘The Girl I left behind me’.) Just eight weeks after Adrian’s shattering telegram from America, Horace gathered together the men who had sustained him through his ill-fated love affair—Guy Ridley, Tudor Castle and Adrian himself—to embark on the hoax that would make his name. It was a bold decision and a remarkable turnaround in his state of mind. He did so to prove to his friends, himself, and to Mildred in far off Tennessee that he was undiminished, unconquered and still unafraid. He risked all because he felt he had nothing he left to lose. He would call it his ‘navy joke’ but afterwards the papers labelled it ‘The Dreadnought Hoax’. In his book on the affair, Adrian Stephen said it was a naval officer who gave Horace the idea of impersonating the Emperor of Abyssinia and talking his way onto the British battleship HMS Dreadnought, flagship of the commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet, Admiral May. The most likely candidate for this mischievous suggestion is Bernard Buxton, a seafaring cousin of Leland Buxton’s who Horace listed as a ’semi-principal’ in his working notes for his lost autobiography. At the time Bernard was flag lieutenant in HMS Indomitable, an armoured cruiser attached to the Home Fleet. Indomitable had recently conveyed the prince of Wales to Canada for a royal visit. On board, as executive officer, had been thirty-four year old William Fisher who had since moved to Dreadnought as Admiral May’s flag commander. So Fisher was a link between the two ships. But there is another persuasive reason for supposing that he was the principal target and motivation for 'The Dreadnought Hoax'. As the priggish son of their maternal aunt Mary, Fisher was a much-ridiculed cousin of Adrian and Virginia Stephen. . As children there had been bitter rivalry between them, with the clever, sardonic Stephens tormenting the earnest and patronising Fishers. The Fishers embodied middle-class respectability and conformity: everything Adrian and Virginia?egged on by their father before his death?fought against. After entering the Royal Navy at thirteen, William had risen effortlessly through the ranks, in reproach to his stubbornly uncompetitive and low-achieving cousins. A letter written by William to Adrian’s mother in 1891 may even have sown the seeds for both the Zanzibar and Dreadnought jokes. In the letter, William recounts a visit to his ship, then cruising off East Africa, by the Sultan of Zanzibar (the real one). ‘We fired guns and torpedoes’ he rather pompously related, ‘and performed such like naval operations for his edification.’ Now that William was a senior officer in Dreadnought, these details might have been recalled by Adrian though he did not admit as much when he wrote about the hoax in 1936. William Fisher, by then a highly respected admiral, was still alive and Britain again on the verge of war so ridiculing a senior officer in print was unthinkable. A biography of Fisher appeared after his death but it was so obsequious that it is impossible to discern why the man generated so much dislike among his relatives and subordinates. A better impression of Fisher is given by someone else Adrian Stephen knew by chance in Dreadnought. When he eventually visited the ship Adrian discovered to his surprise that the captain was an acquaintance from a weekly walking club he attended. But Herbert Richmond was quite unlike either Admiral May or Commander Fisher, both of whom he openly disliked. He saw his fellow officers in Dreadnought as dogmatic, out-dated in strategy and uninspiring. In contrast Richmond was well read, highly cultivated (he was a Cambridge Don after the war), a little theatrical and plainly rather arrogant. His diary gives a candid insight into the bitter rivalries on board Dreadnought at the time of the hoax. ‘Lack of imagination is a most deplorable deficiency in a man’ he declared of May ‘He reads nothing, He never looks at a paper. Lady May sends him cuttings which may interest him ‘Curious Case of Breach of Promise by a Man’ or ‘Cat Attacked by a Thrush’ but of serious or sustained reading he is incapable. Yet he is a man charged with this supreme trust. On him rests the security of our coasts...He will spend hours over some very minor, usually easy, tactical question, because it involves no deep thinking and enables him to spend hours on the bridge making signals to people and finding fault with their manner of handling ships, but the really big things which require concentration of thought and real brain work never touches him.’ Richmond’s distrust of Willy Fisher is palpable: ‘ I have a suspicion that Willy can’t get it out of his head that I am too young...and I dislike not being trusted more than I can say...I know nothing more unpleasant than the feeling of a lack of sympathy between my Chief and myself. We look at things in very different ways and our interests and amusements are different...abstract thought he is incapable of’. In his book 'The Dreadnought Hoax', Adrian called May ‘Admiral X’, Richmond ‘Captain Y’ and Willy Fisher ‘cousin Z’. The pseudonyms fooled nobody in the know. But if Adrian encouraged 'The Dreadnought Hoax', Horace made the joke gloriously his own. The visit to England in November 1909 of the Chinese Naval Mission when exotically dressed Orientals, including a prince, had toured the fleet showed it was possible. Clearly, the Royal Navy was craven when it came to impressing its allies. Apart from a family grudge, there were other, more complex reasons for choosing this particular ship. Dreadnought was the most powerful, complex and aggressive machine in the world. The ship was a potent and expensive symbol of state power and authoritarianism. Dreadnought’s launch in 1905 had significantly raised the stakes in Britain’s dangerous arms race with Germany. It spawned a whole new, eponymous class of ships. A patriotic public demanded eight of the new ships; in his 1909 Budget the Liberal chancellor David Lloyd-George had promised four (at £1.5m a piece) alongside a far reaching welfare scheme for Britain’s teeming poor. All this would be paid for by a new super-tax on the rich and a land tax on estates. The ‘People’s Budget’ produced howls of protest from the aristocracy and landed gentry. One imagines Uncle Alfred choking over his breakfast at the news. Lloyd George’s budget was thrown out by the House of Lord’s in November 1909, the first time the upper house had defied the will of the Commons since the Glorious Revolution. Lloyd-George proposed flooding the Lords with new peers to dilute its inherent Tory majority so clearing the way for social reform. As he wittily remarked, a fully equipped Duke cost twice as much as a Dreadnought. But without a budget Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government could not survive. A general election was called early in 1910 (the first of two that year). It was fought over the Budget with, at its heart, the totemic issue of the Dreadnoughts. In those more leisurely days, the election ran from 15 January to 10 February. 'The Dreadnought Hoax' took place on 7 February so it should be seen against this highly charged atmosphere. It was not the first time Horace had become embroiled in a general election campaign. Before the 1906 Liberal landslide he had organised hustings with Dummer and Tudor with all of them posing as politicians. At the first interruption of Horace’s long-winded and nonsensical speech, his colleagues had turned and pelted the audience with rotten eggs. It was a neat reversal of expectation; one many real politicians would relish. By exposing Dreadnought to ridicule at such a politically sensitive time, was Horace deliberately highlighting the wilful extravagance of building battleships and courting war with Germany when there were so many other more deserving calls on the public’s (and his) purse? He certainly held views on titles and privilege, the other subject then preoccupying the nation. For a man with so many titled friends his opinion, as usual, was unexpected and steeped in romantic nostalgia. ‘It would be better to abolish all titles’ he declared later, ‘they mean nothing. Most of the House of Lords is descended from corrupt lawyers and placemen, from butchers [and] swindling tradesmen as Chesterton pointed out years ago. There are few historic titles in the male line?not 6. The only advantage of a title is to spur the imagination, I think...it’s all damned silly...I spit on such “royal-favour” and think the Socialists when they come in would be well-advised to declare all titles illegal ’. Horace was commenting in the aftermath of the Maundy Gregory scandal but his meaning was clear. Modern life had devalued the chivalric origins of the peerage leaving it the preserve of self-seeking placemen and vulgar parvenus. I think it would be wrong, however, to give the hoax one overarching grandiose theme. Like the people assembled to execute it, it was a blend of personal and political interests fused by a single desire for adventure. Adrian and Horace decided to follow the successful formula of the Zanzibar joke. But whereas that had been a largely spontaneous event lacking detailed planning (and risking disaster during the chaotic escape from Cambridge station) 'The Dreadnought Hoax' would be carefully prepared. With the likelihood of failure so much greater, and the risks higher, every precaution had to be taken to secure success. No