The Sultan of Zanzibar

by Martyn Downer
Black tyring 310pp £16.99
The Week bookshop £15.29 (incl. p&p)


"The trouble with practical jokes is chat they arc not very funny," said Nigel Jones in The Sunday Telegraph. "Laboured, elaborate, often expensive, depending on their victims' credulity, their whole point is to make fools of people." Horace de Vere Cole, "the subject of this beautifully written, but, ironically, rather sad biography, was the exemplary exponent of this very English form of fun". Described by his friend Winston Churchill as "our chief jester", he was most famous for the Dreadnought hoax of
1910, in which a group of friends posed as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his entourage, and were given a tour of the Royal Navy's revolutionary battleship. Cole's life was a procession of elaborate pranks. He passed himself off as the Sultan of Zanzibar; he held a party for people whose names all included the word "bottom"; he and a group of chums dug up Piccadilly Circus disguised as workmen, then watched the resulting mayhem from the Ritz; and he once strolled through the West End with a cow's teat dangling from his fly.
Cole was also a very angry man, said Lynnc Truss in The Sunday Times. Born into a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, he had a miserable childhood. His father died when Cole was 11, his mother remarried, and he was rendered nearly deaf by diphtheria. He suffered from "black rages", which expressed themselves in the form of cruel japes: not just knocking off people's hats and feigning epilepsy in the street, but trying to poison a house guest or sticking a knife into a friend's pillow - next to his head. The problem with this biography is that it is always tries to pass these off as "pranks" and never acknowledges that Cole was really a "Grade One deviant nutcase". Is it really a "joke", for instance, "to get someone committed as insane using a form stolen from a doctor"?