My Weekly Book

Masquerade - Kit Williams; and The Quest for the Golden Hare - Bamber Gascoigne

I’ve been taking a renewed interest in treasure hunting recently. It’s all down to my good friend Mr Random and the conclusion of a certain treasure hunt cum alternate reality game known as Perplex City. And February 24 was the 25th anniversary of Masquerade’s golden hare being dug up (just 20 days after Perplex City’s lost Cube came out of the ground). Plenty of food for thought, all this, and definitely time to have another look at this book.

[Buy Masquerade second-hand on Amazon] [Buy Quest for the Golden Hare second-hand on Amazon] [Search on eBay]

Some basics for those who, unlike me, have not spent the last 25 years obsessed with this saga. Masquerade is the wonderful picture book created in 1979 by eccentric artist Kit Williams around a central riddle that gave the whereabouts of real, live buried treasure - a golden hare-shaped jewel that was buried near a monument to Catherine of Aragon at Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire. Bamber Gascoigne, who shared a publisher with him, was called upon to act as a kind of independent arbitrator and reassure the nation that the treasure really had gone into the ground and was recoverable. Thus he was (somewhat unwillingly) drawn into the whole mad two-year worldwide quest for the buried treasure, even though he had grave private doubts about the chances of the riddle ever being cracked. He was the only living soul apart from Kit himself who knew where the golden hare could be found. In the absence of any encouragement from the artist or from Jonathan Cape, some treasure hunters turned to him for confirmation of their wild and wonderful theories. Thus he was in a unique position to document the Masquerade phenomenon, which he did in Quest for the Golden Hare.

The result is almost an anthropological study into all the vagaries and delusions of human nature. As well as telling how Masquerade came to be commissioned and produced, and how its riddle was conceived, it tells the story of a number of treasure-seekers including at least one that began to suffer from psychotic delusions, several Americans playing the numbers game - that is bombarding Kit with a huge number of solutions in the vain expectation of miraculously hitting the correct co-ordinates, the many people who were wildly successful in imposing their own thinking on the book, but not in identifying the riddle correctly and, tantalisingly, the three sets of people who came within an ace of identifying Ampthill Park and claiming the hare for themselves. Gascoigne has a wonderful way of dealing with these disparate accounts, always respectful and open-minded but still approaching the motley crew of interviewees with a dry wit and a sceptical cast of mind. The results make fascinating reading.

Another area he explores to great effect is the astounding role played by coincidence in the whole Masquerade saga. Thus we hear about the two separate treasure hunters who arrived respectively at Ampthill Park and a monument to Catherine of Aragon to be visited at the equinox. Neither of them had solved the central riddle and so neither was working with a full set of information. Both had come to their conclusions in ways undreamt-of by the author. The first wrote to Kit but had to be politely turned down as he had got within 20 feet of the golden hare but had no way of getting any closer. The second went off down another line of inquiry and so away from the scent altogether. But reading these stories, however many times I do it, brings me out in goose bumps. The facts of the matter are that what we perceive as coincidences are nothing of the sort - it’s just that the human brain functions by making patterns of things and sometimes it tries to do that where no real pattern exists. However, they don’t half seem spooky when they happen, a fact that Gascoigne notes several times.

So, back to the subject in hand for this blog, should you read this book? Truth is, I’m not sure - it’s not the easiest thing to get hold of and I realise that I’m no longer capable of an objective opinion on a subject that has obsessed me since the age of nine. For me it’s riveting reading and it was the Perplex City endgame that caused me to revisit it to see how its conclusions had stood the test of time. It is a fact that the Perplex City game designers had a well-thumbed copy on the office bookshelf from the outset and that we would never have started playing in the first place if the similarities to Masquerade had not jumped out at us. One nice by-product was that it made me properly revisit the book itself - to read through the text and to properly solve all the riddles and word puzzles that are there at the most superficial level. Every time I open the book I am impressed anew with what a beautiful object it is, with its fantastic detail and quirky tone. One thing I would suggest is that you always get hold of the original hardback copy rather than the paperback reprint - the detail levels and print quality is just not good enough there. So many copies were printed that it’s fairly readily available second-hand and worth every penny of the extra outlay.

It took a few years for the full story of Masquerade to come out and for people to realise just how thoroughly the eventual winner, Dugald Thompson (known at the time as Ken Thomas) and his partner John Guard had gone against the spirit of the game - to say they cheated certainly does not seem too strong with the information we now have (for more details see links below). It is interesting to speculate how much Gascoigne knew, or suspected, at the time of writing. Certainly he documents a good deal of highly erratic behaviour by Thompson - agreeing to do interviews then refusing, making other demands such as the disguising of his voice and appearance, refusing to let the golden hare be displayed at the Victoria and Albert museum, disappearing for long periods of time shortly after the find. My informed guess is that he found the man thoroughly disreputable and was only prevented from saying so directly by a prudent regard for the laws of libel. He certainly does document the dissatisfaction and disappointment of all those people who had been attempting to solve the puzzle in the way its creator intended and points out that, with Kit Williams anagramising to I Will Mask It and the obviously-disguised Ken Thomas to The Mask On, it is hardly any wonder that many of them refused point blank to believe in this fudged ending and carried on searching regardless.

