Road Work
At noon on a spring day in Paris some years ago, an old motor truck broke down in the center of the Place de l’Opéra, requiring the driver to spend a half hour under it to make the repair. After apologizing for the trouble he had caused the policemen who had been directing the traffic around him, the truckman drove away — to collect several thousand dollars from friends who had bet that he could not lie on his back for 30 minutes at the busiest hour in the middle of the busiest street in Paris. He was Horace De Vere Cole, England’s celebrated practical joker.
– Collier’s, 1948
Wire Work
In 1897, con artist Soapy Smith opened a telegraph office in Skagway, Alaska. For five dollars, new arrivals in the Klondike Gold Rush could send 10 words to loved ones anywhere in the world, informing them of their safe arrival and imminent riches.
No one noticed that the cable was simply nailed to the back of the building, and that its other end disappeared in the waters of Skagway Bay.
Telegraph lines did not reach Skagway until 1901.
Vet Service
In 1936, Democrats took over Rhode Island’s state senate and began giving out $100 bonuses to veterans. Concerned at this liberality, a Republican quietly recommended a bonus for Sgt. Evael O.W. Tnesba of the Twelfth Machine Gun Battalion. A Democrat seconded the bill and it passed immediately, sending a ripple of laughter through the chamber.
Sensing they’d been had, the Democrats referred the bill to a committee for study. There they discovered that Evael O.W. Tnesba spelled backward is Absent W.O. Leave.
“It is true that members of the Rhode Island General Assembly, except dual office holders, get only $300 a year each for their legislative labors,” opined the Providence Journal. “But even for this modest sum they ought to do better than to vote gratuities to non-existent war veterans.”
A Shiny Lemon
In 1929 a well-dressed man approached Tony and Nick Fortunato, owners of New York’s Fortunato Fruit Company. He identified himself as T. Remington Grenfell, vice president of the Grand Central Holding Corporation, and he told the brothers that Grand Central Station had decided to shut down its information booth. If they could come up with $100,000, the first year’s rent, they could take over the booth and convert it into a fruit stand in the heart of the busy train station.
Overjoyed, the brothers brought $100,000 to the corporation’s offices. There they met the president, Wilson A. Blodgett, who accepted their money and gave them a contract saying they could take over the booth on April 1. But when they arrived at the station to begin renovations, they found employees operating the booth as normal, and when they began to argue officials kicked them out of the station. They returned to the Grand Central Holding Company but found an empty suite.
The Fortunato brothers never got their money back, and Grenfell and Blodgett, whoever they were, were never caught. But for years afterward the brothers would visit Grand Central Station regularly to castigate the employees there — a spectacle that itself became a small-time tourist attraction.
Catching Rays
In 1984, Bob Ellis, managing editor of the Eldorado, Ill., Daily Journal, announced a contest “to recognize and honor the American summer tradition, Daylight Saving Time.”
“The rules are simple,” Ellis wrote. “Beginning with the first day of Daylight Savings Time this year, those entering the contest must begin saving daylight. Whoever saves the most daylight … will be awarded prizes.”
He arranged for the contest to end on April 1, and hoped he had inserted enough absurdities that readers would see the joke. No pre-dawn light or twilight would be accepted, and moonlight was disallowed. Contestants could store their light in any container and deliver it to the Journal’s office. “All entries will be donated to less fortunate nations that do not observe Daylight Saving Time.”
But they didn’t. Ellis was contacted by media in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Dallas, “every section of the nation” seeking more information about the contest.
That was all right with Ellis. He’s written the piece as “change of pace from the usual and often gloomy side of the news,” he said, so that people “could laugh at the world, and me, and perhaps even at themselves, with reckless abandon. And feel good. And therein lies the worth of such a diversion.”
The Fly Game
Industrialist and gambler John “Bet-a-Million” Gates was lunching one day with John Drake, whose wealthy family had founded Drake University.
Gates proposed a bet. He dunked his bread in his coffee and placed it on his saucer. “You do the same,” he said, “and the piece that attracts the most flies wins. Shall we say $1,000 per fly?”
Drake agreed and lost $11,000. Gates made this bet many times, and he always won. His victims never noticed that he left his coffee untasted — because he’d added six spoonfuls of sugar.
