20 April 1854
This was the day slim francophone Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne was last seen alive — a few months before he was presumed dead, and about 11 years before a 27-stone cockney butcher called Thomas turned up claiming to be the long-lost baronet.
Roger was the elder son of Sir James Tichborne, 10th baronet, and one of a long line of landed Tichbornes who could trace their family tree back to before 1066. According to family lore (recounted in Jan Bondeson’s The Great Pretenders):
At her deathbed, the thirteenth-century Lady Mabella Tichborne asked her husband to help the deserving poor. Her hard-hearted spouse replied that he would give as much land as she could crawl around while a torch burned. To everyone’s astonishment, she roused herself and crawled around twenty-three acres of land, the yield from which was afterward given to the poor. Lady Mabella threatened that if these alms were not distributed according to her wishes, evil times would come to the house of Tichborne: seven sons would be succeeded by seven daughters, and the family would become extinct.
So, the family’s history was already… interesting, arguably made more so by the fact that 19th century Roger had left England when he wasn’t allowed to marry his cousin — either because the family didn’t think first cousins should, or he was a drunk. Accounts vary.
Either way, he set out from Rio for New York on 20 April 1854. Whether it was the family’s failure, several centuries on, to follow Lady Mabella’s wishes which caused their woes, we cannot say, but — in the words of William J Kinsley in the Yale Law Journal in 1911:
Roger had a younger brother, though, so he — Alfred — became the 11th baronet in 1862 on the death of their father. How he felt the following year when his mother started advertising in The Times offering a reward to anyone with news of Roger, we also don’t know.
But Alfred died in 1866, leaving behind a baby called Henry, due to become the 12th baronet. The previous year, though, the plot had thickened. Roger’s mother, Lady Tichborne, had taken out adverts internationally, too — one of which had borne fruit…
Quite what it was about the words “HANDSOME REWARD” and “MOST LIBERAL REWARD” that first attracted the attention of William Gibbes, the Australian lawyer who was handling butcher Thomas Castro’s bankruptcy will forever remain a mystery, but Gibbes’ wife remembered that Castro had claimed he was due to inherit some land in England. Obviously, this sounded plausible. It’s not like anyone else in recorded history who’s short of cash has ever before claimed that some is due in any day now. So, in the words of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography…
It’s important to know, at this stage, that Lady Tichborne had not got on with her husband, and had spent much of their marriage in Paris, raising Roger, who consequently spoke mostly French and English only with a strong accent. Lady T had also, of course, described her first born in that advert as “of a delicate constitution”, while — in a 1935 short story based on the case, Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor — Jorge Luis Borges called this man an “obese dimwit from Wapping” and:
Borges may have been writing fiction, but he’d seen the photos. Lady Tichborne had in front of her a man who had forgotten not only his French, but also, apparently, and for over a decade, the need to contact his mother and reassure her that he was alive. So, obviously:
Most of the rest of the family thought nothing of the kind, but as long as Lady T was alive, there wasn’t a lot they could do about it. Nor could they stop her giving ‘Roger’ an income of £1,000 a year. They could, however, look into his story…
‘Roger’ claimed he’d survived the wreck of La Bella and been picked up by a ship bound for Melbourne. He’d become a cattle rancher and for some reason taken the name of a man he’d once met in Chile. As the ODNB puts it, though:
‘Roger’ still managed to impress people with his knowledge of Tichborne Park and his early life there — but he had made friends with a former servant of the Tichborne family, so… might he, perhaps, have picked up some of those details from them…?
‘Roger’ said he knew Arthur. They had been ranchers together, but also outlaws, which was why Arthur had vanished so completely. And conveniently. Oh, and by the way, they used to swap names sometimes, too. The Tichbornes discovered that ‘Roger’ had visited the Orton family in Wapping in 1866 on his return to Britain — and an old girlfriend said he was Arthur (although the Ortons didn’t). These mixed reviews weren’t great for ‘Roger’, and then he had another blow.
His ‘mother’ (and only ally in the family) died, and the stage was set for a trial to establish the facts. ‘Roger’ found 100 people prepared to testify that he was Roger. The family found 250, and then needed hardly any of them
So, it now seemed pretty clear that ‘Roger’ was Arthur, meaning he could be charged with perjury. However, having lost the previous case, he was in a hole for £80,000 of legal fees, so — in Jan Bondeson’s telling of the story — other means would have to be found for the next one:
TO PAY FOR the coming trial, the Claimant’s friends had hatched a scheme at once novel and brilliant. The Claimant had himself been declared bankrupt in 1869, and none of his backers were ready to sponsor his adventure in court out of their own pockets. The solution was to print Tichborne bonds, on which the Claimant promised to pay the holder £100 within a month of obtaining possession of the Tichborne estates. The bonds sold for around £20 and greatly appealed to the British public’s sporting instincts and fondness for gambling; in all, not less than £40,000 was obtained from this scheme. The government and the upper classes stood aghast at this novel system of raising funds. Could any penniless adventurer challenge the landed aristocracy with impunity, and was every skeleton in the family cup- board to become a potential commercial enterprise?
Having the money didn’t help Arthur very much. After a 10-month trial — one of the longest in British history at the time, in which the lord chief justice’s summing up accounted for the whole of the final month — he was found guilty and jailed for 14 years. His lawyer was disbarred and embarked on an eccentric career trying to prove his client’s innocence — which even included a short stint as an MP, during which he failed to secure a royal commission on the Tichborne case.
Arthur, though, was a model prisoner, was released four years early, and embarked on a tour of the country to drum up support, but his moment had passed. He tried his luck in America, where he also had no joy. One account even has him meeting another Tichborne Claimant and calling him an impostor.
The final chapter, though, had him — desperate for cash — sell his story to the People newspaper for £4,000. At that price, of course, they wanted not the story everyone already knew, but a full confession of his deception, which he duly provided. However, he wasn’t adept at dealing with newspapermen… Bondeson again:
He died penniless three years later, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Paddington Cemetery — although, curiously, the Tichborne family allowed a plaque inscribed Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne to be put on the coffin.
I’ve been wanging on for about 1,500 words now, and have barely touched the surface of this story. Several books have been written about it, and in 1998 there was film by David ‘Harry Potter’ Yates.
But what was the truth? Was he Arthur Orton? Or Thomas Castro? Or even Sir Roger? Did the beastly Establishment close ranks against him?
Well, it’s possible, of course, that the powers that be would resist an interloper and that he was a fraud. Both things can be true.
What’s vanishingly unlikely, though, is that ‘Roger’ was really Roger.
