While submitting an answer to r/Askhistorians regarding why the US and Australian Woolworths have the same name, I fell down a rabbit hole of decent proportions. This post is that rabbit hole, all started because of a 'possible' dare made exactly 100 years ago.
One of the first things I found while researching was an article by news.com titled "Woolworths is only called ‘Woolworths’ because of a cheeky dare in 1924". In it, it states that the Australian Woolworths got its name through a dare made to use the already-extant US brand's name. Simple enough right? Except it wasn't. Woolworths' site doesn't mention the dare at all, not even in their 'about us' section which specifically discusses their name's origin. Even weirder, the news.com article states that its source was Stephen Ward, "manager of the Woolworths Heritage Centre".
So now we have a dilemma. Woolworths doesn't mention the dare, an interesting tidbit that'd 100% fit a corporate 'about us' page, and yet the news.com article, whose source is a person in charge of Woolies history, does. And instead of just letting this lie, I fell deep into the rabbit hole. You see, Wikipedia's article for the Australian Woolworths Group also mentions the dare. It states that "according to Ernest Robert Williams, Percy Christmas dared him to register the name Woolworths". Even if it is Wikipedia, surely this must corroborate the news.com article, right?? Nope! Not only is the Wikipedia article lacking a citation (more on that soon), but the person taking the dare is completely wrong. In the news.com article, it is Cecil Waine who Percy Christmas dared, not Ernest Williams. Both men were partners in the original Woolworths, but not the same at all.
Okay, so now we've got three variants. No dare, Ernest dared, Cecil dared. Trying not to be dragged further in, I did a direct search for the stated line from the Wikipedia article, hoping to find an original source. This however, led me down deeper into the rabbit hole. Most of the hits which weren't from post-2020s were blogs during a period between 2007-2010. All of them contained the exact same line from the Wikipedia page, and most actually linked back to the Wikipedia article. While this was annoying, I assumed that it meant there existed a common 'ancestor'. This seems certain by the fact that another news.com article, this one from 2018, titled "How SPC, Milo and other iconic brands really got their names", mentions the dare. Only this article mentions the Percy-Ernest dare, not the Percy-Cecil one.
Determined to find this ancestor, and answer the r/Askhistorians question in the proper way, I began searching through some academic sources. The Australian Dictionary of Biography entry for Percy Christmas mentioned nothing of the dare, which seems to line up with the 'about us' page. Going onto Trove and searching a myriad of phrases and words throughout the 1900s for a decent while also came up with no hits. At the very least, the newspapers Trove has digitized never mention a dare, but that is not conclusive proof that such a dare never existed. However, this left me at my wits end. No clear common source made me believe that the answer may have just been out of my reach.
Throwing one final hail Mary, I checked the Wikipedia page's version history. And that's when I found it. While the original article for Woolworths Group (Australia) is just a stub, the first major update completely expanded the page. Amongst this expansion, a single line appeared, the same one regarding Percy and Ernest's dare. And shockingly, it still lacked a citation. That version of the article was created in AUGUST 2004! That line, uncited for 20 years now, has sat there, untouched. And through it, dozens of blogs have taken up this as 'fact', all the way up until 2018 where news.com reported it as truth. 20 years, and not a single time has it been questioned.
Based on this find, I have an idea of what probably happened. This is mostly conjecture though, so take it with a huge grain of salt. The user who updated the Woolworths page in 2004, had, at some point, gone to the Woolies Heritage Centre and knew of the 'dare', but had misremembered the names involved. They added it, without a citation as would regularly happen with Wikipedia 20 years ago, and likely thought little of it. This line than trickled down throughout blogs and articles, before finally being put to rest in 2019, with the more recent news. com article which, unlike anything else, seems to have a concrete source.
That leaves us with a massive question, though. Did a dare actually occur? The answer is, most likely, probably.
While I think there is misinformation which needs to be cleaned up, I doubt the Woolies Heritage Centre and Stephen Ward lied to news.com. So, at the very least, they presumably have some sort of evidence for the dare (which I cannot get to right now). Whatever the case, it seems the dare probably occurred. What did occur, though, was this rabbit hole, of which I had been stuck for hours in while answering that question. Out now, I am simply struck with curiosity about how much other history has ended up wrong due to a Wikipedia article.
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