‘No spade, or pick or computer trick’, the 1984 computer game Hareraiser proclaims. This was kind of the problem: the game was interminably boring because there were no tricks – except in regards to its purported prize.
Following a hare through a series of ‘intrigues’, Hareraiser was created by John Guard and Dugald Thompson at the company Haresoft, and is described by the BBC Micro Games Archive as ‘an extremely suspect “game”, published as part of a scam “competition”.’
In theory, if you completed the game (no one did), you could claim real-life treasure or its financial equivalent of £30,000. The treasure was a bejewelled golden hare, the same golden hare discovered two years earlier by a strange, be-piped man called Ken Thomas. The hare Thomas found was the prize for an armchair treasure hunt of a 1979 book called Masquerade. How it got into the hands of Dugald Thompson is a matter of spades, picks and tricks.
When Tom Maschler, the legendary publisher at Jonathan Cape, initially approached the artist Kit Williams to make what would become Masquerade, he declined. But Maschler’s parting words, that he believed Williams could do something no one had done before, changed his mind. Williams decided on a treasure hunt.
Masquerade followed the adventures of a hare on its quest to reunite the lovers of the sun and moon, and on each page were clues as to where buried treasure lay. As well as writing and illustrating the book, Williams made the treasure himself, an 18-carat gold hare with bells, moonstones and rubies; a thing of dreams.
Jonathan Cape appointed the University Challenge host Bamber Gascoigne as a trustworthy witness for the burial of the golden hare, and a month before Masquerade’s publication, Williams and Gascoigne buried the treasure at a secret location. On publication, the book – and the allure of buried treasure – becamea cultural phenomenon that captured imaginations worldwide. But, after about a year, despite hundreds of thousands of sales, no one had solved Williams’ riddle.
On the 21st December 1980 the Sunday Times published a new illustrated clue by Williams as to where the treasure was buried. It was accompanied by a piece recounting the lengths people had gone to find the golden hare. One teenager failed his A-Levels after trying, and failing, to solve the riddle. A ‘perfectly sane, normally law-abiding’ woman from Somerset was so convinced she had found the treasure’s unlikely locale that she broke into Taunton fire station and was promptly arrested. A treasure-seeker from Switzerland climbed down a Cornish cliff and had to be rescued when the tide came in. An American woman flew her friend to the UK to find the treasure in the crow’s nest of the Cutty Sark – the Cutty Sark doesn’t have a crow’s nest. Priests began writing distressed pleas to Williams that the hunt for buried treasure was taking precedence over Sunday worship.
Masquerade having been such a sensation, I decide to follow the treasure hunt back to its beginning. Ampthill, in Bedfordshire, is an affluent dormitory town where Williams lived with his then girlfriend, an animal rights activist called Veronica Roberts. It was here that he devised Masquerade.