The Sin Ship
In 1924, at the height of Prohibition, rumors began to circulate of rich people partying on a 17,000-ton steamship anchored 15 miles off the New York coast, safely out of the reach of law enforcement. “A Negro jazz orchestra furnishes the music to which millionaires, flappers, and chorus girls whirl on a waxed floor with the tang of salt air in their lungs,” wrote Sanford Jarrell of the New York Herald Tribune, who claimed to have spent a night aboard the mysterious ship.
Other newspapers picked up the story, but none could confirm it. Customs agents began an investigation even as boatloads of intrigued New Yorkers began to search the Atlantic off Fire Island, and Washington ordered a Coast Guard cutter to hunt down the ship.
At first the Herald Tribune defended Jarrell against skeptics, but finally it reported that the story was untrue. The episode had begun with a tip from a reputable source, but Jarrell had followed it up and found nothing. He’d filed his story of the “sin ship” as a hoax, and it had snowballed out of control. Finally he sent a written confession to the paper’s editors.
“In anticipation of the natural penalty for my misdemeanor,” he wrote, “and assuring you of my sincerest regret about the whole affair, I herewith tender you my resignation as a member of the Herald Tribune staff, to take effect at once.”
Air Mail
On Aug. 17, 1921, a bedraggled carrier pigeon landed at the feet of a policeman in Columbus Circle in New York. Tied to its leg was this message:
Notify Dan Singer, Belleclaire Hotel. I am lost in Hoodoo Mountains, Yellowstone Park. Send help, provisions and pack-horses. HELLER. 8-13-21.
At the Belleclaire Hotel police found insurance agent Daniel J. Singer, who identified Heller as naturalist and photographer Edmund H. Heller and recognized the bird as a veteran that had accompanied him on a trip to Africa with Theodore Roosevelt in 1909. Heller had kept it on the roof of the Belleclaire and taken it with him to Yellowstone recently to gather material for a lecture tour.
This was both dramatic and fishy. If the bird had left Wyoming on Aug. 13 then it had flown 1,900 miles in five days, an astonishing feat. Sure enough, when reporters contacted the superintendent of Yellowstone, he responded, “Edmund Heller is here. There is no foundation whatever for the report that he is or has been lost.”
Apparently someone had arranged the hoax in order to publicize Heller’s lectures, forging his signature on the note. The district attorney saw little humor in the stunt and began issuing subpoenas. The New York Times noted, “At the Belleclaire it was said that Singer was out of town, but had disclaimed responsibility and insisted that some person in the hotel perpetrated the hoax.”
Pasted Praise
This “parable against persecution” was a favorite of Benjamin Franklin, who would sometimes pretend to recite it out of a Bible as “the 51st chapter of Genesis.” He wrote that “the remarks of the Scripturians upon it … were sometimes very diverting”:
1. And it came to pass after these things, that Abraham sat in the door of his tent, about the going down of the sun.
2. And behold a man, bowed with age, came from the way of the wilderness, leaning on a staff.
3. And Abraham arose and met him, and said unto him, ‘Turn in, I pray thee, and wash thy feet, and tarry all night, and thou shalt arise early on the morrow, and go on thy way.’
4. But the man said, ‘Nay, for I will abide under this tree.’
5. And Abraham pressed him greatly; so he turned, and they went into the tent; and Abraham baked unleavened bread, and they did eat.
6. And when Abraham saw that the man blessed not God, he said unto him, ‘Wherefore dost thou not worship the most high God, creator of heaven and earth?’
7. And the man answered and said, ‘I do not worship the God thou speakest of; neither do I call upon his name; for I have made to myself a God, which abideth alway in mine house, and provideth me with all things.’
8. And Abraham’s zeal was kindled against the man; and he arose, and fell upon him, and drove him forth with blows into the wilderness.
9. And at midnight God called unto Abraham, saying, ‘Abraham, where is the stranger?’
10. And Abraham answered and said, ‘Lord, he would not worship thee, neither would he call upon thy name; therefore have I driven him out from before my face into the wilderness.’
11. And God said, ‘Have I borne with him these hundred ninety and eight years, and nourished him, and clothed him, notwithstanding his rebellion against me; and couldst not thou, that art thyself a sinner, bear with him one night?’
12. And Abraham said, ‘Let not the anger of my Lord wax hot against his servant; lo, I have sinned; forgive me, I pray thee.’
13. And Abraham arose, and went forth into the wilderness, and sought diligently for the man, and found him, and returned with him to his tent; and when he had entreated him kindly, he sent him away on the morrow with gifts.
14. And God spake again unto Abraham, saying, ‘For this thy sin shall thy seed be afflicted four hundred years in a strange land;
15. ‘But for thy repentance will I deliver them; and they shall come forth with power, and with gladness of heart, and with much substance.’
(In reality it’s thought to have originated with the Persian poet Saadi.)
High-Class Forgery
In 1925, small-time criminal Alves Reis convinced the British firm that printed Portuguese currency to make some for him, and he passed some 5 million phony escudos into the Portuguese economy. Because the unauthorized bills came from official presses, the government at first could detect nothing wrong, but finally it found some duplicate serial numbers in Reis’ accounts and the game was up.
Reis argued that he had cheated no one, but he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Lord Macmillan of Aberfeldy called the scheme “a crime for which, in the ingenuity and audacity of its conception, it would be difficult to find a parallel.”
And it raises an interesting legal question: If currency is produced by an official government printer, can it still be called counterfeit?
Camera Ready
In December 1964, French photographer Robert Le Serrec, his wife, and his Australian friend Henk de Jong were crossing Stonehaven Bay, Hook Island, Queensland, when a gigantic tadpole-like creature appeared beneath them. Le Serrec and de Jong approached it underwater and had just begun filming when it opened its mouth and they retreated to the boat. The creature was 75 to 80 feet long.
That’s the story that Le Serrec published in Everyone magazine in March 1965; unfortunately, it quickly came to light that he was fleeing creditors in France and had boasted of money-making plans involving a sea serpent. Striking photo, though.
Getting Behind
In London some years ago a man named Pierce Bottom, weary of jokes about his name, spent several days combing through the telephone directories, seeking people who had ‘bottom’ in their names. He found dozens — Bottom, Bottomley, Winterbottom, Throttlebottom, Greenbottom, Sidebottom, Higginbottom, and so on. He arranged for a dinner to be served in the sub-basement of a London building, and sent engraved invitations to all the ‘bottoms.’ Most of them showed up, but Pierce Bottom did not, and the guests found that each of them had to pay his own check. The entree was rump roast.
– H. Allen Smith, The Compleat Practical Joker, 1953
Better Safe
For several years during the Cold War, New York police guarded the Soviet consulate at 9 East 91st Street in Manhattan. Officers manned a pale blue guard post 24 hours a day. “It’s like being a prisoner of war stuck in a telephone booth,” one said.
The Soviets left in 1980, and the police department accordingly canceled the guard, but two months later the 23rd precinct received a call from an Officer Cowans who said that Inspector Whitmore of police intelligence had ordered the guard to be reactivated. So the police resumed their vigil over the now-disused building.
Five months later, in May 1982, the police happened to mention the consulate duty in a report. “What booth?” asked a bewildered intelligence official. It turned out that Officer Cowans and Inspector Whitmore did not exist; the police had been guarding an empty building around the clock for five months, right through Christmas, for no reason.
They closed up shop and removed the booth. “Whoever did this was someone who wanted to break chops or who stood to gain from it,” Lt. Robert McEntire told the New York Times. “We’re not sure which, and we probably never will be.”
Rogue Don
In 1948, while a student at Cambridge, future MP Humphry Berkeley conceived “the only practical joke that I have played in my life.” He invented a public school called Selhurst and, writing on fake letterhead, began to send letters to public figures posing as its eccentric headmaster, H. Rochester Sneath.
Sneath invited George Bernard Shaw to speak, William Reid Dick to erect a statue, and Giles Gilbert Scott to design a new house at Selhurst (all declined). But mostly he plagued and bewildered the masters of English public schools, seeking advice regarding rats, ghosts, and other peculiar problems at his college. In March 1948 he sent a warning to the master of Marlborough College:
Dear Heywood,
I am writing you this letter in the strictest confidence. I understand from a Mr. Robert Agincourt who was Senior French Master at Selhurst, for one term two years ago, that he is applying for a post on the staff of Marlborough College.
He has asked me if I could give him a testimonial to present to you and I told him that by no stretching of veracity was I able to do this. You will understand that nothing that I have to say about Mr. Agincourt is actuated by any personal malice but I feel it my duty to inform you of the impression that he gave while he was at Selhurst.
