Masquerade is a children’s book, written and illustrated by Kit Williams, which sparked a treasure hunt by concealing clues to the location of a jeweled golden hare, created and hidden somewhere in Britain by Williams. It became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts.
The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide, many in the United Kingdom, but also in Australia, South Africa, West Germany, Japan, France and the United States. 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 for 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 Derbyshire 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. Gascoigne summarized his experiences thus:
“Tens of thousands of letters from Masqueraders have convinced me that the human mind has an equal capacity for pattern-matching and self-deception. While some addicts were busy cooking the riddle, others were more single-mindedly continuing their own pursuit of the hare quite regardless of the news that it had been found. Their own theories had come to seem so convincing that no exterior evidence could refute them. These most determined of Masqueraders may grudgingly have accepted that a hare of some sort was dug up at Ampthill, but they believed there would be another hare, or a better solution, awaiting them at their favourite spot. Kit would expect them to continue undismayed by the much publicised diversion at Ampthill and would be looking forward to the day when he would greet them as the real discoverers of the real puzzle of Masquerade. Optimistic expeditions were still setting out, with shovels and maps, throughout the summer of 1982.”
On December 11, 1988, The Sunday Times exposed the winner of the Masquerade contest as a fraud. The winner, “Ken Thomas”, was revealed to be a pseudonym of Dugald Thompson. Thompson’s business partner, John Guard, was the boyfriend of Veronica Robertson, a former live-in girlfriend of Williams. Guard had apparently convinced Robertson to help him because both were animal rights activists and Guard promised to donate any profits to the animal rights cause.
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