Odd this day
Admiral Sir William May, Commander in Chief of the Home Fleet, received a telegram on board HMS Dreadnought, flagship of the Royal Navy, then moored at Portland. It arrived at about 3.30pm, was signed “Harding, Foreign Office” and informed him:
Prince Makalem of Abbysinia and suite arrive 4.20 today Weymouth he wishes to see dreadnought. Kindly arrange meet them on arrival regret short notice forgot wire before interpreter accompanies them.
Sir William did what any right-thinking Englishman would and got his men scrambling into action PDQ. Captain Herbert Richmond and an honour guard met four dark-skinned, bearded men in flowing robes at Weymouth station at 4.20pm and conveyed them at once to the great ship. The bandmaster couldn’t greet them, as hoped, with the Abyssinian national anthem, because no-one knew it, but a Foreign Office report later said they played
The Dover Castle March which had a fairly regal sound.
The party of foreign gentlemen was delighted with the visit anyway, pottering round happily for 45 minutes and marvelling at such new-fangled things as a wireless and torpedoes. Each fresh delight was met with a chorus of excitement. “Bunga, bunga!” they said, as one, in their authentic native language.
Yes, this was, in fact, Horace de Vere Cole and three friends from the Bloomsbury Group enjoying their first moment in the spotlight when it turned out later that the whole thing was a prank. Not only that: it was a repeat of a prank he’d first carried out during his time at Cambridge, on that occasion pretending to be the uncle of the Sultan of Zanzibar at the expense of the dignity of the university’s Vice-Chancellor (who declined to have the young man sent down, on the grounds that that would make Trinity College look even more silly than it did already).
The rest of the cast list of blacked-up bohemians was Virginia Stephen, Guy Ridley, Anthony Buxton and artist Duncan Grant. Horace posed as a representative of the F.O., and Virginia’s brother Adrian was the ‘interpreter’.
Sir William found out the next day that he’d been had, and suffered further humiliation when the story made the Daily Express a week later. He demanded retribution, and a police handwriting expert was called in to examine the telegram. This turned out to be from a Mr Tudor R. Castle — and, incredibly, the handwriting expert wasn’t in on the joke. Tudor Castle was a real person’s actual name. Eventually, however, the Admiralty took the same view as the Cambridge College and let the whole thing drop.
Two codas to the story came along in 1915: in the first, Virginia published a novel. She’d got married in the meantime, to a Leonard Woolf. The second event that year was that HMS Dreadnought became the only battleship ever to have rammed and sunk a German submarine. One of the congratulatory telegrams read:
BUNGA BUNGA.
