1: Horace De Vere Cole:

Horace De Vere Cole was a man devoted to, one might almost say obsessed by, practical jokes. His most memorable prank was probably giving carefully selected free theatre tickets to bald men so that when their gleaming pates were seen from the Upper Circle a rather rude word could clearly be seen. Whether impersonating foreign dignitaries to the consternation of senior naval officals or shocking Edwardian society by performing astoundingly vulgar tricks with a cow's udder in public thoroughfares his was a life devoted to, and ultimately squandered on, the pursuit of japery. Click here for more

2: Henry de la Poer Beresford

The wildly unpredictable third marquess of Waterford was never conclusively linked with the mystery of Spring-Heeled Jack, the demonic apparition who terrorised the women of South London in the 1830s, but 'the Mad Marquis' certainly had the athleticism and the temperament to be at the root of Battersea's own Urban Legend. Click here for more

3: Charles Dawson

Although he could conceivably been the hapless victim of the Piltdown man hoax, it's perhaps kinder to think of Charles Dawson as the perpetrator of that celebrated piece of archaeological fakery. Hailed at the time as ‘by far the most important ever made in England, and of equal, if not of greater consequence than any other discovery yet made, either at home or abroad’, the Piltdown Man skull later proved to be the combination of two quite disparate hominids. From its 'discovery' in 1912 to the exposure of the fraud in the 1950s, Eoanthropus dawsoni was considered as the 'missing link' between ape and man. Click here for more

4: Elizabeth Parsons

Perhaps the most successful fake haunting in history is the Cock Lane Ghost.. The site of the haunting, in Cock Lane in the City of London, attracted many curious observers. The Duke of York and Samuel Johnson were just two dignitaries who were drawn to witness the celebrated phenomena. They were, of course, entirely fraudulent – the work of an eleven-year-old girl called Elizabeth Parsons who convinced witnesses by means of assorted scratchings, feats of ventriloquism and bumps in the night that the house was inhabited by the shade of girl murdered by a former lodger. Her father ended up standing trial for the imposture, and was sentenced to the pillory, but remained comparatively untouched by a sympathetic London mob. Click here for more

5: Mary Willcocks

On Good Friday 1817, a young woman wearing a black turban and speaking an unknown language was found wandering in Almondsbury, north-east of Bristol. Convincing the locals that she was the exotic Princess Caraboo, she was the centre of much excitement, involving dancing, swimming, and the cooking of chicken curries. It was only in the June of that year that the princess was exposed as Mary Willcocks, a former nursemaid from Witheridge. She continued to trade on the Princess Caraboo name even after exposure, finally dying in a houseful of cats at the turn of the last Century. Click here for more

6: Frances Griffiths

Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright were the teenage cousins behind the still-famous Cottingley Fairies photographs. Although the pictures did not initially fool the family members to which the girls showed them, in 1920 they came to the attention of celebrated author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had become obsessed with the supernatural after the loss of his son in the Great War. He made a cause célèbre of the photos, which made it almost impossible for the girls to admit their deception. They maintained the veracity of the images for over sixty-five years, only confessing that the 'fairies' were in fact paper cut-outs in 1983. Click here for more

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