Good morning! And welcome once again to Sunday Griot! Come on in, have a seat and I’ll tell you a story. Today’s story is true — well all stories are true, but this one actually happened (although as usual it’s been embellished a bit), and though it happened almost 100 years ago, it has a message for today. We begin the story in the middle of a discussion about whether . . . an innocent man has nothing to fear.
“But why should he?” said Horace’s friend. “If a man has done nothing, why should he worry? The facts of it will come out.”
The year was 1909. Horace was a student at Cambridge, and keenly interested in politics. He happened to be in London that day, and had met up with a friend of his, a member of Parliament from Leeds. The topic of discussion had turned to crime and punishment, and whether an innocent man had anything to fear from the authorities.
The debate had been going on for some time when suddenly Horace sighed. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said in apparent acquiescence. He looked up absently, as if listening to some inner voice, then tapped his friend on the shoulder. “Race you to the corner?”
“You’re on,” said the MP.
“All right,” said Horace. “Ready – steady – GO!”
The MP took off like a shot, but instead of racing, Horace began to scream bloody murder. “Thief! Thief!” he yelled. “Stop that man! He’s got my watch!” Only then did Horace take off running after the MP.
A policeman at the corner the MP had been rushing toward grabbed the MP as he rushed past. “What’s all this then?” the copper asked.
Horace rushed up to the policeman, out of breath. “Thank you, officer,” he panted.
“Stop this!” the MP said to Horace, then turned to the officer. “Do you know who I am?”
“Can’t say that I do, sir,” the policeman replied. The MP identified himself.
“And my name, officer,” Horace offered, “is Horace de Vere Cole.”
Horace made a great show of reaching into the MP’s jacket pocket and he pulled out a watch, which he had slipped into the pocket when his friend wasn’t looking. Inside the cover of the watch was the inscription: “H. d.V. Cole.”
The officer led the MP away, still protesting. “Don’t worry,” Horace called after him. “After all, an innocent man has nothing to fear.”
Whenever a list of great hoaxsters and pranksters is compiled, a few names invariably turn up. Alan Abel, the mad genius behind the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals; Hugh Troy, who spent part of World War II traveling ahead of ethnologists studying the lives of South Pacific islanders and bribing children with chocolate bars to tell the ethnologists outrageous and completely spurious native tales; and Horace de Vere Cole.
Cole (1881-1936) was an aristocrat, the brother-in-law of Neville Chamberlain, and a man with a fertile imagination that seemed perfectly tuned to making mischief. Coming across a loitering work crew one day, he directed them into Picadilly Circus and set them about digging a ditch (a feat later duplicated by Hugh Troy in New York). On his honeymoon in Italy, he spent some time on the mainland collecting horse droppings. He later surrepetitiously deposited them on sidewalks in Venice, which of course has canals instead of streets, leaving a puzzled populace to wonder how they had gotten there. (His wife must have been quite a remarkable woman.) And he perpetrated the Dreadnought hoax, where several of his friends (including a young Virginia Woolf) made themselves up as visitors from Abyssinia and were entertained as dignitaries by the Royal Navy.
Today’s story is apparently true, and I believe I first heard it in H. Allen Smith’s The Compleat Practical Joker. Smith was an admirer of Troy and Cole, and recounted several of their exploits in the book. Lately this particular story has taken on a darker side, though. Maybe it’s just paranoia, but when the subject of the Patriot Act comes up, or people talk about you don’t have to worry if you haven’t done anything wrong, I can’t help but think of Horace’s friend the MP.
But, I don’t want to end Sunday Griot on a downer, so let me offer you this tidbit I found while researching today’s story. I’m sure that wherever he was at the time, Cole looked down on the scene with approval and amusement. The story is from the Financial Times by way of Norway’s Handelshøyskole:
A fake orchestra joins the parade of phoneys
Wherever there is a gain to be ill got, there have been fakes and forgers. Yet, it is difficult not to hold a degree of sneaking admiration when an entire orchestra of impostors pulls off a grand deception. Last month ten thousand music lovers in Hong Kong paid to see performances by the illustrious Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. The critics scribbled and the multitudes applauded. No one suspected anything amiss until it was discovered that the real Moscow Philharmonic was actually on a tour of France and Spain at the time.
