At 7.40 p.m. on 16 January 1926, BBC radio broadcast a talk on 18th-century English literature. The subject was Gray’s ‘Elegy’ — or, as lisping lecturer William Donkinson put it, ‘Gway’th Elegy’: ‘The dithtinctive note, then, of eighthteenth thentuwy litewature ith that of technical perfection within a vewy limited wange of performanth.’

The average listener to John Reith’s British Broadcasting Company would have thought nothing of such high-minded programming. It was later that things took a turn. After routine bulletin items – the Test Match scores, a ‘plucky waterman’ saving a child’s life at Chiswick – came some distressing news:

The Unemployed Demonstration. The crowd in Trafalgar Square is now assuming threatening dimensions. Threatening dimensions are now being assumed by the crowd which has collected in Trafalgar Square to voice the grievances of the Unemployed…

It is easy to see why this struck a nerve. The ‘Bolshevist bogey’ was a fact of life in 1920s Britain. Only fourteen months earlier, the 1924 general election had touched the high-water mark of political anti-communism; while the red scare had diminished in intensity under Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government, unemployment remained rife and Number 10 was already making emergency preparations in anticipation of a General Strike. Imagine, then, the reaction as the bulletin rose in pitch:

The Unemployed Demonstration. The crowd is now pouring through the Admiralty Arch, and is advancing towards the back of the Government Buildings in Whitehall in a threatening manner. The Admiralty Arch is being poured through by a crowd, lately collected in Trafalgar Square, and the back of the Government Buildings in Whitehall is being approached in a threatening manner… One moment, please… The crowd has now collected in the neighbourhood of the artificial water in St. James’s Park, and is throwing empty bottles at the water-fowl…

The bathos of ‘water-fowl’ ought to have given away its satirical intent – but this was undercut by the escalating tone of fast-breaking crisis. The next thing listeners knew, the crowd had sacked the National Gallery, blown up the Savoy Hotel and hanged the Minister of Traffic from a tramway post on Vauxhall Bridge Road. Most outlandishly, it was announced that Sir Theophilus Gooch, a philanthropist set to lecture listeners on the housing of the poor, could no longer come to the studio. The reason for this? ‘From reports which have just come to hand it appears that Sir Theophilus Gooch, who was on his way to this station, has been intercepted by the remnants of the crowd still collected in Trafalgar Square, and is being roasted alive.’

Within minutes, pandaemonium ensued. The broadcast, said the Manchester Guardian, ‘set some hundreds of anxious inquirers ringing up the Sunday newspapers to discover… how soon the tide of civil war might be expected to sweep in their direction’. The manager of the Savoy Hotel received two hundred local calls and hundreds of trunk calls from all over Britain and Ireland asking if guests should cancel their room bookings. The Lord Mayor of Newcastle said that his wife was terribly upset and that he had to ring a neighbouring mayor to reassure her. The BBC, in its familiar state of damage control, interrupted its subsequent programming with rapid apologies – but this was not enough for some listeners: many woke up without a Sunday newspaper, which in their eyes confirmed the worst. (This was actually due to a snowstorm.)

The affair led to national outrage and hand-wringing about broadcaster responsibility. The Daily Express thundered: ‘A Blunder by B.B.C. Revolution Hoax by Wireless. People Alarmed all Week-End.’ Sir Leo Chiozza Money, an economist and former government minister, said: ‘I should not have made a worse joke if I had rung you up on the telephone and announced that I murdered my grandmother.’

No-one was more surprised than the broadcast’s originator. Father Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was a giant of his time: Catholic priest, polymath, biblical translator, theologian, detective novelist, devotional writer, and, per the Daily Mail, ‘the wittiest man in England’. While he has faded with fashion, his life was the stuff of biographies: a full biography by his friend Evelyn Waugh (The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox) and a partial biography by his niece Penelope Fitzgerald (The Knox Brothers). Knox had come up with the idea while listening to the 1924 general election on the radio. ‘I endeavoured to visualise the breathlessness there would be throughout the country during a revolution, and I tried to imagine the news bulletins during such a time of popular excitement. I put my ideas on paper and then attempted to burlesque them.’

Why did this ‘burlesque’ backfire so drastically? To read the transcript – reproduced in Knox’s Essays in Satire (1928) – is to be struck by its sheer silliness: the sacking of the National Gallery was led by ‘Mr Popplebury, Secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues’. Knox’s flaw was to overestimate his listeners’ savviness. This was a form still in its infancy: it took another decade for radio to reach most working-class households. The conventions of breaking news – the rapid updates, the interrupted programming – were still not established; this remained so twelve years later when Orson Welles’s ‘War of the Worlds’ adaptation caused an even greater panic stateside. The two broadcasts have a lot in common. Both came replete with warnings, only for many listeners to tune in too late. (Knox’s talk was introduced as ‘a skit on broadcasting’.) Both, crucially, used realistic sound effects. To mimic the destruction, BBC station assistants hacked an orange-box to pieces and dumped broken glass on the studio floor. As a result, reported the Daily Mail, several listeners refused to believe that it was a hoax: ‘We have heard it on the wireless. Why, we have even heard the explosions!’

Penelope Fitzgerald found a further reason for the hysteria: a sense of humour failure. She wrote:

Unemployment was not a very good subject for satire, but alarmism was, and so was the B.B.C. manner of presenting news, which Ronnie, always a good mimic, did well… Newsmen caught up with Ronnie in Birmingham, where he had gone on to preach. He could only say that he had not meant to deceive anyone. He did not dare to add that he had meant to be funny.

Could the same hoax happen today? We are no less gullible; and the quality of our news feeds has never been more degraded. But there is an essential difference. Today’s information pick ‘n’ mix is a result of collapsing institutional trust; the events of 1926 were a result of overwhelming institutional trust – in a monopoly broadcaster considered authoritative and reliable. Reith’s organisation was a leaner bureaucracy, with fewer managers and much less oversight. Evelyn Waugh wrote that Knox’s script had not been sent to London for approval – unthinkable by modern standards. The furore died down after a few days of bad headlines. And what happened to Knox? Only a few months later, he was back on the BBC with a parody of a scientific talk – ‘illustrating the sounds, now made audible to the learned, of vegetables in pain.’