Sultan of Zanzibar

A generation knew him as the man behind the Dreadnought hoax, and Horace de Vere Cole entertained the nation for over twenty years through the tabloids and the gossip columns. And yet the mischief, apparently innocent and impish, concealed an undercurrent of anger, frustration and violence. 'Our chief jester' was, as Winston Churchill said, 'a very dangerous man to his friends', with a darker and more political side. He was a complex figure, in whom many of the conflicts and contradictions of his times mingled.

A generation knew him as the man behind the Dreadnought hoax, and Horace de Vere Cole entertained the nation for over twenty years through the tabloids and the gossip columns. And yet the mischief, apparently innocent and impish, concealed an undercurrent of anger, frustration and violence. 'Our chief jester' was, as Winston Churchill said, 'a very dangerous man to his friends', with a darker and more political side. He was a complex figure, in whom many of the conflicts and contradictions of his times mingled.

The Dreadnought hoax in 1910 scandalised the Edwardian establishment and provided the tabloid newspapers with a story that would run and run. The man behind it has lived in the popular imagination ever since as the world's greatest practical joker. But he was much more than that. He was a socialist whose hoaxes were intended as skewers to pomposity; a socialite who moved as easily through Soho and Whitechapel as Belgravia; an Anglo-Irish eccentric in whose character violence mingled with dreamy romanticism and high-minded poetic idealism. Once the toast of society and the popular press, he lost his fortune and died alone in poverty. For his most famous hoax, Cole and a group of friends (including the youthful Virginia Woolf) impersonated a delegation of Abyssinian princes and talked their way into an inspection of the Royal Navy's flagship, HMS Dreadnought. Showing a distinctly modern flair for media manipulation, Cole fed the press the story, making him an overnight celebrity and the Navy a laughing stock. With unique access to Cole's papers and letters, Martyn Downer has written the first biography of this fascinating, quixotic and complex man. Now that a century has passed since Cole's audacious stunt, it is surely time for his story to be told. In The Sultan of Zanzibar, Downer conjures up a vanished pre-war world of seedy nightclubs, artistic battles and doomed love affairs with, at its heart-roaring, blustering and raging - its chief jester Horace de Vere Cole.

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