Short Stuff: The Berners Street Hoax

A full 200 years on, we're still talking about one of the most sweeping hoaxes of all time. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff on Josh And
there's Chuck and this is short Stuff and this is
a hoax edition which we're starting to slowly assemble into
a short stuffed suite. The year eighteen ten, the month November,
the day possibly unknown, right, and on this particular day,

(00:24):
if we zoom over to London and then zoom in
a little more into a wealthy section of London, and
then even further into a place called Berners Street, We're
we're going to find a twenty two year old a
guy who I would have liked to have been friends with,
named Theodore Hook. He was a bomb of aunt. He
was known to be mischievous, incredibly intelligent, very charming kind

(00:48):
of guy. Um, the kind of person who would just
show up on a stranger's doorstep and start talking to
them and in the hopes that he would be invited
to dinner just to see if he could do it. Um.
Just a neat guy all around. And he's walking down
the street with a friend of his name, Samuel Beasley, Right,
that's right, Uh, in this bon vivant which I'm not
even sure what that is. What does that mean? It's

(01:09):
somebody who likes the good life. They like the party.
They don't want to work. They they just wanna have fun.
Oh like us kind of I think we work a
little too much for that. But yes, my daughter one
of her favorite songs as girls just want to have fun.
And she looked at Emily one day and said, I
feel sorry for boys. They just don't want to have fun.

(01:33):
And it made me realize she had the name wrong.
She I guess she thought it was just girls want
to have fire. Girls, that's hilarious. It's like boys have
fun too. Uh. So they were walking down the street
that day in November of eighteen ten, these two boys
and the bon vivant cook, uh pointing to a house

(01:55):
which was Burner Street, fifty four Burners Street, and said, hey,
I'll wager within a week I can make that house
that I've talked about alis in London, and Beasley said,
you're on. I'm sure. So they had they had a bet.
I'm sure listeners are like, well, that was dead on.

(02:17):
That was purposely bad. Everybody, My exits are usually much better.
Yet they are agreed, but we'll give you a pass
because of that. Too bad. They're not German, right, m hmm. Yeah.
So Beasley said, you're on. I don't know why you
would even make that bet. It's such a preposterous bet
that I can't possibly lose. So we took that bet.

(02:37):
And a week later, about seven and them in the
morning at fifty Burnard Street. Uh, the date was November.
We have the date, yeah, but we didn't know when
they were walking down the street. It was some time
about a week earlier. I'm gonna say November three. Sure,
let's go with that. So this is November ten, and um,
a chimney sweep shows up at fifty four Burner Street

(02:57):
and knocks on the door and says, I'm here to
clean Mrs Tottenham's um chimney and the the servant who
answered the door, because Mrs Tottenham was a fabulously wealthy widow,
um and the servants would be the ones answering the door,
said that we don't need a chimney sweep, but your
your mistaken please go away shut the door. And that
was that, right, that's right. Another different chimney sweep would

(03:22):
show up, and then another, and then they kind of
kept coming and it was a rush of chimney sweeps.
And you might think, you know, that's probably a pretty
good joke, much like the prank today where you might
order a pizza to someone's house. Apparently, just calling like
a chimney sweep or some other service to a house
was a joke of the day, and the servants thought, oh,

(03:43):
that's very funny. Uh, that's great. But that was not
the end of it, and that is not why people
still tell this story two years later. So perhaps we
should take a break a little early, because that's a
great cliffhanger and tell you what happened next. Okay, Chuck,

(04:24):
So it's time to unhang off of the cliff. And
like you said, we would not be talking about this
hoax if it had just been a handful of chimney
sweeps that showed up that day. But those chimney sweeps
were just a little trickle that were foreshadowing of the
deluge to come. And as the morning started to begin
in Earnest, tons and tons and tons of people showed up,

(04:47):
all of whom had been um summoned toft Burner Street
within the last month or so on this particular day
November to carry out some sort of business or another,
and the sheer volume of how how many people were
tricked into showing up. Is why we're still talking about
this hoax two hundred years later. Yeah, it's at this

(05:08):
point I wish we could hire that fast talking guy
from the TV commercials in the eighties. Just read through these,
but uh, I'll do something. Why don't you just follow
in after? Alright, So here's who came by the house
that day. Uh, male midwives, tooth pullers, miniature painters, artists, auctioneers, grocers,

(05:29):
textile merchants, horse drawn taxis, morning coaches, poultry sellers, an
undertaker with a coffin made to measure six men. It's
a six men bearing an organ that could be very anything.
Wine porters, barbers with wigs, and you can take over opticians, uh,
coal wagons, upholsterers, pianos, linen, jewelry, people bearing furniture, doctors, attorneys.

(05:56):
Apparently at five PM, a whole bunch of servants showed
up because they were told that there was a job
to fill, and fifty different bakers showed up with raspberry
tarts between them. That is just the joke. Yes, that's
just a sampling of who was there, so you can
guess in very short order. The streets Burner Street in particular,

(06:17):
but also streets around it became completely thronged with not
just like taxis and carts of coal and like all
of the trades people showing up, but also gawkers who
came out to say, like what is going on? And
so the police arrived pretty quickly and had to shut
the whole street down. That's right. This prank even got

(06:38):
the mayor involved. Lord Mayor London got a note that
said that and again Mrs Tottenham was, you know, a
woman of means, and I feel like somebody that um
would have had some sort of political influence. But uh,
there was a note supposedly from Mrs Tottenham that said
she was summoned to appear before him, but she was
confined to her room by sickness and requested that the

(07:01):
Mayor come to her house, which he did. And also
not just the mayor was roped into this, the Archbishop
of Canterbury showed up, the Governor of the Bank of England,
the chairman of the East India Company, and the Duke
of York all duped along with all of those scores
and scores of tradespeople showing up at fifty four Burners
Street on November, so you can imagine like this was

(07:24):
a pretty big deal. The police were finally able to
disperse the crowd um by evening maybe by night, and
um the next day Samuel Beasley knew for sure that
he had lost that bet. That's right. Uh, newspapers were
reporting it all over England. Um, there were annual registers

(07:44):
that said it was one of the notable events of
London for the whole year for ten. It is still
talked about today as part of British lore and pop culture.
And you know, of course they wanted to find out
who did this, but officially they never found out that
it was Theodore Hook. Didn't that right? Yeah it was, yeah,
but it was. It's widely assumed then and now that

(08:07):
it was Theodore Hook. And he, I mean, he was
the kind of person who would do this. But also
he wrote a semi autobiographical novel about twenty five years
after it was called Gilbert Gurney, and in it one
of the characters says, I'm I'm the one I did it.
I pulled off the Berner Street hoax and then rattles
off some of like the greatest hits. So people are like, yes,

(08:28):
obviously it was Theodore Hook, but he was never like
prosecuted or anything like that because no one could ever
prove he did it. Yeah, and this is the part
that really impressed me was I thought, when I had
read the initial review of this that, uh, you know,
if he says that a week later, it's game on.
Like that's a lot of work to get that many people.

(08:50):
It was a long con. Apparently he had uh little
Minians working for him, and they wrote up to four
thousand letters in weeks who knows, maybe even months leading
up to this. So he had this thing planned out
all along, and you know, purposely brought his friend by

(09:10):
that house once everything was in place and said, hey,
I bet you a guinea that I can get make
this house and most talked about house. So it was
all pre planned, which makes it even better, it really does.
And then, um, Hook wasn't really picking on Mrs Tottenham
for any particular reason. Uh. Most people say that he
had no acquaintance with or whatsoever, that she was a

(09:31):
random victim. Uh. And so this prank went down in history.
I mean like people are still again talking about it
two d years later. We're talking about it two hundred
years later. Um. But there's a there's a twist to
this whole thing to Chuck, isn't there. Yeah. The twist
is that, and I I'm not sure I buy this,
is that it may not have actually even happened, and
that the real hoax was that Theodore Hook made all

(09:56):
this stuff up. And it's not like a newspaper b
reporter from reporters from all over England descended upon this
to witness this with their own eyes. They heard reports
of this and wrote about it. So it was a
hoax on a hoax and it never really happened to
begin with. Yeah, there's some historians who believe that the
hoax of a hoax, which however happened, if it happened

(10:16):
the way that it supposedly did as reported in the papers, awesome,
if he managed to pull the same thing off without
actually doing it, I think that might be even more awesome, Chuck,
I'm fox Smoulder here. I want to believe so bad. Okay,
but you just do that because there's no reason not to,
all right, Okay, Chuck said, Okay, everybody that means short

(10:37):
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