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.

[5] 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 subsequently invalided out of the army, donating the £1,800 he received from cashing in his disability pension to the war widows and orphans fund.

He was unable to afford the upkeep and in 1912 sold the property to his uncle, Alfred Clayton Cole, who later became Governor of the Bank of England.

On occasion, Cole would wander the streets with a cow's teat poking through the open fly of his trousers; once he judged he had caused optimum outrage, he would cut off the offending protrusion with a pair of scissors.

[12] Spending most of his later life in London, Cole executed a series of bold jokes and escapades aimed to deflate pompous figures of authority.

On another, he challenged an old schoolfriend from Eton, the newly elected Conservative Member of Parliament Oliver Locker-Lampson, to race him on a London street to the nearest corner, giving him a 10-yard head start.

[13] According to another story he bought tickets for particular seats at a theatrical performance he considered pretentious and distributed them to eight bald men whose heads, painted with a single letter, spelled out the word "B-O-L-L-O-C-K-S" (another source claims it was four men's heads making the word F-U-C-K),[14] which was legible from the circle and boxes above.