""" On February 7th, 1910, Virginia Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) and five of her Bloomsbury companions—painter Duncan Grant, Woolf’s brother Adrian, Anthony Buxton, Guy Ridley, and Horace de Vere Cole—boarded the pride of the British Royal Navy, the HMS Dreadnought, dressed in blackface and outlandish stage costumes. (In the photo above, from left to right.) In what became known as “The Dreadnought Hoax,” the six convinced the Dreadnought’s officers that they were the “Emperor of Abyssinia” (now Ethiopia) and his entourage, and they were received with high honors. The hoax, masterminded by Cole, began when he sent a telegram to the ship telling the crew to expect a visit from some North African dignitaries. Once on board, the group spoke in accented Latin (quoting the Aeneid) and gibberish. Woolf kept quiet so as to disguise her gender. One of the officers on the ship was a cousin of Virginia and Adrian, but he failed to recognize them. It wasn’t a flawless performance on either side: at one point, Buxton sneezed and almost lost his mustache, and the Navy, unable to find an Abyssinian flag, flew the flag of Zanzibar instead. In the audio recording above, you can hear Duncan Grant recount the adventure in a 1975 interview. The “princes” asked for prayer mats, presented the officers with fake military honors, and exclaimed “bunga, bunga!” each time they were shown some marvel of the ship. The Dreadnought was then, in the words of Woolf’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, “the flagship of the Home Fleet, the most formidable, the most modern, and the most secret man o’ war then afloat.” (This incident is said to be the origin of the ludicrous phrase “bunga, bunga,” most associated with the exploits of the recently convicted Silvio Berlusconi.) The next day, Cole anonymously sent the photograph at the top to The Daily Mirror, revealing the hoax.""" Heh. GG.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 06:58:33 +0000
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