by The Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, a first edition on the counter and a bookseller with an unfortunate surname sorting the prank from the harm
The Day Virginia Woolf Put On a Beard and Fooled the Royal Navy
A woman came in today and asked whether I was related. It happens about twice a week. My surname is the same as the most famous novelist of the Bloomsbury set, and I work in a bookshop three streets from where the set used to live. I said what I always say: no relation, my grandfather was a tailor in Whitechapel, and the name was spelt four ways at the docks. She looked disappointed. So I told her my favourite story about the real one instead, and she bought a biography. I have decided to write it down, since it is the best tale I know about the difference between a joke and a lie, and that difference is how I earn a living.
February 1910
The pride of the Royal Navy, and of the whole empire, was a battleship called HMS Dreadnought. She was the most powerful warship afloat, so far ahead of everything else that every navy in the world had to start building again. She lay with the fleet at Weymouth, the flagship, bristling with secrets.
On the seventh of February a telegram arrived for the admiral commanding. It was signed with the name of the senior official at the Foreign Office. It said that the Emperor of Abyssinia’s family, a party of princes, would be arriving by train that afternoon and wished to see the ship. Kindly arrange to receive them.
There was no time to check. A guard of honour was turned out. A red carpet was laid on the platform. A band was found. And at the appointed hour there stepped off the London train four dignitaries in flowing robes and turbans, with dark skin, heavy beards and gold chains, accompanied by a top-hatted gentleman from the Foreign Office and an interpreter.
They were piped aboard. They inspected the guard. They were shown the guns, the wireless room, the officers’ quarters. They exclaimed at each marvel in a language the interpreter rendered into English, and which seems to have been a mash of Latin verse, mispronounced, and a phrase repeated with great enthusiasm that afterward became famous. They declined refreshment, on what the interpreter said were religious grounds. They attempted to bestow a decoration on an officer. They were saluted and escorted back to the train.
Who They Were
The telegram was a fake. There were no princes. The man from the Foreign Office was a wealthy young Irish-born practical joker named Horace de Vere Cole, who had already, as an undergraduate, impersonated the uncle of a sultan and been received by the mayor of Cambridge. The interpreter was his friend Adrian Stephen. And the four royal visitors, in greasepaint, false whiskers and costumes hired from a theatrical outfitter, were a painter, two young men about town and Adrian’s twenty-eight-year-old sister Virginia, who had not yet published a novel and was, for the afternoon, a prince.
They had refused food because they were afraid the beards would come off. It rained, and the make-up began to run, and the interpreter had to hurry them under cover. One of the officers who showed them round was Virginia and Adrian’s own cousin, who looked straight at them both and did not know them.
They got clean away. They might never have been found out if Cole, who could not bear a joke nobody knew about, had not gone to the newspapers with the story and a photograph.
The Uproar
It was a sensation. The papers ran it for days. Questions were asked in Parliament about the security of His Majesty’s ships. The Navy was the laughing stock of the country. Small boys shouted the princes’ catchphrase after sailors in the street. A music hall song was written. When the real Emperor of Abyssinia visited England some time later, he is said to have been followed by children chanting it, and was refused a tour of the fleet for fear of embarrassment.
The Navy considered prosecuting and found there was very little to charge them with. Nothing had been stolen. No secret had been learned by anybody who understood it. Honour was instead satisfied in a very English way: a party of young officers called on two of the hoaxers in turn and administered a few ceremonial taps with a cane, after which everyone shook hands.
Virginia was not touched. She dined out on the story for the rest of her life, put a version of it into a short story, and gave a talk about it to a women’s institute thirty years on. Her account survives. The British Library has written about the affair, and the photograph is easy to find.
What Kind of Thing It Was
I used to tell this simply as a romp. I do not quite any more, and I owe the reader the reasons.
First, the plain one. They did it in blackface. Six privileged young English people darkened their skins and played a royal family from an ancient African kingdom as gibbering comic foreigners, and the joke on the Navy depended on the assumption that nobody could tell one such person from another. It was 1910 and none of them gave it a thought. We can. It is the part of the photograph that has aged worst, and I say so to anyone I tell the story to.
Second, what was it for? Here the participants did not agree. Cole did it for mischief; he hoaxed anyone. The others, afterward, gave it a meaning. They were pacifists, most of them, and suspicious of uniforms. Virginia would later write one of the fiercest attacks on militarism in English, in which she invites the reader to look at the photographs of great men in their robes, medals and plumes, and to notice how like a fancy dress party it all is. She had been to that party, in a beard. She had seen an admiral salute a telegram.
So it can be read as a blow against pomp: the mightiest ship on earth, undone by a hired costume and a confident manner. That is the reading I like. It is also a little too kind, because of the third thing.
A Hoax Is Not a Satire
Here is the distinction that matters to me. I write two days a week for The London Prat, and the first document I was handed was the house essay, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not.
A satire announces itself. The reader knows the piece is not literal and is invited to see through it to something true. A hoax does the opposite. It works only if the victim believes it. It is a lie told for effect, and the laugh comes afterward, at the expense of whoever was taken in.
The Dreadnought affair was a hoax. A forged telegram is not a joke shared with the admiral. And although the target was powerful and deserved a little puncturing, the method is the same one used by every fraud and every pedlar of false stories: a confident tone, an official-looking source and no time to check.
That is precisely what the paper’s guide for readers is meant to defeat. How to tell satire from real news sets out a list of questions. Where did this come from? Can it be confirmed anywhere else? Does it arrive with a deadline that stops you asking? The admiral at Weymouth failed all of them in a single afternoon. One telephone call to London would have ended it.
My editor says our trade lives on the right side of a thin line and that the day we forge a telegram we become something else. I think Virginia knew it. She kept the costume in the story and left the forgery out.
The Piece
All the same, I could not resist. This week’s item reports that the Royal Navy has introduced a new security procedure following a review of an incident some years ago: all visiting dignitaries will now be asked to eat a sandwich. A spokesman said the measure was proportionate and that beards would be tested in light rain. The Foreign Office confirmed that it no longer sends telegrams, or indeed replies.
It will go on the English satirical news page, labelled as what it is.
The woman who bought the biography came back at four to say she had read the chapter on the bus and missed her stop. She asked again whether I was sure I was not related. I said that if I were, I would be wearing the beard. More of what I write is over here.
