Overview
On 24 February 1910 a Member of Parliament stood up in the House of Commons and asked the First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, "whether a hoax has been played upon the naval authorities by the pretended visit of some Abyssinian princes." McKenna confirmed that one had. "A number of persons put themselves to considerable trouble and expense in pretending to be a party of Abyssinians," he said, "and in this disguise visited one of His Majesty's ships." When a second member asked whether the joke was "a direct insult to His Majesty's flag," McKenna declined to go further "into a matter which is obviously the work of foolish persons."
The ship was HMS Dreadnought, flagship of the Home Fleet and the vessel that had given its name to a whole class of battleship. The foolish persons included Horace de Vere Cole, a professional prankster, and a 28-year-old Virginia Stephen, who would later write under her married name, Woolf.
Five years later the Royal Navy was staging its own deception. On Winston Churchill's orders, merchant ships were dressed in wood and canvas to pass as battleships. This article covers both episodes and the idea that grew out of putting them side by side: that British sea power in the dreadnought era was partly theatre, a matter of what could be made to look real.
The visit
The fullest documentary account comes from the Admiralty and Foreign Office files at the National Archives, summarised in 2017 by the naval historian Richard Dunley. On the afternoon of 7 February 1910, Admiral Sir William May, commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet, received a telegram reporting that "Prince Makalen of Abyssinia," with his suite and an interpreter, was arriving at Weymouth on the 16.20 train and wished to see Dreadnought. It was signed "Harding Foreign Office."
Less than an hour later four men in long robes, accompanied by two in Western dress, were met at Weymouth station by Captain Herbert Richmond and an honour guard. They were taken out by the admiral's barge and shown around the ship by May himself. The visitors had blacked their faces and wore false beards and theatrical robes. A photograph of them in costume, later used as the frontispiece of Adrian Stephen's account, shows six people: Virginia Stephen, the painter Duncan Grant, Cole, Anthony Buxton, Virginia's brother Adrian Stephen and Guy Ridley. Cole himself went undisguised, in a top hat, as a young gentleman from the Foreign Office escorting the party.
The files record small embarrassments. "The Bandmaster didn't know the anthem of Abyssinia," one account notes, "so we played 'The Dover Castle March' which had a fairly regal sound." The party stayed about 45 minutes and left on the 18.00 train. Afterwards some officers had doubts. One reported he thought the "interpreter had a false beard." Richmond wrote to the Foreign Secretary's private secretary that "the 4 Abyssinians were all introduced as Princes. I hope they weren't frauds pulling our legs. If they were they did it very well."
The confession
The next day, according to the Foreign Office files, "a man by the name of Cole" called at the Foreign Office to say he had been aboard Dreadnought "in the guise of Abyssinian visitors to this country," and that the visit was a deliberate hoax. Officials' first inclination was "to regard the man as mad." The Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Charles Hardinge, thought the Admiralty should be told anyway. He then learned that a delegation had been received the previous afternoon on the strength of a telegram in his name. After a copy was fetched from the General Post Office, Hardinge confirmed that "it was neither signed by him nor despatched under his instructions."
Then the story reached the newspapers. The Daily Express reported on 14 February that the "princes" had been shown "everything – the wireless, the guns and the torpedoes, and at every fresh sight they murmured in chorus 'Bunga bunga'." The phrase followed the ship for years. Dunley found that it was used in the navy "to deride their colleagues on Dreadnought," and that it "even ended up in a Portland music hall song."
The navy's response
Nothing in the Admiralty file suggests anyone found it funny. May, Dunley writes, "felt humiliated and demanded action 'to punish the ringleaders'." The Admiralty asked the Foreign Office to back a referral to the Director of Public Prosecutions, arguing that the "abuse of the telegraph in such a way as to mislead officers in command" could not be allowed to pass. Hardinge declined to join in, pointing out that most of what was known had come from Cole himself and could hardly be used in court.
The police went ahead anyway. A handwriting expert named a likely sender of the telegram, a Mr Tudor R. Castle, but the Director of Public Prosecutions remained unsure. As the embarrassment faded, the Admiralty decided it was better not to press charges. In April the Daily Express reported that the navy had found another remedy: two of the "princes" had been invited to a house in London and "administered six strokes with a cane," and had "submitted to the castigation with lamb-like docility."
