The citizens of Venice woke on the morning of April Fool's Day to find piles of horse manure deposited throughout the Piazza San Marco, as if a procession of horses had gone through there. This was extremely unusual, since the Piazza is surrounded by canals and not easily accessible to horses. The manure turned out to be the work of the infamous British prankster Horace de Vere Cole, who was honeymooning in Venice. He had transported a load of manure over from the mainland the night before with the help of a gondolier and had then placed it throughout the Piazza. Perhaps he should have been paying more attention to his wife while on honeymoon because, evidently tired by his constant hijinks, she divorced him within a few years.
The
Indianapolis News reported on the victim of a street prank who exacted revenge. A "little Italian boy" working at a fruit stand in the market house had tied a purse bulging with paper to one end of a string and fastened the other end behind his counter. He then threw the pocketbook into the aisle:
In a few minutes along came a busy woman, and seeing the tempting purse pounced on it. As it jerked from her hand, a whoop went up from the little Italian. So it was a prank, was it? She would teach him how to get cute with an old lady! Then fruit began to fly. Orange after orange hurled at the dodging boy who was being constantly advised to duck and jump by a horde of delighted youngsters. The ammunition was more than oranges, for some bananas and grapefruit were spinning toward their owner. Not until all the fruit on top of the stand had been exhausted did the angry marketer stop her barrage and start on.
The Associated Press reported that a prankster started a rumor alleging that Colonel House had announced that the peace treaty ending World War I had been signed: "The report rapidly spread over all Paris and the telephone wires to the American headquarters in the hotel de Crillon became hot with inquiries as to the truth of the rumor. It did not take long however, for inquiries to realize the character of the report when they were reminded that today was April 1st." The Treaty of Versailles, which marked the formal end of the war, was signed on June 28, 1919. [
Daily Northwestern, Apr 1, 1919.]
Hundreds of people, mostly shop girls and women, gathered in front of the Brandenburg gate in Berlin, drawn there by an announcement placed in Berlin papers the night before stating that a motion picture camera was going to take a picture in front of the gate at noon, and that everybody who was in front of the gate would be in the picture. The announcement was a prank perpetrated by a night worker at the papers. The
Chicago Tribune foreign news service reported: "Some people stood there for hours before they realized that this was the first day of April, known in Germany as in the United States as April Fools' day." [
Chicago Daily Tribune, Apr 5, 1919.]
