H. Rochester Sneath

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H. Rochester Sneath MA L-ès-L (c. 1900 – ?) is a fictional character, headmaster of the fictional Selhurst school, who was created by Humphry Berkeley in a series of hoax letters to public school headmasters and public figures starting in 1948.

Fictional biography

Sneath was supposedly the

with 175 male students.

Invention of Sneath

Selhurst School and Rochester Sneath were the inventions of Humphry Berkeley, then an undergraduate student at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Berkeley ordered headed notepaper printed with Selhurst's letterhead. He arranged with the Royal Mail to have his post forwarded to his Cambridge address. After some time they refused to send mail from a nonexistent address, so he would ask his correspondents to reply c/o Mrs Harvey-Kelly, at a Cambridge address which was that of a fellow student.

The letters

Headmasters

Berkley's earliest letters as Sneath, written in March 1948, were to the

.

The Master of

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."

Other letters included written by Sneath included:

• A letter to the headmaster of Stowe School to ask if he should provide sex education for the school maids.
• A complaint to the headmaster of Oundle School that the school chaplain was hopeless as a rat catcher.
• Asking Haileybury for a reference for a teacher who had a club foot and warts.
• Even the headmaster of Eton received a letter from Sneath, asking to apply for his job.

Some of the headmasters answered politely to a person they thought to be a fellow headmaster; one even recommended Selhurst to a parent of a prospective pupil.

Public figures

Public figures soon found themselves receiving letters too:

• 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.
• Conductor Sir Adrian Boult was invited to conduct the school orchestra; he, like Shaw and Scott, was not enthusiastic.

Two of Sneath's correspondents detected the hoax: one was Walter Oakeshott of

" be ready for him.

Exposure

On 13 April 1948, Sneath's letter was published in the

textbooks for compulsory Russian lessons in his school.

The News Review asked to interview Sneath to discover more about this unusual school, but Sneath's "secretary", "Penelope Pox-Rhyddene", claimed he was ill. The journalist then visited Petworth to discover that there was no Selhurst School there, and subsequently turned up on the doorstep of Berkeley's friend's lodgings.

A story in the News Review on 29 April revealed that Berkeley was behind the hoax.

Berkeley was sent down (excluded from university) for two years.

After Sneath, and publication

Berkeley was later elected

.

The Rochester Sneath letters were published in 1974 under the title The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath, together with drawings by Nicolas Bentley.

Books

• ISBN 0-7067-0150-X
  .