The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath: A Youthful Frivolity

From Wikipedia: "Humphry John Berkeley (21 February 1926 14 November 1994) was a British politician noted for his many changes of parties and his efforts to effect homosexual law reform. Berkeley's father Reginald was Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) for Nottingham Central from 1922 to 1924 and a noted playwright. Humphry Berkeley attended Malvern College followed by Pembroke College, Cambridge and was President of both the Cambridge Union Society and Cambridge University Conservative Association in 1948. His studies were interrupted when he was excluded ('sent down') for two years as a result of a practical joke in which he impersonated 'H. Rochester Sneath', the headmaster of a rather odd public school, and wrote hoax letters to public figures. Berkeley knew Rab Butler who arranged a job for him at Conservative Central Office during this time; he also advised him to keep the hoax letters and their replies safely, and publish them a quarter of a century later (the 'Rochester Sneath letters' were duly published in 1974). In the 1959 general election he was elected as a Conservative MP for Lancaster. Berkeley was a strong internationalist who supported the work of the United Nations; his father had supported the League of Nations. He served on the Parliamentary Assembly of the Western European Union and the Council of Europe from 1963. When he won second place in the ballot for Private Member's Bills in 1965, Berkeley decided to introduce a bill to legalise male homosexual relations along the lines of the Wolfenden report. Indeed, according to a 2007 article published in The Observer, Berkeley was well known to his colleagues as a homosexual, and not much liked. His Bill was given a second reading by 164 to 107 on 11 February 1966, but fell when Parliament was dissolved soon after. Unexpectedly, Berkeley lost his seat in the 1966 general election, and ascribed his defeat to the unpopularity of his bill on homosexuality. In 1968 he had resigned from the Conservative Party, largely in opposition to its stance on the Vietnam War. In 1970, he joined the Labour Party and stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate in 1974. As a moderate and pro-European he joined the SDP in 1981, and fought Southend East for them in 1987. In 1988 with the SDP splitting over whether to merge with the Liberals, he rejoined Labour." Also from Wikipedia: "H. Rochester Sneath MA (born c. 1900, exposed 1948) was the nonexistent headmaster of the also nonexistent Selhurst School ("near Petworth, Sussex") who wrote many bizarre letters to public figures in 1948. Selhurst supposedly had 175 male students. In March 1948 several headmasters of British public schools began to receive letters from Sneath. The Master of Marlborough College, F. M. Heywood, was livid when Sneath asked how he had "engineered" a recent visit of the royal family. Next he received a letter in which Sneath warned that he should not hire a French teacher, 'Robert Agincourt', because he had climbed a tree naked. Finally, when asked to recommend a private detective and a competent nursery maid, Heywood wrote back, "I am not an agency for domestic servants. I really must ask you not to bother me with this kind of thing." Sneath wrote to the Headmaster of Stowe School to ask if he should provide sex education for the school maids. He complained to the headmaster of Oundle School that the school chaplain was hopeless as a rat catcher. He asked Haileybury for a reference for a teacher who had a club foot and warts. Sneath even wrote to the headmaster of Eton to apply for his job. Some of the headmasters answered politely to a person they thought to be a fellow headmaster. One headmaster even recommended Selhurst to a parent of a prospective pupil. George Bernard Shaw received an invitation to speak at an annual celebration at Selhurst (he declined). Architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott was informed of the possibility of designing a new main building for the school (he declined as well). Very good.…