Secret behind greatest student prank of all time

April Fools day is an appropriate time to report on what has been called the greatest student prank of all time.

A team of a dozen engineering students executed what was probably the most ingenious student prank ever.


The year was 1958. The place was Gonville & Caius College which is a part of the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England.

In June 1958, Cambridge awoke to see a car perched at the apex of an inaccessible rooftop, looking as if it were driving across the skyline.

It was an Austin Seven van that appeared out of nowhere on top of the Senate House roof.

The spectacle made headlines around the world and left police, firefighters and civil defense units battling for nearly a week to hoist the vehicle back down before giving in and taking it to pieces with blowtorches.

The shadowy group of engineering students who executed the stunt were never identified and the mystery of how they did it has baffled successive undergraduates and provided fodder for countless tourist guides.

Now, 50 years later, the group reunited to disclose their identities and reveal how they winched an Austin Seven to the top of the university's 70ft-high Senate House.

A diagram at the link below shows how the stunt was pulled off by the twelve students divided into three groups.

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