Episode I: The Dreadnought Hoax
The long 19th century was a time when racism was an adventure. In that age when yt ppl were at their most tricknological, quirked up kkkrackas were launching new expeditions in caucasity at unprecedented levels. This is the Yakubian Years...
The Dreadnought Hoax was a practical joke organized by noted prankster Horace de Vere Cole. An Old Etonian and veteran of the Second Boer War, Cole began a new profession as a prankster while he read at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1902.
While at Cambridge, Cole encountered a set of bohemian writers, artists, and thinkers through his friend Adrian Stephen, a pioneer of Freudian psychoanalysis in England. This loose web of acquaintances would go on to form what became known as the Bloomsbury group after finishing their studies.
Stephen's elder sister was none other than trailblazing modernist novelist Virginia Woolf but she wasn't married yet so her last name was still Stephen.
In 1905, Sayyid Ali bin Hamud al-Busaidi, sultan of Zanzibar, visited England. Cole and Stephen used the visit as the basis for their first hoax, sending a telegram to the mayor of Cambridge alleging that the sultan would be visiting the town. They then donned blackface and went to the railway station.
Sayyid Ali bin Hamud al-Busaidi, sultan of Zanzibar (left). Adrian Stephen, Robert Bowen Colthurst, Horace de Vere Cole, Leland Buxton, and Lyulph "Drummer" Howard, dressed in orientalist robes and turbans borrowed from costume designer, Willy Clarkson (right). The "sultan's entourage" is done up in blackface makeup.
The deception went off without a hitch. The mayor gave the "dignitaries" a welcome reception and tour of the town and university. None of the students recognized their disguised classmates. The next day, Cole gave an interview in the Daily Mail, revealing the prank and embarrassing the mayor.
Newspaper headlines and a political cartoon about "The Cambridge Hoax".
Five years later, Cole set his sights on a much deadlier target, the Royal Navy. Britain had been monitoring an alarming naval buildup in Germany since 1897. Queen Victoria's grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, wished to live up to his grandmother's legacy and build a strong navy of his own to stand beside the British as peers. Britain, of course, would have none of it, the splendid isolation the Home Islands had enjoyed for nearly a century was predicated upon the unparalleled strength of the Royal Navy.
In 1908, Germany's ally, the byzantine Habsburg monstrostity of Austria-Hungary, annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. The controlled demolition of Muslim hegemony in the Balkans would ignite tensions that would make the region the powder keg that caused WWI and left deep scars that haunted the region through the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s to the present. Despite its prestige and penchant for unilateral action, Austria-Hungary was a kafkaesque paper tiger that relied on its military alliance with the Prussian-dominated German Empire to back its actions.
Germany, feeling the need to expand its military to support Austria's quixotic crusader fantasies, approved more naval funding in 1908 in an effort to achieve parity with the British. This, in turn, forced Britain to increase its naval spending and triggered a global arms race.
The HMS Dreadnought was the most advanced ship built in its age, it represented the peak of British naval engineering. In those days, the Dreadnought was the Royal Navy and the Royal Navy was the Empire. Ironically, it would miss the only significant naval battle of WWI, the Battle of Jutland.
Cole's next hoax would be a repeat of his earlier antics at Cambridge, but on a national scale. He was joined in this endeavor by his longstanding compatriot Adrian Stephen, Adrian's sister, Virginia, Duncan Grant (John Maynard Keynes' boyfriend), Guy Ridley, and Anthony Buxton.
According to a 1940 interview, Woolf claims the hoax was the idea of some officers from the HMS Hawke who were friends of Cole's. The Hawke is another vessel with a storied history, having famously crashed with the Titanic's sister ship, the Olympic. It was sunk by a U-boat at the outbreak of WWI.
Life cycle of the HMS Hawke.
Once again, Willy Clarkson, suspect in the Jack the Ripper case, was called upon to deck the hoaxers in suitably orientalist garb and blackface.
Willy Clarkson (left), does this man look like he could dismember a lady of the night? The hoaxsters (right) in blackface, bet you don't remember this chapter in Mrs. Dalloway.
A telegram was sent and the hoaxers headed to the train station. They were then escorted to the Dreadnought, where the ship's crew greeted them with an impromptu honor guard. No Abyssinian flag could be found, so the flag of Zanzibar was used while the band played Zanzibar's national anthem.
The delegation asked for prayer mats, attempted to bestow fake military honors upon the crew, and shuffled about mumbling "bunga bunga". Following Cole's interview with the Daily Mirror outing the hoax, the pacifistic pranksters (minus Woolf) were subjected to a public spanking.
"Bunga Bunga" became a popular meme in Britain for the remaining decade. After the Dreadnought reported that it had rammed SM U-29, making it the only battleship to ever purposely sink a submarine, the crew received a telegram of congratulations reading simply "BUNGA BUNGA".
Tune in next time for another installment of the Yakubian Years featuring one of the quirkiest white bois to ever be goated with the sauce...
