Horace de Vere Cole

William Horace de Vere Cole (5 May 1881 – 25 February 1936) was an eccentric prankster born in Ballincollig, County Cork, Ireland. His most famous prank was the Dreadnought hoax where he and several others in blackface, pretending to be an Abyssinian prince and his entourage, were given a tour of the Royal Navy ship HMS Dreadnought. Family background and early life Cole was the son of British Army officer William Utting Cole, a major in the 3rd Dragoon Guards who died of cholera in India when his son was a child. His mother, Mary de Vere, was a niece and heiress of politician Sir Stephen de Vere, 4th Baronet. Cole was a great-nephew of the Anglo-Irish poet Aubrey de Vere. Horace's paternal grandfather had made his fortune dealing in quinine, while his mother's family claimed kinship with the de Vere Earls of Oxford and the right to the position of Lord Great Chamberlain of England. A bout of diphtheria at the age of ten seriously affected his hearing for the remainder of his life. A few years later, he was sent as a boarder to Eton College. During the Second Boer War, Cole was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Yorkshire Hussars, in which he quickly rose to the rank of acting captain. He was wounded by a dumdum bullet on 2 July 1900 and recuperated from shrapnel wounds at the Red Cross hospital in Kroonstad until September that year. He was subsequently invalided out of the army, donating the £1800 he received from cashing in his disability pension to the war widows and orphans fund. On his return to England, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1902, although he did not complete his degree.