Selhurst School and Rochester Sneath were the inventions of Humphry Berkeley, then an undergraduate student at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
The Master of Marlborough College, F. M. Heywood, was livid when Sneath asked how he had "engineered" a recent visit of the royal family.
Finally, when asked to recommend a private detective and a competent nursery maid, Heywood wrote back, "I am not an agency for domestic servants.
Public figures soon found themselves receiving letters too: Two of Sneath's correspondents detected the hoax: one was Walter Oakeshott of Winchester College, who declined an invitation because he was attending a commemoration of a remote ancestor at Salt Lake City, Utah.
The journalist then visited Petworth to discover that there was no Selhurst School there, and subsequently turned up on the doorstep of Berkeley's friend's lodgings.