Selhurst's Tercentenary

H. Rochester Sneath, headmaster of Selhurst School, "near Petworth in Sussex," seemed to need advice. Since fashionable Marlborough College had recently been visited by the royal family, Sneath wrote to Marlborough's headmaster: "As you are probably aware, this summer sees the 300th anniversary of the foundation of Selhurst ... I am most anxious to have the honor of entertaining Their Majesties, if this is at all feasible. How did you engineer your royal visit?"

Marlborough's headmaster answered civilly but uncommunicatively. Others were less civil. Sneath wrote to George Bernard Shaw, reminding him of "the long-standing connections between your late wife's family and the school" and asking his attendance at the tercentenary. Replied G.B.S.: "Never heard of any such connection. Too old (91), anyhow."

Sneath kept trying. To the master of another distinguished school he wrote: "You will doubtless remember old Tubby Sneath--well, it will give you a helluva shock, you old bounder, because last year I took the headship here . . . Listen, Stinker, quite seriously, Selhurst is having a beano for its 300th anniversary on June 19. Could you come down, old boy, and give us a sermon on the Sunday?" Returned the headmaster's secretary, on the distinguished man's behalf: "Obviously not meant for him."

Then Sneath switched. He wrote to the London Daily Worker: "I am endeavoring to institute the compulsory study of Russian in this school, but have been met with every form of obstruction . . ." Somberly, the Worker published the letter as an example of growing anti-Soviet feeling. London's less credulous News Review checked up, found that there was no Selhurst School, never had been. H. Rochester Sneath turned out to be two Cambridge undergraduates who had invested $1.60 in letterheads to perpetrate the best hoax of the spring.*

* Though far from the best hoax in university history. Cantabrigians would rank higher the fictitious Sultan of Zanzibar (the late William Horace de Vere Cole, brother-in-law of former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain), who, in 1910, bamboozled the Vice Chancellor into entertaining him at tea. The record at Oxford appears to belong to "George Psalmanazar" (real name unknown), who palmed himself off, in 1704, as an authority on the language of Formosa, published a fake Formosan geography and history, taught at Oxford for six months, was not exposed until four years later.

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