Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Berners Street Hoax

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

A full 200 years on, we're still talking about one of the most sweeping hoaxes of all time. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now The extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca slash host Hey and welcome to the short stuff, I'm 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 stuff sweet The year 1810 the month November the day Possibly unknown right and on this particular day 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 Burners Street We're gonna find a 22 year old a guy who I would have liked to have been friends with named Theodore Hook He was a bon vivant. He was known to be mischievous incredibly intelligent very charming kind of guy 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 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 In this bon vivant, which I'm not even sure what that is. What does that mean?

It's somebody who likes the good life. They like to party. They don't want to work. They them. They just want to have fun No, like us Kind of I think we work a little too much for that. But yes my daughter one of her favorite songs is 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 And it made me realize she had the name wrong. She I guess she thought it was Just girls want to have fun

Not girls just want to have fun. Oh man. That's hilarious. It's like boys have fun, too uh, so they were walking down the street that day in November of 1810 these two boys and They just wanted to have fun the bon vivant cook Pointing to a house which was Burner Street 54 Burners Street and said hey, I'll wage you within a week I can make that house the most talked about house in London And Beasley said you're on Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I'm sure they had it. They had a bet. I'm sure our British listeners are like, wow, that was dead on That was purposefully bad everybody

My exits are usually much better. Yeah, they are agreed But we'll give you a pass because of that too bad. They're not German, right? 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 and a week later About seven in the morning at 54 Burner Street. The date was November 10th. Oh, 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 Yeah, I'm gonna say November 3rd. Sure. Let's go with that so this is November 10th and

A chimney sweep shows up at 54 Burner Street knocks on the door and says I'm here to clean Mrs. Tottenham's Chimney and the the servant who answered the door because Mrs. Tottenham was a fabulously wealthy widow. Sure And the servants would be the ones answering the door said that we don't need a chimney sweep But you're you're mistaken. Please go away. Shut the door and that was that, right? That's right Another different chimney sweep would 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, that's very funny That's great, but that was not the end of it Mm-hmm, and that is not why people still tell this story 200 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 Hey friends when you're staying at an Airbnb You might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn?

So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now The extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it But you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at air bnb.ca Slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new iHeart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road Okay, see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself? What advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh God seriously

I swear and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you Oh, man, and so my husband Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step Oh, not another one. Uh-huh kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life Oh, just stop now. If so tell everybody yeah, everybody About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye Listen to frosted tips with the Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts Okay Chuck 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 all of whom had been Summoned to 54 Burner Street within the last month or so on this particular day November 10th to carry out some sort of business or another and The sheer volume of how many people were tricked into showing up is why we're still talking about this hoax 200 years later Yeah, it's at this point. I wish we could hire that fast-talking guy from the TV commercials in the 80s The FedEx guy?

to just read through these but I'll do something. Why don't you just follow in after? Okay, sure sounds great. All right, so here's who came by the house that day A male midwives tooth pullers miniature painters artists auctioneers grocers 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 dirty. No wine porters barbers with wigs and You can take over opticians

Coal wagons, upholsterers, pianos, linen, jewelry, people bearing furniture, doctors, attorneys Apparently at 5 p.m. a whole bunch of servants showed up because they were told that there was a job to fill and 50 different bakers showed up with 2,500 raspberry tarts between them. That is just a Quite a joke. Yes, that's just a sampling of who was there So you can guess in very short order that the street Burner Street in particular, but also streets around it became completely thronged with not just like Taxis and carts of coal and like all of the tradespeople 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 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 Would have had some sort of political influence, but 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 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 54 Burner Street on November 10th So you can imagine like this was a pretty big deal. The police were finally able to disperse the crowd by evening maybe by night and And the next day Samuel Beasley knew for sure that he had lost that bet That's right Newspapers were reporting it all over England There were annual registers that said it was one of the notable events of London for the whole year for 1810

it is still talked about today as part of British lore in 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, isn't that right? Yeah, it was yeah But it was it's widely assumed then and now that 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 25 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 Burner Street hoax and then rattles off some of like the greatest hits So people are like yes, 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 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. It was a long con apparently he had a little minions working for him and they wrote up to 4,000 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 that house once everything was in place and said hey I bet you a guinea that I can get Make this house the most talked about house So it was all pre-planned which makes it even better. It really does and then hook wasn't really picking on Mrs. Tottenham for any particular reason Most people say that he had no acquaintance with her whatsoever that she was a random victim And so this prank went down in history. I mean like people are still again talking about it 200 years later We're talking about it 200 years later

But there's a there's a twist to this whole thing too Chuck isn't there Yeah, the twist is that and I don't 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 this stuff up and it's not like a Newspaper reporter from reporters from all over England descended upon this to witnesses 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 it happened if it happened 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 Mulder 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 stuff is out Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows