When the Royal Navy launched the HMS Dreadnought in 1906, it caused an earthquake that was felt in all European chancelleries. She was the “ideal battleship” that the Italian naval engineer Vittorio Cuniberti had theorized about a few years before, the first to dispense with medium and small caliber batteries, mounting only 305 mm, long-range pieces. This brought naval warfare to a range at which the Dreadnought was unbeatable. For this reason, the previous models, now obsolete, were called pre-Dreadnought.
In an era of rampant nationalism and imperialism, such as the Edwardian era, the news struck a chord with the British people, who turned the battleship into a cultural icon. Songs and books were dedicated to him, and he appeared in a ballet and a West End musical. In turn, the term “dreadnought,” which in 17th-century English meant “fearless of anything,” was translated as a cliché into popular language.
Well, on February 7, 1910, the famous ship was moored at the Portland docks. On board was Admiral William May, commander-in-chief of the Home Fleet. After a quiet day, which they had spent cleaning the deck and loading provisions for exercises at sea, in the afternoon, May was preparing to disembark when this telegram arrived: “Commander in Chief, Home Fleet. Prince Makalen of Abyssinia and entourage arrive at 4.20pm today in Weymouth. You want to see the Dreadnought. “Kindly arrange a welcome upon arrival.” The note was signed by Charles Harding, deputy secretary of the Foreign Office (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
Despite the rush, May had time to put on a decent reception. She sent a lieutenant in full dress uniform to meet them at Weymouth station, where a red carpet, a marching band and a carriage had been arranged to take them to the port. There they would board a boat to reach the ship, where the soldiers and all the officers would receive them in a standing position. They couldn't find an Abyssinian flag or anthem sheet music, so they used those from Zanzibar, a detail that none of their guests noticed.
They were four most extraordinary guys, black as coal, and dressed in oriental tunics and turbans on their heads. As officer John St. Erme Cardew noted in his logbook, his outfit was not very suitable for the English winter, but it was undoubtedly sensational.
They were accompanied by a Foreign Office official and an interpreter who was translating the gibberish they were speaking among themselves. “Bunga-bunga,” they exclaimed every time some part of the ship surprised them. Before ending the visit, which lasted no more than an hour, the princes imposed some medals on the officers and one of them spread out a prayer rug, something strange considering that, if anything characterized Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) and His royalty was orthodox Christianity.
By snooping through Royal Navy archives, historian Danell Jones was able to uncover the details of this story. The next day, Admiral May had already returned to his duties when Sir Graham Greene, assistant permanent secretary of the Admiralty, wrote to him. Greene explained that a crazy-looking guy had shown up at the ministry claiming that what happened the day before had been a farce. For the moment they were not going to give it importance, but he did warn him that the circumstances “were a bit strange.”
Harding, for his part, knew that he had not sent the telegram of the 7th, so he began some very discreet investigations, because, above all, he wanted to prevent the case from becoming known to the press.
On February 12, that didn't matter. The Daily Express headlined: “Amazing naval deception”; the Globe: “Posh princes in the Dreadnought!”; the Sheffield Evening Telegraph: “Imposter princess on a warship”… The next day, the same thing happened in Dublin and New York, and the next, in Cape Town.
On the 16th, the Daily Mirror carried a photograph of the “princes” with their royal attributes on its front page, and there was a young Virginia Stephen (she would not take the surname Woolf until she married, in 1912). She was accompanied by her brother, Adrian Stephen, who years later would become one of the first British psychoanalysts; Guy Ridley, who would pursue a career as a lawyer; Anthony Buxton, renowned writer, and Duncan Grant, the celebrated painter; In short, the cream of the University of Cambridge. There was also Horace de Vere Cole, but this one deserves a separate mention.
With the exception of the latter, all the participants in the innocent joke were part of the Bloomsbury group, as a circle of intellectuals has been called that began to meet in a small house in the homonymous neighborhood of London that Virginia shared with her brothers, Adrian and Vanessa.
When the Dreadnought thing happened, the group was still unknown, but in a few years it would become a focus of freethought in England in the first half of the 20th century (John Maynard Keynes was among its members).
It was not a politically militant association, but all its members moved between left-wing liberalism and socialism. Anti-militarism, anti-imperialism, the defense of women's suffrage and the rejection, in general, of bourgeois morality were points in common. Then there was their very free vision of sexuality: Adrian, Virginia, Duncan…, many had homosexual or polyamorous relationships at some point.
The Bloomsbury circle has also generated suspicions, already among its contemporaries. The writer Wyndham Lewis was around him, but he got out of what he considered a “corrupt, elitist and talentless” group. It is an accusation that has been made many times, that of being grateful children of the same elitist class that they tried to revile, as if their rebellion were imposed, and their art, dilettante.
The novelist Andrew Sinclair, who knew the history of Cambridge in those years well, had this to say about Bloomsbury: “Rarely in the field of human endeavor has so much been written about so few who achieved so little.”