one apparently considered that the consequences of successfully fooling the Royal Navy were likely to be worse than failing to do so. For the new hoax they would impersonate Abyssinian nobility led by ‘Ras ‘el Makalen’, a fictitious cousin of the Emperor of Abyssinia. The cover story was that they were in England viewing Eton as a potential school for the princely children (this could have been verified by the authorities but never was). In 1936 Adrian claimed that they had posed as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his suite, a falsehood which has stuck in the popular imagination. In fact, not only was the real emperor lying gravely ill in Addis Ababa at the time of the prank, but Horace had learned the lesson of the Cambridge hoax when his attempt to impersonate the Sultan of Zanzibar had come unstuck forcing a last minute change of plan. No one was likely to recognise an obscure prince. Why did they choose to be Abyssinians, or Ethiopians as we know them today? Interviewed in 1962, Tony Buxton said that none of the hoaxers knew a ‘single thing’ about the country or its language. Most likely Abyssinia was chosen as it was a valuable ally of Britain against German ambitions in North Africa. Horace may have calculated that representatives of that country were likely to be warmly welcomed on board a British warship. Acting on intelligence, he set the date of the hoax to early February 1910 when Dreadnought would be anchored off Weymouth in Dorset. This gave him two or three weeks of detailed preparation. The day of the hoax shifted as the time approached—and volunteers dropped in and out—causing confusion in later accounts. In the end Horace plumped for 7 February (not 10 February as is sometimes stated). Conveniently this was a Monday giving a weekend of preparation beforehand?and the possibility of a full week of press coverage afterwards. The vital element of the hoax?the disguise?was again entrusted to Willy Clarkson. With ample time to organize costumes, Horace went to greater efforts than with the Zanzibar joke to ensure authenticity. Over meetings with Clarkson at the costumier’s lavish new shop premises in Wardour Street (still there and now a Chinese restaurant) Horace arranged robes, turbans and accessories. All the costumes were made to order using a pattern book Horace himself supplied. The end result, however, was a bizarre and gaudy collection of outfits more suited to a pantomine dame than a prince and quite unlike the restrained and elegant dress of a real Abyssinian. Yet the ensemble fulfilled Western expectations (largely drawn from music hall) of how Africans bedecked themselves, so the costumes worked and were never challenged. Recruiting the princes was more difficult. Horace knew from Cambridge that there was safety in numbers, as much to divert the attention of the victim as to give the regal imposters sufficient dignity. But several friends who volunteered to join him got cold feet and backed out as the day approached. According to Adrian’s sister Vanessa Bell, even Horace grew ‘frightened‘at the enormity of the undertaking. As the day approached only her brother Adrian ‘was really keen about it’. Was Adrian egging Horace on again, as he had in Cambridge? It is obvious from his lovemaking to Duncan Grant that Adrian was a risk taker but, unlike Horace, a surreptitious and secretive one. He was also toying with becoming an actor so perhaps he was excited at the prospect of testing himself under the closest scrutiny. Apart from the ringleaders, none of the original Zanzibarees were available for the new hoax. Dummer Howard was still in Paris; after all his adventures, Leland Buxton was sheep farming in South Africa while Robbie Bowen Colthurst was now on the staff of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in Dublin. With a few days to go, only Guy Ridley and Tudor Castle had committed to join Adrian and Horace in their adventure. Guy, the son of a High Court judge, had been at school and college with Dummer Howard and shared Horace’s love of fantasy. He wrote a strange Tolkeinesque novel called ‘The World of Teregor’ in which all the characters were trees and listed his occupation in Who’s Who as ‘Assistant Master in Lunacy’. Nevertheless, it looked liked the hoax would have to be cancelled. Then Anthony Buxton, another member of the Buxton dynasty and a friend of Adrian and Horace’s from Trinity, was persuaded to take part encouraged perhaps by the influence of his cousin Bernard on the scheme and by his own desire to upstage the earlier efforts of another relation Leland Buxton at Cambridge. He was followed into the hoax by Adrian’s lover the painter Duncan Grant. He was motivated