Raise a glass today for Horace de Vere Cole, Neville Chamberlain’s brother-in-law, and a prankster of rare dedication.
Here was a man who once stood in the street handing out free theatre tickets to a series of extremely bald passers-by with the result that, when viewed from the dress circle, the assembly of shiny bald heads in the carefully chosen seats clearly spelt out an expletive – complete with a dot over the ‘i’.
He had a Corkman’s flair for obscenity. His Who’s Who entry was rejected when he described his chief recreation as “fucking”, and the things he did with a cow’s udder must have given nightmares to many.
Find out more about Cole and his ilk in Norman Moss’s 1977 work The Pleasures of Deception, or in the unusually good Daily Mail article from which I have quoted above.
That is fantastic, I never heard of this chap.