PRACTICAL JOKES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 September 1938, Page 9

PRACTICAL JOKES

revellers in village.

CONFUSION AND CHAOS. Milkmen and the postman making . their early morning rounds on August 17 at Saundersfoot, a pretty seaside resort four miles from Narberth (Pembrokeshire), found the village was the victim of a practical joke on an unprecedented scale. Gates of the houses had been changed about; “To Let” notices had been taken from outside empty houses and placed in front of hotels. Signposts were reversed; “pure ices” notices fixed on all the public watertaps. Canoes had been carried on to the footpaths; motor cars moved from one end of the village to the other; public seats hauled to the forks of trees. Residents latei’ found that garden gates had been carried off and left onf the rocks on the beach. Damage and confusion were caused everywhere and the villagers are incensed. Midnight revellers are suspected, but there is no clue to their identity. Students’ Pranks Recalled. Oxford and Cambridge have been scenes of two notable practical jokes. Sixteen years ago, an undergraduate fooled both dons and students at Oxford by giving a lecture as Dr Emil Busch, a psycho-analyst, of Vienna. Professor Armstrong Gibbs recently confessed that when at Cambridge he and some friends held a spoof art show. They painted 174 pictures themselves, charged sixpence for admission, paid all their expenses, sold £2O worth of pictures and paid out £25 to the hospital. It was William Horace de Vere Cole, prince of practical jokers, who tore up a roadway in Piccadilly, disguised as a workman. An American, Hugh Troy, tried the same joke outside the Rockefeller mansion.