by loyalty to Adrian and, as a resident of Bloomsbury, by a visceral dislike of the sort of establishment pomposity encapsulated by his father, a senior army officer. Duncan also relished playing jokes having once fooled an elderly aunt by dressing up as a German schoolmistress. With four accomplices, Horace judged he could make the hoax work so he set the date and asked Clarkson to begin final preparations. However, he had not reckoned on the appetite for adventure of Adrian’s sister Virginia who, according to Willy Clarkson, had ‘pleaded continuously’ to join the hoax whilst watching Clarkson and his assistants practised the make-up on her brother and his friends at Fitzroy Square in the days beforehand. ‘When cajolery failed’ the costumier recalled, ‘she employed Portia-like argument: teeming, stormy, insistent and permeating’. The men dismissed the idea out of hand. The risk of taking her on the expedition was far too great and anyhow there was no role for a woman in the planned charade. But Virginia loudly persisted and years later Clarkson recalled in The People newspaper how she eventually got her way ‘in a quaint and unexpected way’ Horace ‘had just said “You know what we’re in for. If we’re found out we’ll be thrown overboard for certain. They’d pitch us overboard without a thought.” One of the fake princes replied in a foreign voice?for by now it seemed that it was impossible for him to act out of character?: “Well that’s all right. We’re all good swimmers.” Then the lady’s voice broke in: “I can swim as well as any of you. Better. You all know that. I’m willing to take the risk. Why can’t I come into the plot?” There was silence for a moment and then the company broke into a spontaneous and prolonged laugh. Her persistence had won.” Horace subsequently blamed Clarkson for ‘inaccuracies’ in his account of the hoax (he was also furious, even in 1932, that the newspaper named Virginia Woolf). But the story has the ring of truth. It is unlikely that either Horace or Adrian would ever have considered asking Virginia to join them in the hoax so she presumably had to force herself in. Moreover, Vanessa Bell was horrified at her sister’s involvement voicing her family’s wider opposition. Virginia had recently suffered a serious mental breakdown and, with her emotional state so fragile, Vanessa feared the excitement could tip her into another. Despite having enjoyed Horace’s hospitality at West Woodhay, Vanessa thought him ‘an intolerable bore...very rich and very vulgar [who] throws his money about’. She suspected Horace of trying to ingratiate himself to Virginia. Horace was already hanging around Fitzroy Square and Vanessa now dreaded he would ‘pervade’ the place. (Is this a hint that Horace had been making clumsy advances towards his best friend’s sister? If so, his hopes were horribly misplaced.) Apart from a desire for risk-taking and excitement?symptomatic perhaps of her emotional instability?Virginia was motivated, like Adrian, to join in the humiliation of their much loathed cousin Willy Fisher. But which part would she play? There were objections to taking a ‘princess’ on the men’s escapade so Virginia volunteered to be dressed and disguised as a man. ‘Her first make-up was a failure’ remembered Clarkson, ‘the project was almost abandoned; but I felt piqued at being thwarted from an effect which I knew could be obtained and made a fresh start. This time the result was astounding in its realism. The beautiful girl had vanished, and in her place was a slim, dignified, dusky nobleman with a sombre countenance and a flowing regal beard.’ Duncan stayed with Adrian and Virginia in Fitzroy Square the night before the hoax (despite residing only a few doors away) so he was already there when Horace, Tony Buxton and Guy Ridley arrived at the house before dawn on 7 February to be dressed and made up. Tony had a slight cold which caused trouble later when his sneezing dislodged his false beard. Towards seven o’clock Willie Clarkson and his assistants arrived. Clarkson later claimed he had no idea what was afoot: ‘For aught we know, a beard may be desired for amateur theatricals’ (at dawn, on a Monday morning, in February?) The similarities with the earlier Cambridge joke were so great it is impossible he did not suspect another hoax was being planned. Clarkson certainly milked his involvement afterwards, selling his story to the Daily Telegraph for £100 when Horace’s triumph was confirmed. One significant difference between the Dreadnought joke and the earlier Sultan of Zanzibar escapade was Horace and Adrian’s decision not to go in costume as foreign potentates. This time Horace would play ‘Mr Herbert Cholmondeley’ of the Foreign Office (presumably a name derived from his unsympathetic stepfather Herbert Studd and the family which had supplanted the de Veres as Lord Great Chamberlains). Adrian would pose as the official interpreter to the royal party, the role assumed by Dummer in Cambridge. Clarkson’s men set to work supervised by the great man himself. He took pride in his skills of deception and was an avid self-promoter. ‘Clarkson’s Lillie Powder: The Greatest Beautifier in the World’ (named for Lillie Langtry) was a very popular product at the time so was Clarkson’s ‘Kleeno’ for removing make-up. But his activities were not restricted to the stage or necessarily always to legitimate clients. In the 1880’s he assisted Scotland Yard in their attempts to catch ‘Jack the Ripper’ by disguising police officers as prostitutes. It has also been suggested that he was mixed up in the infamous Dr Crippen murder case when Crippen’s mistress escaped England dressed as a boy. Rumours of Clarkson’s own double-life abounded. After his death, Virginia Woolf who maintained an interest in his career long after 'The Dreadnought Hoax', would describe Clarkson’s ‘sexual kink’. Now he was in her elegant drawing room directing his assistants as they applied beards, fixed moustaches and blackened faces. One imagines them trying out different robes and struggling with their turbans. Clarkson outlined his art in an article he wrote in 1905. From this, we can picture him arriving at Fitzroy Square with his large ‘expanding make-up box’ containing ‘grease-paints, powders, lip-salve, nose-paste, rouge, hare’s foot, crêpe hair, scissors, brush and comb, mirror, sponge etc’. The various grease-paints would have been neatly lined ready for use. After applying a foundation of Lillie Cream, the Abyssinians would have been coloured with ‘No. 12 Black’ or, more likely, a special preparation called ‘Nigger-black’ which Clarkson used on minstrels. ‘Burnt cork used as a powder’ was also effective. The princes’ moustaches and beards, or ‘face-fittings’ as Clarkson called them, were created using ’crêpe-hair and spirit-gum’. It sounded an uncomfortable process. First, the face was carefully spread with the gum and then strands of hair attached and pressed on with a towel. Clarkson advised against trimming the whiskers with scissors as this could make them look artificial. As the interpreter, Adrian recalled receiving ‘a little sunburn powder’ from Clarkson (possibly his grease-paint No 3½ ‘Slightly Sunburnt’). This gave a nice impression of a European unused to the Abyssinian sun. A battered bowler hat and long, shabby overcoat completed his garb making him look like a ‘seedy commercial traveller’. Horace’s outfit was even more straightforward. He simply donned a top hat and tail coat to play Cholmondeley of the Foreign Office (appropriate attire for the ringmaster of the venture). He also carried a silver topped cane which, as Tony Buxton recalled nearly fifty years later, he constantly brandished about. When the disguises were finished to Clarkson’s satisfaction, Horace took his company of princes by car to Lafayette’s photographic studio on Bond Street. Irishman James Lauder had only established his London studio in 1897 but he was already well-known in Dublin where he had been operating under the glamorous name of Lafayette since 1880. Lafayette was the Patrick Lichfield of his age photographing actors, celebrities and Society ladies. Visiting royalty inevitably beat a path to his door, all eager to follow in the footsteps of the British royal family. In 1902, Ras Makonnen and a suite of Abyssinian dignitaries had called at Lafayette ahead of the Coronation of Edward VII. The image which resulted, portraying the berobed Abyssinians flanked by tail coated British officials, so closely matches the photographs now taken of Horace’s hoaxers that it seems impossible that he was not aware of it. They were on a tight schedule. Weymouth was a great deal further away than Cambridge and with fewer trains they had to make the 12.40 or else call the hoax off. However, unlike the Sultan of Zanzibar joke, when the timings had gone awry, Horace judged it perfectly. There was time at Lafayette’s studio for at least two carefully posed photographs of the hoaxers. One version, which was circulated among the participants afterwards as souvenirs, shows all six standing with Tony Buxton as ‘Ras ‘el Makalen’ in the centre. (Tony’s personal copy of this photograph, apparently lost for decades, reappeared by strange chance on the day I visited his son John Buxton in Norfolk). This photograph, which was used by the Daily Mirror as a poster when it broke the story, has since come to represent the joke in the popular imagination. However, a less familiar version survives at the National Portrait Gallery in London. This has Horace standing nonchalantly in the middle of the group, hands in pockets, framed by Buxton and Virginia who are both sitting. The NPG example is annotated in an unknown hand and titled ‘The Princes of Abyssinia and suite February 1910 with the compliments of the Foreign Office.’ The photograph clearly identifies who played who in the charade. So, besides Buxton posing as ‘Ras ‘el Makalen’; we learn that Guy Ridley acted the part of ‘Ras ‘el Mikael Golen’, Virginia of ‘Ras ‘el Singanya’ and Duncan Grant that of ‘Ras ‘el Mendax’. Apparently the princes picked the names themselves. ‘Makalen’ was a near anagram of the real emperor’s name Menelik; ‘Mikael Golen’ combined a traditional Abyssinian noble name with that of the ancient Syrian city Golan, whilst ‘Mendax’ mischievously played on the Latin for mendacious. Virginia’s choice of ‘Singanya’ is more obscure and suggestive of her joyful love of words, real or not. No fading black and white photograph, however, can ever give us a true idea of the vividness of the costumes. These have to be coloured by our imagination though one press report later noted that Virginia had worn a ‘sky-blue robe, beautifully embroidered’. The formalities completed at Lafayette, the hoaxers were hurried to Paddington where Horace had arranged a reception committee of the railway company. After a brief ceremony, the princes were ushered into a pre-booked private saloon car. Minutes later, the train eased out of the platform. It was too late to turn back now. For Virginia this meant her nervousness disappeared and she no longer cared what happened. For the next three and half hours Horace and his accomplices would be out of contact with the world, uncertain how their journey would end. They had been meticulous in their preparation, but the trap itself had yet to be set. Now Tudor Castle swung into action. Since chasing Mildred Pasolini around Europe he had found work with Thomas Harvey at Toynbee Hall. He is the invisible man of the hoax but his role was critical. An hour after the Abyssinians departed for Weymouth, Tudor walked calmly into a post office in St James’s Street with a carefully drafted telegram. It was addressed to Admiral May, the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, and signed Charles Harding, the permanent undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office. Timed at two minutes past three, it read: To: C in C Home Fleet Portland Adrian and Horace had fretted beforehand whether the telegram needed some form of official coding. In fact, as it was pointed out later, the telegram should have been sent OHMS (On His Majesty’s Service). It wasn’t, but the message was still taken completely at face value when it was transcribed at Portland half an hour later at 3.31pm. The document still exists at the National Archives in Kew near London. I found it tucked inside the slim file of papers relating to 'The Dreadnought Hoax' in the Admiralty papers for February 1910 (the hoax itself has been carefully excised from the ship’s log). Its wording was so bureaucratically matter of fact that no one thought to challenge it. A further vital fifteen minutes elapsed before the message was handed to Admiral May in Dreadnought. This delay was a stroke of luck for the hoaxers. With only half an hour before the scheduled arrival in Weymouth of his foreign guests, May had no time to wire the admiralty back for confirmation (he didn’t think of telephoning). In any event, the admiral was an unimaginative man, not given to querying orders. Horace and Adrian soon found the dining car in the train (which was emptied for their exclusive use by obliging stewards). The Abyssinians were forbidden from eating for fear of disturbing their beards and make-up. Indeed, for most of them hunger was the overriding impression of the day. Horace did purchase some buns for the princes at Reading, which they nibbled behind the drawn blinds of their carriage, but their starvation matched his growing anxiety. So many things could go wrong. Apart from concern that the telegram would be questioned, it had slowly dawned on Adrian that his cousin William Fisher might possibly recognise him ‘and then we should get into trouble’. To while away the journey, and distract such thoughts, Horace and Adrian tried to learn a little Swahili using a grammar from the ‘Society of the Propagation of the Gospel’ bought especially for this purpose. But their efforts were lacklustre. They half expected the whole thing to be called off or prove a damp squib. They would then, as Adrian put it, ‘slink back to London’ with no harm done. How wrong he was. |