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Stonehenge finally clears up mystery from February 1966

It should have been a poignant reunion when Bob and Bruce Bogle met their maker at Stonehenge — but they just stared blankly ahead. But then it was quite hard to recognize the student perpetrators of an outrageous stunt among the gray-haired, or bald, retired professionals assembled among the stones.

They last all met up at dawn on an icy day in February 1966 — and have kept the secret of that meeting ever since.

“We never put any money in the collecting box when we went in over the fence all those years ago, so we were a bit worried about owning up,” Martin Bergs, a retired chemist, said.

Now it can be told: the infamous 1966 Bogle invasion of Stonehenge, a story that went around the world, was a Manchester student rag-week publicity stunt that went spectacularly wrong since nobody outside the gang of plotters had the faintest clue what it was all about.

All the world knew 42 years ago was that staff arrived to find the ancient monument invaded by 16 life-size wooden stick men. Each had painted Beatles moptop hair, a name on their skinny chest and clutched curious implements. Bruce, Bob, Boris Bogle and their brothers stood, sat or — having blown over in the wind despite cord supports and sacks of sand weights — sprawled on the stones like students sleeping off a heavy night.

Before the horrified caretakers gathered them up and burned them, Austin Underwood, a local school teacher, arrived and photographed the Bogles in situ — images that appeared in many UK national papers.

The perpetrators waited confidently for the world to get the joke. The Bogles were the University of Manchester rag-week symbol. It featured on neckties, and the name was lent to a gruesome rag-week tradition, an 87km walk, usually done in brutally bad weather, called the Bogle Stroll.

But nobody did get the joke. To their amazement their Bogles were interpreted as everything from fascist to druidic to occult symbols. And by then there had been such outrage over another Manchester rag-week stunt, when students kidnapped an eagle from London Zoo, that they were afraid to own up. Ever.
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