Justin Pollard reveals what the past can tell us about successful strategies for keeping schtum and for preventing confidential matters from getting into the public domain. Anyway, best not to rabbit on...
LIFE HACK #07
As we all know, the best way to get news out is to tell someone it’s a secret. Somehow, everyone will soon know. But what can history teach us about genuinely keeping things secret?
Firstly, we should choose a credible secret. Mary Toft claimed to have been startled by a rabbit during her pregnancy in 1726 and had ever since been giving birth to rabbits. Eminent medical professionals supported her story and made her a great cause célèbre – until someone pointed out that people can’t give birth to rabbits and she was exposed as a fraud.
Quite what Mary was expecting to gain from breeding rabbits remains unclear, but it was a lot of effort for a small reward. So if you’re going to have a secret, make it something everyone wants. Tudor fraudster Doll Philips claimed the fairy queen had secretly explained to her how to find gold. While everyone was out looking for the promised fortune, she would rob their houses. Shakespeare created scenes with fake fairy queens based on her.
RELIGIOUS FRAUD
The next thing we should consider is hiding our secret. There are two schools of thought here. Firstly, conceal the secret. Secondly, don’t. The latter course was favoured by the medieval prior of Leominster Church. He installed his secret lover in a gallery in the upper reaches of the building, claiming her to be divinely inspired. As proof, communion wafers would ‘fly’ from his hand to her during mass – with the aid of a wire.
If we are to be less brazen, we might follow the example of Christopher Clayton Hutton. ‘Clutty’ worked for MI9, a branch of military intelligence, and was involved in training men to escape from PoW camps and to evade capture during World War II. He created an escape pack that included a compass hidden in a button, maps printed on parachute silk and a version of Monopoly that doubled as a prison-break kit.
Having brilliantly hidden our secret, we must be careful! It would be really fun to let others in on it, but this can have dangerous consequences. Lady Grange was trapped in an unhappy marriage, so threatened to reveal that her husband was involved in the Jacobite Rising in 1715 if he didn’t release her. Instead he had her kidnapped and moved to a number of different remote islands while holding a fake funeral for her back in