During his brief stay no less than five boys were removed from the school as a result of his influence, and three of the Matrons had nervous breakdowns. The pictures on the walls of his rooms made a visiting Bishop shudder and would certainly rule out another Royal visit. His practices were described by the Chairman of the County Hospital as ‘Hunnish.’ The prominent wart on his nose was wittily described as ‘the blot on the twentieth century’ by a visiting conjuror.
As you cannot fail to have noticed, his personal appearance is against him, and, after one memorable Carol Service, a titled Lady who was sitting next to him collapsed in a heap. He was once observed climbing a tree in the School Grounds naked at night and on another occasion he threw a flower pot at the wife of the Chairman of the Board of Governors.
Should you wish any further information, I should be glad to furnish it for I could not wish another Headmaster to undergo the purgatory that I suffered that term.
(When the Marlborough master replied that the man had not approached him, Sneath reported that he had abandoned the idea of an academic career and “has now become a waiter in a Greek restaurant in Soho.” He also asked for the name of a good private detective and a nursery maid.)
When Sneath wrote to The Daily Worker complaining that he was being prevented from teaching compulsory Russian at Selhurst, a reporter exposed the hoax. The master of Pembroke College formally rebuked Berkeley and barred him from the college for two years — though, Berkeley wrote, “I think that I saw a twinkle in his eye.”
Double Scotch
In the early 1970s, University of Minnesota chemical engineer Rutherford Aris received a letter from Who’s Who in America requesting a biography of “Aris Rutherford.” Aris wrote back, explaining their mistake, but the requests kept coming. So in 1974 Aris gamely sent in a biography of Aris Rutherford:
- Born in Scotland, he earned a degree in 1948 from the Glenlivet Institute of Distillation Engineering.
- In 1955 he became the chief design engineer and tester for the Strath Spey Distillation Company.
- From 1960 to 1964, he was a visiting professor of distillation practice at the Technological Institute of the Aegean, in Corinth.
- He was active in the Distillation Club of Edinburgh and wrote three books, including Distillation Procedures (1963).
The news media quickly learned of the hoax, and Who’s Who cut the entry in the following year’s edition. That’s a pity, Aris said — his alter ego was about to publish another book, American Baseball: A Guide for Interested Englishmen.
Book Club
When a visiting Englishman expressed disappointment that New York had revealed none of the bohemian color that he had hoped for, actor (and inveterate joker) Edward Sothern invited him to a dinner for twelve.
While the soup was being served, one man laid a battleax beside his plate, another a knife, and others produced guns, scythes, and staves.
“For heaven’s sake,” whispered the Englishman, “what does this mean?”
“Keep quiet,” replied Sothern, “It is just what I most feared. These gentlemen have been drinking, and they have quarrelled about a friend of theirs, a Mr. Weymyss Jobson, quite an eminent scholar, and a very estimable gentleman, but I hope for our sakes they will not attempt to settle their quarrel here.”
At that one guest leapt to his feet and cried, “Whoever says that the History of the French Revolution, written by my friend, David Weymyss Jobson, is not as good a book in every respect as that written by Tom Carlyle on the same subject, is a liar and a thief, and if there is any fool present who desires to take it up, I am his man!”
In the ensuing melee, someone thrust a knife into the Englishman’s hand and said, “Defend yourself! This is butchery — sheer butchery!”
Sothern sat by and said only, “Keep cool — and don’t get shot.”
Sothern was famous for such jokes; it’s said that few of his friends attended his funeral because they assumed the announcement was a hoax. Once, at a restaurant, he and a friend gathered up all the silverware and hid under the table. Outraged, the waiter ran off to summon the police. When he returned, the two were sitting at their places as if nothing had happened.
