Masquerade (book)
Masquerade is a children’s book, written and painted by Kit Williams, which sparked a worldwide treasure hunt by concealing clues to the location of a jeweled golden hare, created and hidden somewhere in the British Isles by Williams. It became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts.
Book
Challenged by Tom Maschler, of the British publishing firm Jonathon Cape, to “do something no one has ever done before” with a children’s book, Kit set out in the 1970s to create a book of paintings that readers would study carefully rather than flip through and discard. The book’s objective, the hunt for a valuable treasure, became his means to this end. Masquerade featured fifteen exquisite, detailed paintings illustrating the story of Jack Hare, who seeks to carry a treasure from the Moon (depicted as a woman) to her love object, the Sun (a man). On arriving at the sun, Jack finds he has lost the treasure, and the reader is left to find its location.
Along with creating the book, Kit crafted a hare from 18 carat gold and jewels, which he hid at a secret location within the British Isles on August 7th, 1979, and announced that his forthcoming book contained all clues necessary to decode the treasure’s location.
Kit Williams said:
- "If I was to spend two years on the 16 paintings for Masquerade I wanted them to mean something. I recalled how, as a child, I had come across 'treasure hunts' in which the puzzles were not exciting nor the treasure worth finding. So I decided to make a real treasure, of gold, bury it in the ground and paint real puzzles to lead people to it. The key was to be Catherine of Aragon's cross at Ampthill, near Bedford, casting a shadow like the pointer of a sundial."
Search
The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies world wide, many in the UK, but also in Australia, South Africa, Germany, Japan, France and the USA. Searchers often dug up public and private property acting on hunches. One location in England named “Haresfield Beacon” was a popular site for searchers, and Williams paid the cost of a sign notifying searchers that the hare was not hidden on the premises. Real-life locations reproduced in the paintings were searched by treasure hunters, including Sudbury Hall in Suffolk and Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire.
In March 1982, Kit Williams announced that Ken Thomas had won the contest. Bamber Gascoigne, having been asked by Williams to witness the burial of the hare and to document the contest from beginning to end, did so in his book Quest for the Golden Hare.
Scandal
On December 11, 1988, the Sunday Times exposed that the winner of the Masquerade contest was a fraud. The winner was revealed to be Dugald Thompson using the pseduonym "Ken Thomas", whose business partner John Guard was the boyfriend of Veronica Robertson, the former live-in girlfriend of Williams. Apparently Guard had convinced Robertson to help him because both were animal rights activists and Guard promised to donate any profits to the animal rights cause.
While living with Williams, Robertson apparently learned the physical location of the hare, while remaining ignorant of the proper solution to the book’s master riddle. This knowledge was all that was needed to draw a crude sketch of the location, which Williams recognized as the first correct solution mailed to him. Williams immediately phoned Thompson and instructed him to dig for the hare.
Only later did Williams discover that Thompson had not solved the puzzle in the intended manner, but appeared at the time to have blundered into a lucky guess. Only after (and very shortly after) Thompson unearthed, and was formally awarded the prize, was the proper solution unraveled by two physics teachers, Mike Barker and John Rousseau.
Thompson founded a software company called “Haresoft”, and offered the jewel as a prize to a new contest which took the form of a computer game. The company and its game were unsuccessful, yielding no winner, and the hare was later auctioned for 31,900 pounds to an unknown buyer. The treasure’s whereabouts today are as mysterious as they were during its original interment in the soil of Ampthill.
Williams was shocked to discover this and is quoted as saying:
- "This tarnishes Masquerade and I'm shocked by what has emerged. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to all those many people who were genuinely looking for it. Although I didn't know it, it was a skeleton in my cupboard and I'm relieved it has come out."
Solution
Solving the riddle of Masquerade involved an elaborate system, subtly indicated in the book, of drawing lines starting from the eyes of characters within the paintings, proceeding through the tips of middle fingers and big toes of the same characters, and finally pointing to letters which appear on the border of every painting within the book. Decoding and following this method reveals the nineteen-word message:
CATHERINE’S LONG FINGER OVER SHADOWS EARTH BURIED YELLOW AMULET MIDDAY POINTS THE HOUR IN LIGHT OF EQUINOX LOOK YOU
Taking the first letter indicated by each painting, the acrostic “CLOSE BY AMPTHILL” is revealed. Properly interpreted, the message told to dig near the cross-shaped monument to Catherine of Aragon in Ampthill Park, at the precise spot touched by the tip of the monument’s shadow at the stroke of noon on the date of either the vernal or autumnal equinox.