The “intruder” in the Daily Mirror photo was De Vere Cole, a frivolous and indolent young man, similar to his cronies only in that he was from a good family (he was descended from Irish nobility on his mother's side). At a very young age he was wounded in combat during the Second Boer War (1899-1902), and perhaps it was the only meritorious thing he would do in his life, because he did not even finish his studies at Trinity College in Cambridge, and he is not known. trade, although it did benefit, a fortune that he inherited at the age of twenty-five.
He was a dedicated prankster, so much so that in the United Kingdom he is revered as the patron saint of April Fools. He dug a trench in the middle of Piccadilly Street, impersonated a member of Parliament, got another arrested... Once, he paid four consecutive theater tickets for some bald men and painted their heads so that the word "" could be read from the chicken coop. fuck”, and another, he posed as the uncle of the Sultan of Zanzibar and received a tour of the city and University of Cambridge from the mayor.
The idea for the Dreadnought was his, and the one who got the Bloomsbury guys into trouble was Adrian, who knew Cole from a run at university. They agreed to participate because they wanted to make fun of the military liturgy, and a little out of foolishness. Of course, none of them expected the media coverage that the matter was going to have, especially Virginia.
The journalists took her on, not because she was a well-known writer (she was still five years away from publishing her first novel, End of the Journey), but because she was a woman. They didn't want to know why she had done it, but rather things like her marital status, her age, or her creed. That one of the princes was a transvestite added morbidity to the story, and they wanted to turn her into a kind of femme fatale. “One of them wants a photo of me in my evening dress!” she told her friend Violet Dickinson in a letter.
As the writer Mairead Case, who analyzed the case from a feminist perspective, explains, this must have made a generally reserved woman uncomfortable, and who, as her later literary work demonstrated, hated the vision, sometimes hypersexualized and sometimes puritanical, that Their society had the female sex.
Because Woolf figures in it, the Dreadnought hoax has caused a lot of talk among feminists. Mairead Case, for example, believes that Orlando (1928) is, in part, an attempt to make sense of what the author experienced aboard the battleship. Like her that day, the protagonist of the novel changes sex, and, by doing so, the world immediately perceives him in a different way.
Dressed as a man, and in a masculine environment, such as a warship, Virginia was treated with a deference she would never have otherwise experienced, much less from an admiral. Many readings of this type have been made, in line with what the American philosopher Judith Butler calls the “performativity of gender.”
There is also another way of analyzing this case, less flattering to those involved. Seen in perspective, her masquerade is much less confrontational than one might think, since it was performed in a way that perfectly satisfied the Victorian racial stereotype. Firstly, because of the costumes chosen, which reveal an absolute ignorance of Ethiopian ways and customs.
They fell into the cliché of the “oriental”, a generalization that included all peoples who were not part of the West. And secondly, because the charm of the innocent story was precisely that it was “barbarians” who deceived the Royal Navy.
In the media and popular language, the primitive “bunga-bunga” became the slogan to make fun of the incident and the crew of the HMS Dreadnought. There were songs like this: “When I came aboard a dreadnought ship / although I looked like a traveling market huckster / they said I was an Abyssinian prince / because I shouted ‘bunga-bunga’.”
To be fair, those involved never intended for this to become an object of debate; I had to stay in mischief. According to what Adrian and Virginia said, the initial agreement was not to give it publicity, and if the issue came to the press, it was due to the loquacity of Horace de Vere Cole, a hopeless braggart (the “madman” who presented himself at the Foreign Office probably out him).
They were lucky that, despite the media scandal, the Admiralty decided not to file charges. If they were trying to avoid further ridicule, the worst thing they could do with these buffoons was to sit them in court, and, furthermore, they feared that the controversy would encourage a discussion on more fundamental issues, such as the exaggerated arms budget and the race in that terrain that was being disputed with Germany.
Virginia Woolf, for her part, did not speak about the matter for thirty years, until the summer of 1940. In those days, she was once again immersed in those states of darkness to which her changing mood, now worsened by circumstances, subjected her: The German Wehrmacht had taken over Europe, and was threatening to bring its war of annihilation to the islands.
According to her diary, she and her husband, the Jew Leonard Woolf, were thinking about suicide: “Capitulation means the surrender of all Jews. Concentration camps. So…, to the garage.” In the garage of the house, Leonard had stored gasoline in case they decided to get poisoned by the car's combustion gases.
And then the memories of that day in 1910 came back to him. “The idea hit me hard,” he wrote in his diary, “I don't want the garage to see my end (…), my way of fighting is by thinking.” A few days later she gave a talk about the Dreadnought case at the Rodmell Women's Institute.
As Danell Jones explains, when the world was facing the abyss, the story of how some daring young people challenged the most powerful army in the world had a cathartic effect, lifting spirits and exorcising the fears of the entire room, for a few hours at a time. less. This praise of courage, patriotic while still being pacifist, was Virginia's last public act. A few months later she filled her pockets with stones and jumped into the River Ouse.