The Devil’s Snare
In 1892 an alarming tale made the rounds of British magazines — the adventure of a Mr. Dunstan, a naturalist in Nicaragua:
‘He was engaged in hunting for botanical and entomological specimens, when he heard his dog cry out, as if in agony, from a distance. Running to the spot whence the animal’s cries came, Mr. Dunstan found him enveloped in a perfect network of what seemed to be a fine, rope-like tissue of roots and fibres. The plant or vine seemed composed entirely of bare, interlacing stems, resembling, more than anything else, the branches of the weeping-willow denuded of its foliage, but of a dark, nearly black hue, and covered with a thick, viscid gum that exuded from the pores.’ Drawing his knife, Mr. Dunstan attempted to cut the poor beast free; but it was with the very greatest difficulty that he managed to sever the fleshy muscular fibres of the plant. When the dog was extricated from the coils of the plant, Mr. Dunstan saw, to his horror and amazement, that the dog’s body was bloodstained, ‘while the skin appeared to have been actually sucked or puckered in spots,’ and the animal staggered as if from exhaustion. In cutting the vine, the twigs curled like living, sinuous fingers about Mr. Dunstan’s hand, and it required no slight force to free the member from its clinging grasp, which left the flesh red and blistered. The gum exuding from the vine was of a greyish-dark tinge, remarkably adhesive, and of a disagreeable animal odor, powerful and nauseating to inhale. The natives, we are told, showed the greatest horror of the plant, which, as we have noted above, they called the ‘devil’s snare,’ and they recounted to the naturalist many stories of its death-dealing powers. Mr. Dunstan, we are told, was able to discover very little about the nature of the plant, owing to the difficulty of handling it, for its grasp can only be shaken off with the loss of skin, and even of flesh. As near as he could ascertain, however, its power of suction is contained ‘in a number of infinitesimal mouths or little suckers, which, ordinarily closed, open for the reception of food.’ ‘If the substance is animal, the blood is drawn off and the carcass or refuse then dropped. A lump of raw meat being thrown it, in the short space of five minutes the blood will be thoroughly drunk off and the mass thrown aside. Its voracity is almost beyond belief.’
None could quite agree on the piece’s source or author, but they were surprisingly open-minded as to its truth. “It must be admitted to be circumstantial enough in all its details to be possible,” wrote the editors of the Spectator. “The story is unquestionably a very curious one, and we may rely upon it, that if the plant really does exist, we shall soon have a specimen at Kew. The digging of the Nicaragua Canal will bring plenty of Americans and Englishmen into the very country where the ‘vampire vine’ is said to exist, and the question whether the whole thing is or is not a hoax may very soon be tested.” Indeed, they said, this argued in favor of the story’s truth: A hoaxer would have placed his plant in a more obscure location.
Imp Perfect
Apparently bored in 1940, Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson sent a note to socialite Sibyl Colefax:
I wonder if by any chance you are free to dine tomorrow night? It is only a tiny party for Winston and GBS. I think it important they should get together at this moment. There will be nobody else except for Toscanini and myself. Do please try and forgive this terribly short notice. Eight o’clock and — of course — any old clothes.
He made sure that both the signature and the address were illegible.
The Branded Pen
In the early 1980s Doris Lessing published two novels under a pseudonym. “I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that ‘nothing succeeds like success,’” she told the New York Times. “If the books had come out in my name, they would have sold a lot of copies and reviewers would have said, ‘Oh, Doris Lessing, how wonderful.’”
It appears her concerns were justified. Diary of a Good Neighbor was rejected by Lessing’s regular U.K. publisher as “not commercially viable”; another house said it was “too depressing to publish.” When it did appear and no one recognized her work, she wrote a second novel, If the Old Could, under the same pseudonym. Each book received promotion typical for a novel by an unknown author, garnered few reviews, and sold only a few thousand copies.
“Some of the so-called experts on my work, people who I know looked at the novels by Jane Somers, didn’t recognize it was me,” Lessing said. “And many of the readers’ reports to the publishers were very patronizing and very nasty. … What happens mostly is that an immense amount of space will be given to not very good books by established writers.”
Bullet Train
On Oct. 15, 1856, the London Times published an alarming account of a rail journey in Georgia — the author, “John Arrowsmith of Liverpool,” claimed that half a dozen duels had broken out during a single day’s ride:
Of the two dozen passengers fifteen are mentioned as entering more or less into the action of the drama; twelve took a direct part in duels; six were killed, and three were left on the way fighting. Four of the duels were fought at convenient spots, the train stopping for the purpose; one was fought in the luggage car while the train was in motion; and the one with uncertain results was fought at a regular stopping place. Three of the dead bodies were left behind; one was carried from the scene of the duel and deposited on the luggage; another lay where it fell in the luggage car; another was throw out on the roadside.
After a torrent of ridicule from the American press, the retraction-shy Times tried to claim that the affair had taken place in 1828 — but that was “some dozen years,” one critic noted, “before the erection of a railroad in Georgia, or the invention of revolvers, the terrible weapons used upon the sanguinary occasion.” The hoaxer was never identified.