For anyone seriously interested in playing Perplex City it was clear that Quest for the Golden Hare would act as a kind of a treasure-hunter’s manual. The game’s creators specifically said they regarded their work as a tribute and follow-up to Masquerade. And they certainly made it clear they would not fall into the trap of entering into correspondence with people claiming to know where the Cube lay hidden - only the Cube itself and a detailed description of where it was buried would suffice. It later transpired that anywhere within 50 miles of a place where the game inventors had lived was ruled out as a burial location, to frustrate background research of the kind that brought Kit Williams down. Everyone interested in this story knows the heartbreaking tale of John Rousseau and Mike Barker, the two Lancastrian physics teachers who correctly solved Masquerade’s central visual riddle by the simple expedient of noticing that the letters surrounding each picture were not evenly spaced and concluding correctly that an artist as meticulous as Kit Williams would not have done something like that by accident. They dug on the exact spot and missed the hare’s clay casket in the dark - leaving the way open for Thompson and Guard, who allegedly turned up with local metal detectorists to collect it. Certainly Gascoigne was so impressed with the written solution to Masquerade’s central riddle that Rousseau and Barker sent him that he printed it unedited - and it is a must for anyone who seeks to understand the elegance and simplicity of Kit Williams’ original puzzle.

So what lessons does Quest for the Golden Hare teach us? One, never try to impose your own solutions on the puzzle. Unless you can get your mind working along the same lines as the game designer/treasure burier you will not succeed. One of the worst traps is to decide on a likely place and try to make the clues fit your preconception. Two, persevere in the face of adversity and do not walk away if at first you don’t succeed. Digging is hard work and needs to be stuck at, even if your confidence in your theory is ebbing. If you’ve arrived at a location as a result of a logical deduction that chimes properly with the clues, you need to take a damn good look and not get discouraged after just one evening’s work, the fate that befell Rousseau and Barker.

Three (and this one is crucial, take it from me) don’t discount the role of instinct and coincidence. Here are two examples, one from Masquerade and one from Perplex City. Gascoigne’s book, rightly wary of the role of unsupported free-thinking and word association to solve a very logical, almost mathematical puzzle, nevertheless gives the example of John Soans and Claudia Ashleigh-Morgan of Illinois. These two high-flying business executives went to huge lengths to solve the puzzle and, working from some fairly explicit clues given in one of the book’s earliest pictures, went prospecting for the word ‘equinox’ in the text around each picture. They found it in the letters surrounding the double-page spread depicting a girl swimming in the pond of Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire. This is where it appears if you have fully solved the puzzle (as part of the descriptive sentence and acrostic ‘Catherine’s long finger overshadows earth buried yellow amulet midday points the hour in light of equinox look you’). Working from that picture they came up with the following sentence: ‘Go to shadow Catherine of Aragon memorial at equinox’. Kit Williams had no clue that this sentence could be derived in the way that it was - and yet it was spookily accurate. The missing piece of information was the location, Ampthill, but as Gascoigne mentions towards the end of his book, not many memorials for the late queen will be capable of casting a shadow on a specific point at the equinox. Surely these two enterprising Americans would have arrived at Ampthill eventually themselves.

Perplex City offers a similar example. One of the principal characters in the game goes by the name of Scarlett Kiteway and, by the time the endgame came, she was well and truly in the frame as the person that had stolen and buried the Cube, a key clue being: “When you know who I am, you’ll know which path to take.” When players were entering the endgame, and had narrowed the Cube’s location down to a Forestry Commission site along a footpath called the Jurassic Way, they spotted a place called Rockingham Forest in Northamptonshire. Within it, at a location called Fineshade Wood, is a red kite centre (with information about a bird of prey very common in this area). This was completely unplanned by the game designers but was enough to get a substantial number of players into the locality and wandering over to a neighbouring bit of land called Wakerley Great Wood, to consult its map board and to notice that it fitted the clues to the Cube’s location perfectly.

As one of the Perplex City writers later said: “We’re now going to pretend that we planned it that way all along…”

Some links:

• Wikipedia: Bamber Gascoigne
• Wikipedia: Kit Williams
• 1984 audio interview with Kit Williams
• H2G2: Masquerade
• The Wee Web: Masquerade, the solution
• The Wee Web: unmasqued, the Masquerade ‘con’
• Bunnyears.net: Masquerade FAQ (scroll down to Frank Branston’s recollections for one of the most interesting accounts of Guard and Thompson’s activities)
• Perplex City: how we got there - and how we should have

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 11:06 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.