The Time Virginia Woolf Wore Blackface / Kevin Young. In: The New Yorker Oct 27, 2017

“On or about December 1910 human character changed,” Virginia Woolf famously declared. Woolf not only helped bring about modernism; she dared give it a start date. But she could have set that start date earlier in the year. On February 7, 1910, Woolf and three other members of the emerging Bloomsbury group, including Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen, played a hoax on the famed British battleship H.M.S. Dreadnought by impersonating the emperor of Abyssinia and his retinue. Donning blackface, fake beards, and turbans, the group managed to board the ship as honored visitors—with two additional members pretending to be their guides, essentially posing as themselves. The ringleader of the half-dozen hoaxers, Horace de Vere Cole, wrote in a letter that came to light more than a hundred years later, “I was so amused at being just myself in a tall hat—I had no disguise whatever and talked in an ordinary friendly way to everyone—the others talked nonsense. We had all learned some Swahili: I said they were ‘jolly savages’ but that I didn’t understand much of what they said.” “A rum lingo they speak,” one of the Dreadnought’s junior officers grumbled under his breath, but the ship’s officers, who happened to include a cousin of Woolf (then still named Virginia Stephen), failed to recognize the blackface troupe as anything but genuine. The crew toured the group around, welcoming them with a red carpet and sending the retinue on their way in a carriage—right before their beards fell off.
Soon after, the story of the hoax broke, causing much embarrassment for the proud British Navy; some officers, including Woolf’s cousin, issued threats against the perpetrators. Most who learned of the incident, however, including the ship’s captain, thought it a fine prank. Woolf and her husband, Leonard, later published “The ‘Dreadnought’ Hoax,” an account written by her brother, at their Hogarth Press, in 1936. In it, Stephen, who had played one of the guides, described the mind-set of the hoaxers. “By the time we reached the Dreadnought,” he wrote, “the expedition had become for me at any rate almost an affair of every day. It was hardly a question any longer of a hoax. We were almost acting the truth.” ... [mehr] https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-time-virginia-woolf-wore-blackface