Our penchant for pranks goes back a long way.

Springtime fooling has been going on for a very long time. Some claim it goes as far back as the early Romans, who set aside a day for foolishness. In more modern times, it seems the tradition is meant to celebrate the passing of winter, and the birth of spring. As Saint John, NB, bookseller, T.S. Hall, put it 125 years ago, “Farewell winter’s storms and cold, the icy blasts, the white snow banks. We welcome April’s joker bold who on first day does play his pranks.”

In 1760, Poor Robin’s Almanac noted:

The first of April, some do say,
Is set apart as All Fools’ Day;
But why the people call it so,
Nor I, nor they themselves do know

Springtime fooling has been going on for a very long time. Some claim it goes as far back as the early Romans, who set aside a day for foolishness. In more modern times, it seems the tradition is meant to celebrate the passing of winter, and the birth of spring. As Saint John, NB, bookseller, T.S. Hall, put it 125 years ago, “Farewell winter’s storms and cold, the icy blasts, the white snow banks. We welcome April’s joker bold who on first day does play his pranks.”

Clary Croft, chronicler of Nova Scotia folklore, says April Fool’s trickery has deep roots in Atlantic Canada. He came across a story in Pamela Newton’s The Cape Breton Book of Days that took place on April 1, 1801, in which “an officer with a regiment stationed at Sydney, Cape Breton, agreed to fight a pistol duel with a former friend. They met, with their seconds, on the Esplanade. They stood facing each other, turned and walked 30 paces, turned again and fired.

“Both men fell to the ground, their white shirts stained crimson. The onlookers were horrified—even more so when both men then stood up. They, too, were shocked, until they learned that their seconds had replaced the bullets with a mixture of gunpowder and cranberries.”

Croft, who travelled with Canadian folklore pioneer Helen Creighton, recalled that she had collected a bit of early April Fool’s material, including the notion that the day “is known as poisson d’avril—after the mackerel, which is silly enough to be caught in large numbers. The trick is to pin a paper fish on the back of some unsuspecting poisson d’avril.

“A similar prank,” says Croft, “used to be played in Nova Scotia, especially along the Western Shore, where paper tails and notes were attached to schoolchildren’s sweaters.”

Through the latter part of the 19th century, some newspapers opened their column of local happenings with a warning to readers that it was All Fool’s Day. Unfortunately, they seldom followed up with specific reports, though from time to time there were comments about boys burning oakum and tossing it into porches, of cayenne pepper that was placed in wood stoves, of dupes being sent on nonsensical errands, of cigars loaded with explosives offered to unsuspecting men, and of wood covered with chocolate that was proffered to children.

There were reports of horses that were switched from one man’s carriage to another’s while their owners were at the post office or church, but the reports were often short on detail. One exception, in the Summerside Journal of April 2, 1901, commented on an incident in Malpeque the previous Saturday night, in which a young man had left his horse harnessed in a stall. When he came to retrieve the animal, he found a cow instead.

“He was completely dumfounded,” the report noted, “and wondered if he was the victim of some hallucination.”

To complicate matters, the sleigh he was supposed to hitch the cow to was found mired in the middle of a “deep pool of water” in the adjacent farmyard.

Also in 1901, the Saint John Globe reported that a Professor Granner, a noted English steeple climber, was passing through the city on his way to the pan-American Exposition; he would scale the steeple of St. Andrews Church, on Germain Street, on Monday at 10am. On that April 1 morning, hundreds showed up, as did an unsuspecting workman named Granner, who had no intention of climbing the steeple. The newspaper demanded an apology from the perpetrator, one E.A. Craig.

Thirty-six years later, the Evening Times Globe became the leading trickster, publishing doctored photos of the Champlain monument being shipped out of Saint John by riverboat, and of the harbour ferry, the Loyalist, apparently swept by giant waves and resting atop the floats at the foot of Princess Street.

In more recent times, electronic media have been used to carry on the tradition of April Fool’s trickery. David McLaughlin was a CBC-Radio reporter in Saint John; he wanted to make a contribution to the Maritime Magazine program that would originate in Halifax on Sunday, April 1, 1985. Since it was a weekend, he knew people would be off-guard, and the story he concocted proved him right.

The tale was based in downtown Saint John, at Market Slip. David had CBC reporters supposedly “on site” describe the King Street area as overrun with lobsters. “Live” interviews were conducted with a woman who recalled that it had happened once when she was a little girl, but who said she suspected that most Saint Johners had forgotten the incident.

A second “interview” took place with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, whose scientists were said to have hired an airplane and were coming to Saint John, because it was the only place where the planetary conditions had resulted in creatures coming out of the sea. They expressed hope that Saint Johners would not simply scoop up the lobsters for food, but were told by the CBC reporters that that was already happening.

As soon as the broadcast ended, the CBC Saint John office started receiving calls from all over the Maritimes, asking if it would be worthwhile to drive from as far away as Cape Breton to enjoy the lobster harvest. McLaughlin shared this story in 2000, saying, “I consider it one of the greatest accomplishments from my Maritime Magazine years.” Those he duped may not have.

Ten years later, in 1995, a story on CTV (then ATV) caught many Maritimers off guard. It seemed serious, since it involved security for the upcoming G7 conference of world leaders in Halifax. There were going to be restrictions on public access to downtown Halifax, and that was not sitting well with people.

The coup de grâce, which appeared on the evening news, was a segment “showing” the top half of the Town Clock on Citadel Hill—built in 1803—being lifted off, because the security folks need an unrestricted view of the downtown from Citadel Hill.

Clary Croft recalls that when he saw the television clip, he gasped and thought, “This time the G7 organizers have gone too far!”

The next day, he was delighted to see the old clock still in place, realizing it had been a joke.

Vicki Bowe, a long-time staffer at CTV, confirmed that the incident happened just the way Croft recalls, and added that it was “one of many of (reporter) Jonathan Kay’s April Fool stories. “People were pretty amused when they phoned us and realized they’d been had,” she says.

As with all such trickery, it is best when people take it graciously. As Mark Twain wrote for Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar about April Fool’s Day, “This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty four.”