Homespun Silk
A publishing sensation swept the United States in 1926: The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 offered scandalous insights into 18th-century society through the observations of one Cleone Knox, who met Louis XV at Versailles, was introduced to Voltaire in Switzerland, and led a pretty eventful private life:
March 3rd [1764]. This morning had a vastly unpleasant interview with my Father. Last night, Mr. Ancaster, who is the indiscreetest young man alive, was seized suddenly while riding home along the shore with the desire to say good night to me. He climbed the wall, the postern gate being locked at that late hour, and had the Boldness to attempt to climb the ivy below my window; while but half way up the Poor Impudent young man fell. (If he hadn’t Lord knows what would have happened for I am terribly catched by the Handsome Wretch.) As ill luck would have it Papa and Ned, who were conversing in the library, looked out at that moment and saw him lying prostrate on the ground!
America swooned, and the book went through nine editions in two months. One critic wrote, “No modern girl will ever write a diary like this. Cleone Knox breathes the very spirit of the witty, robust, patriotic, wicked, hard-drinking, hard-swearing 18th century.”
Alas, a modern girl had. Embarrassed by the publicity, 19-year-old Magdalen King-Hall came forward to say that she had invented the tale using books from the Brighton town reference library. “I wrote the book in a few weeks,” she said, “but, if I had realized so many distinguished people would have taken it seriously, I should have spent much more time and pains upon it.” She had not meant to deceive anyone — but perhaps her publisher had.
King for a Day
In 1913, German acrobat Otto Witte was traveling through the Balkans when Albania declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire. A fellow circus performer noted Witte’s resemblance to Prince Halim Eddine, whom a local faction were entreating to head the new state.
Witte maintained that he forged a couple of telegrams, arrived in the fledgling nation posing as Eddine, took control of the military, and was proclaimed king. For five days he disported with harem girls, ordered amnesty for prisoners, and distributed gold among the local chieftains. When inquiries began to arrive from Constantinople, he slipped out of town “to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.”
Skeptics note that this story is uncomfortably close to The Prisoner of Zenda, whose first film adaptation had appeared in that year. But Witte insisted the story was true, pointing to his official identity card, issued by the Berlin police, which listed his occupation as “circus entertainer” and “onetime king of Albania.” He seems to have convinced at least himself of the tale — when Witte died in 1958, Time noted that he would accept only mail that was addressed to “Otto I, ex-King of Albania.”
“Precocity in Pigtails”
This is James Norman Hall. He co-wrote Mutiny on the Bounty, operated a machine gun for the Royal Fusiliers, flew with the Lafayette Escadrille, and spent months as a German POW.
And he wrote the poetry of a 9-year-old girl.
Literally. In 1938 a girl came to Hall in a troubled dream and began dictating poems to him about life in his childhood home of Colfax, Iowa. “She told me things about people in our hometown that I had completely forgotten, or thought I had.”
He typed them up and published them under the title Oh, Millersville!, claiming they were the rediscovered work of a turn-of-the-century Iowa farmgirl named Fern Gravel:
Oh, it is wonderful in Millersville
On many a winter night,
When the ground is covered with snow
And the moon is shining so bright.
You can hear the sleigh-bells jingling
Everywhere around.
I don’t think there could be
A more beautiful sound.
Keats it ain’t, but its homely charm brought writeups in the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Hall let six years elapse before he published a confession in the Atlantic Monthly, explaining that he’d been ruminating on the evils of industrialization when the girl’s voice had entered his thoughts. The voice, it seemed, remained: Hall wrote a dozen more books and moved to Tahiti, but in his autobiography he wrote that “Iowa, for all the years I have been away from it, has always been, and still is, home for me.”
Tied Up
Posing as a surveyor, English prankster Horace de Vere Cole asked a passerby to hold one end of a length of string while he made a measurement. He chose the “pompous sort of good citizen of the bowler hat and rolled umbrella sort,” according to his friend David Scott-Moncrieff. Then he walked around a corner and give the other end to “another consequential ass.”
“Both victims held their ends for fully ten minutes, each invisible to the other, while the perpetrator of the joke quietly slipped away and joined me in a pub commanding a full view of the fun,” Scott-Moncrieff wrote later. “It succeeded far better than I had dared to hope, due to his brilliant selection of two absolutely perfect victims. Each blamed the other, and they nearly came to blows.”
On his honeymoon in 1919, Cole deposited neat piles of horse manure on Venice’s Piazza San Marco … which was devoid of horses. More of his pranks.
