The Hastings Rarities Affair: A Mystery Worthy of Sherlock Holmes

Today writer Randal A. Burd, Jr. examines the Hastings Rarities Affair, a classic hoax perpetrated by a British taxidermist.

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History

In 1953, the scientific community was shaken to discover they had been made a monkey of… specifically, an orangutan.  The incident in question involved an orangutan’s jaw, which was cleverly attached to a centuries-old human skull some 41 years earlier and passed off as the missing link of the evolutionary tree.

The perpetrator of the Piltdown Man Hoax, as it came to be called, is now believed to be a man named Charles Dawson, although it was previously suggested (and some still believe) the hoax may have been orchestrated by none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.  Not unlike the Piltdown Man Hoax, a similar case of fraud, dubbed the Hastings Rarities Affair, captured the imagination of British scientists for many years.

Of course, birds are often the subjects of legends which extend beyond the bounds of truth, but the Hastings Rarities Affair involves intentional fraud for profit.  A newspaper article from September 3, 1962, gives an account of the fraud shortly after it was discovered.  The article, “Bird Hoax Uncovered: Britain Terms it ‘Great Blow’ to Ornithology,” described the particulars of the hoax to readers of the Reading Eagle.

Patrons of the Reading, Pennsylvania, newspaper learned that taxidermist George Bristow, who happened to be an acquaintance of Piltdown Man discoverer Charles Dawson, had stuffed many of the rare birds included in the Hastings Rarities Affair before dying in 1936.  The article claims Bristow stuffed more rare birds than all other taxidermists at the time combined.  The hoax was allegedly perpetuated by importing frozen birds from other countries and claiming they were found in Britain.

The hoax was discovered through the use of statistics.  Statistician John Nelder noticed irregularities after researching ornithology statistics in the Hastings area, and from what he discovered, he published an article in a 1962 edition of the magazine, British Birds, where he suggested serial fraud had taken place and implicitly implicated Bristow as the alleged perpetrator.  The specimens sold by Bristow under false pretenses between 1892 and 1930 were estimated to be worth 7000 British pounds in 1962, or around $158,700 in today’s U.S. dollars.

The exposure and acceptance of the Hastings Rarities Affair led to the removal of almost 30 species of birds from official list of the British Ornithologists’ Union, although many of those species were reinstated when separate, reliable evidence was presented.  One species, the slender-billed curlew, was removed, then reinstated, and then removed from the list again.

Bottom Line

Like the previous Piltdown Man Hoax at times attributed to Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Hastings Rarities Affair was a hoax that fooled much of the scientific community in Britain for years.  The Hastings Rarities Affair involved importing dead bird specimens and claiming they were species observed to be native to Britain.  A taxidermist named George Bristow allegedly profited around $158,700 in today’s U.S. dollars by selling these specimens under false pretenses.  The hoax led to several species being removed from an official register of British birds, only to have most reinstated after more acceptable evidence of their locality was discovered.