According to Williams’ celebrity witness Bamber Gascoigne (the presenter of student TV quiz show University Challenge who later published his own account of events, Quest for the Golden Hare), many of those seeking the pendant refused to believe that their own theories were flawed and continued to search even after it had been found. The hare was eventually located in 1982 by one “Ken Thomas,” whose real name, it later emerged, was actually Dugald Thompson.

Masquerade sold 2,000,000 copies worldwide, with translated versions appearing in many other countries, including Italy, where it was adapted to lead to the location of a parallel prize. The tens of thousands of letters Williams received from treasure-hunters included one from a priest asking him to confirm that Masquerade contained no hidden occult messages. The artwork of Williams-whose symbolist paeans to the British countryside sprang from the same naive-bucolic tradition that had produced the Brotherhood of Ruralists-and Masquerade‘s hint of Arts-and-Craftsy olde-worlde intrigue immediately entranced and obsessed the country, to the extent that the book was soon being blamed for the digging up of parks and fields by avid treasure hunters. The counterculture of the previous years had engendered a new interest in nature and the “unspoiled” pre-industrial world, and after t he release the previous year of the animated film version of Richard Adam’s traumatizing 1972 rabbit odyssey Watership Down(and Bright Eyes, the Mike Batt-penned Art Garfunkel single from its soundtrack, which spent six weeks in the number one position of the UK charts), the Leporidae family were firmly at the forefront of British national preoccupations. The Yorkshire Ripper was still at large and, against a background of recession and ongoing industrial action (the” winter of discontent“), Britain had just returned the Conservatives to government: the mood of the country was tense and there was an appetite for distraction. The book contained clues to the location of a golden pendant in the form of a hare that had been buried at a secret location and was worth, at the time of Masquerade‘s release, £5,000. In 1979, British artist Kit Williams published Masquerade, a picture book telling the whimsical story of a hare who loses the precious jewel entrusted to him by the sun.

Image Source: World of Spectrum, Pictures from an Old Book

Maker and Year: Kit Williams, Jonathan Cape, 1979

Masquerade book kit williams