In the Commons the matter came up twice. After the February exchange, a member asked on 2 March whether the visitors had been given "full naval honours" and a special train back to London. McKenna replied that "no flags were hoisted or salutes fired, and no special train was ordered by the Admiral." A follow-up about whether "certain pairs of white kid gloves were actually purchased for the occasion," and who would pay for them, drew the reply that the questioner was "better informed than I am."
In 1936 Adrian Stephen published his own account, The 'Dreadnought' Hoax, through the Hogarth Press, which his sister and her husband ran. Reviewing it in The Spectator, an old friend of Cole's wrote that it was "a two to one chance" that the top-hatted Cole, "a well-known man about London," would be recognised by someone on board. In the reviewer's words, "no precautions whatever seem to have been taken."
The dummy fleet
On 21 October 1914, eleven weeks into the First World War, Churchill sent a minute marked "Most Secret" to his senior Admiralty colleagues. He later printed it in an appendix to The World Crisis:
"It is necessary to construct without delay a dummy fleet: 10 merchant vessels, either German prizes or British ships, should be selected at once... They are then to be mocked up to represent particular battleships of the 1st and 2nd Battle Squadrons."
The ships did not need to match the originals exactly, "as it is notoriously difficult to judge the size of vessels at sea." The work was to be done "in wood or canvas." Churchill's reasoning was that the fleet's mere existence would cause trouble: "even when the enemy knows that we have such a fleet its presence will tend to mystify and confuse his plans and baffle and distract the enterprise of his submarines. He will always be in doubt as to which is the real and which is the dummy fleet." He added that the idea was not new: "Three years ago I formed this idea, and deeply regret that I have been so long deterred from putting it into execution."
Lord Fisher returned as First Sea Lord ten days later. In his 1919 memoirs he wrote that he "at once got hold of" Herbert Haddock, master of the White Star liner Olympic, made him a commodore, and gave him command of "the finest fleet of dummy wooden 'Dreadnoughts' and Battle Cruisers the world had ever looked on." The Royal Fleet Auxiliary's historical society records that 14 ships were eventually requisitioned and converted, "a mixture of Cargo ships and Passenger Liners" given canvas and wooden gun turrets, masts and ballast.
Did it work?
The evidence is mixed, and partly contradictory. In The World Crisis Churchill wrote that in January 1915 the German naval staff "had heard about the dummy warships which were being constructed in Belfast" and connected them with a supposed British plan to block the river mouths of the Heligoland Bight. The secret had already leaked. By April several of the dummies had been sent to the Mediterranean, Churchill wrote, "hoping thereby to tempt the enemy to battle in the North Sea."
Fisher remembered a more dramatic result. "The 'Queen Elizabeth' in wood got blown up by the Germans at the Dardanelles instead of the real one," he wrote, and "the Germans left the other battleships alone chasing the 'Elizabeth'." The loss records tell a slightly different story. The ship actually sunk was the former American Line steamer Merion, 19,380 tons, which the Admiralty had bought in 1914 to represent the battlecruiser HMS Tiger. She was torpedoed by the German submarine UB 8 on 30 May 1915 off Strati Island in the Aegean, near the entrance to the Dardanelles. The RFA historical society notes simply that "whether this subterfuge worked is not known." The project did not last long. Eight of the ships went on to serve as tankers, store ships and in one case a kite balloon ship.
From prank to theory
Each of these episodes is well documented, and neither is in dispute. The theory that bears their name joins them together. In its stronger form it holds that British naval supremacy before and during the First World War rested partly on bluff. In this telling the dreadnought was as much a stage set as a weapon, and the Admiralty knew it.
What gives the idea its pull is the overlap between the two stories. In 1910 a handful of amateurs with greasepaint and a forged telegram persuaded the flagship of the Home Fleet to show them its guns. In 1914 the First Lord of the Admiralty wrote that, since "it is notoriously difficult to judge the size of vessels at sea," wood and canvas would do. He added that he had first thought of it three years earlier, a year after the hoax. Read together, they suggest an institution that knew how much of its power depended on being believed.
The documentary record takes it no further than that. The dummy squadron was 14 converted merchant ships, built after war began, and Churchill expected the enemy to learn of it. The battle fleet they imitated was real, as Jutland showed in 1916. The hoax showed that the navy's deference to rank could be exploited, not that its ships were hollow. What the two stories document is a navy that cared a great deal about appearances, and was twice caught out by how far appearances could go.