Attempts are being made to identify the mystery music-makers. The Moscow Philharmonic has made it clear that it does not field a “B” team. Nor was this an upmarket edition of the TV series Stars in your Eyes, featuring an entire orchestra impersonating their favourite performers. Pop music generates its fair share of “tribute bands” hamming up the tunes of groups who are now far too grand – or defunct – to do the circuit of student balls and solicitors’ discotheques. But the Hong Kong farrago is a first for the classical world.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. It also attracts more than its fair share of eccentrics willing to take their chances. For the breadth of his repertoire, the overall prize for gall should surely go to Britain’s master hoaxer, Horace de Vere Cole. Donning workman’s overalls, this highly improbable brother-in-law of Neville Chamberlain chose to dig an enormous crater in the middle of Piccadilly.
He even enjoyed a bit of friendly workman’s banter with unsuspecting passing policemen as he went about blocking the busy thoroughfare.
These days, such deceptions often have a less innocent intent. The real Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra has a right to feel aggrieved that its reputation has been tarnished by those taking its name in vain so shamelessly. But Hong Kong cognoscenti now demanding their money back ought to know when to keep quiet – they were loud enough when they applauded the bogus band to the rafters.
Thank you all for visiting today! As always, cheers to all of you, and happy stories until we meet again.
innocent villagers to the US military as “terrorists” and they ended up at Gitmo they did not even have to produce a planted watch.
The innocent have even more to fear than the guilty since they have no reason to be careful.
Great story as usual.
Yeah, don’t think I wasn’t thinking about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib while I was typing this up . . .
Thanks for stopping by! Nice to see you.
Great story, as usual, and definitely timely. Although I suppose it has always been. There are people who still firmly believe that if you are innocent there is nothing to fear, and that even if you are mistakenly arrested/detained, that all will come out okay, because the innnocence will shine through. This in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
I often enjoy your stories about the story just as much as the stories themselves.
Thanks.
I’m glad you like the stories behind the stories. They’re fun to write, and I think they give some interesting insight into the stories and how they came to be.
But please, shoot me if I ever start writing the story behind the story behind the story . . .
This hasn’t caught on more. Probably people are coming, reading the stories and then just moving on? They do always have a good message to them, and sometimes can even be applied to current events.
Maybe you should try bringing in involvement in some way? Maybe tell your original story, and then the story behind the story (but no further 😉 and then an exercise of sorts… maybe a brief set up, 3 elements that must be included and have people add their own stories in comments. Or hide something in your stories and ask people if they can find it and explain it. Or something like that.
Then again, maybe not. I’m just thinkin’ 😉
and I really don’t know why the stories haven’t caught on more than they have. Maybe it’s because they aren’t interactive like Carnacki’s Got A Happy Story? diary, where the readers submit their own experiences. (I see Catnip has picked up on that in one of the Mojo Fest diaries.)
In any given week I get about 300 different visitors to the Sunday Griot diaries here and on Kos. They usually run about 10:1 between those reading at Kos and those visiting here. That was down to about 9:1 this week; whether that’s just an anomaly or part of the Pie Effect, I don’t know. So this tells me there are plenty of people who are reading but for whatever reason, not commenting. Sometimes there are more comments, sometimes less; for instance, the story “Passover in Hell” got a lot of response. (If you missed it, it was about a group of Jews celebrating Passover in a concentration camp during World War II.)
And really, that’s fine with me. While I would love to see 200 comments under every story and a lively discussion every week and have Sunday Griot hit the top of the recommended list on both sites on a consistent basis, the real point of Sunday Griot is more to get the stories out there, get people reading them and telling them to their friends and using them to frame progressive points of view. Just as an example of a potential success, yesterday during the “core values” discussion over on Kos someone mentioned that privacy issues fell on deaf ears with his father. “Why should I worry?” the fellow quoted his father as saying. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” I pointed the poster to the story above as a counter-argument.
The one thing I don’t want to do is turn into one of those “PLEEEEEEEEEEEEASE somebody notice my diary!!!!!!!!” types. There are a lot of people out there posting diaries, and some of them have things that are more important to get in front of the community than my stories. So I’ve restricted myself to promoting Sunday Griot in open threads, mail to friends, and a couple other places. Hopefully the stories will be of sufficient quality that they will catch on in spite of any marketing clumsiness on my part.
Thanks for the ideas; I’ll have to think about them. I would like to hear other peoples’ stories too; I like to think my stories are good, but they have some limitations, not the least of which being that they are all told in my voice and on subjects I happen to think of.