The Tichborne Claimant

 

This story is not a story about murder, but about imposture. The crime was impersonating someone else for financial gain. The impostor was pretending to be Roger Tichborne, the elder of two surviving sons of Sir James and Lady Henrietta Tichborne. Roger Tichborne was born in Paris in 1829. Lady Henrietta, who was French, hated England and wanted to raise her son as a Frenchman. Roger therefore lived in France for his first fifteen years in Paris, while his father ran his estates in England. Roger naturally spoke French as his first language and English only with a French accent. This worried Sir James, as Roger was to inherit the estate and the English baronetcy. To make him more ‘English’ and fit into his eventual adult role, Sir James enrolled Roger at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit seminary in Lancashire. Because of the way he had been brought up by his mother, Roger had difficulties in making this switch into the English educational system.

Against his mother’s wishes, Roger Tichborne went into the army in 1849, joining the 6th Dragoon Guards. He quickly discovered that he was not cut out to be an officer and the men understandably ridiculed his French accent. He resigned his commission and after that could not settle to anything. There was enough family money for him not to need to work, but he needed something to do. A second bad decision was to allow himself to fall in love with his first cousin, Catherine, a relationship that was doomed from the start.

At this point, Roger Tichborne decided to leave England and become an explorer in South America. His parents tried to talk him out of it, but he was insistent. One reason for leaving was the intolerable atmosphere in the family, with his mother and father always quarrelling. Roger once described his home life with them as hell on earth. He set off in 1854, fully aware of the hazards ahead, and making a will before he went.

Roger Tichborne had ample financial resources for his expedition. He had an allowance of £1,000 a year, a huge income in those days. He set off with the idea of spending eighteen months in South America, before going on to India. He was a great letter and journal writer and kept his mother continually informed of his travels. He also sent back a steady stream of animal skins, stuffed birds and other items back to Tichborne Hall to be added to the ancestral collection. His mother circulated his letters to the staff on the estate, who were fascinated by his travels.

Roger Tichborne’s travels came to an abrupt end on 30 April 1855, on a voyage from Rio de Janeiro to New York aboard the British cargo schooner Bella. Four days into the voyage, the Bella foundered. The ship may have encountered bad weather or a badly stowed coffee cargo may have shifted in the hold, causing her to capsize. Whatever happened must have happened suddenly as no one survived. The only evidence of her existence and her end were an empty longboat and an area of flotsam. The Bella, her crew and her single distinguished passenger were declared lost at sea.

But Roger Tichborne’s story was far from over. His mother characteristically refused to believe that he was dead. She had lost two children through miscarriages and could not bear the thought of losing another, especially when the remaining son, Alfred, was dismissed as a waster. Lady Tichborne took to leaving a lantern at the entrance to Tichborne Hall, so that when Roger returned he would be able to find his way to the door. Her husband Sir James died in 1862 and Alfred died in 1866.

She became more and more obsessed with finding Roger, hiring agents to comb docks and taverns for any information about him. Lady Tichborne’s forlorn quest, worthy of Dickens, became well known among sailors. It was not unknown for sailors who were down on their luck to tell her stories of shipwreck survivors, raising her spirits and ensuring a sovereign for their trouble. Because she was willing to pay for information, it was not long before people started feeding her false reports that survivors from the Bella sinking had been picked up and taken to safety. One story had the ship itself surviving; she was hijacked by the crew, repainted, renamed and sold on in Australia.

Lady Tichborne knew then that her optimism had been right. She felt she was on the trail of her still-living son. She placed advertisements in newspapers offering a substantial reward for information about his whereabouts. These in turn led to newspaper articles about the case, emphasizing the illustriousness of the Tichborne family, owners of the ninth largest fortune in England.

The Melbourne Argus story was typical.

 

A handsome reward will be given to any person who can furnish such information as will discover the fate of Roger Charles Tichborne. He sailed from Rio de Janeiro on the 20th of April 1854 in the ship La Bella, and has never been heard of since, but a report reached England to the effect that a portion of the crew and passengers of a vessel of that name was picked up by a vessel bound to Australia, Melbourne it is believed. It is not known whether the said Roger Charles Tichborne was among the drowned or saved. He would at the present time be about thirty-two years of age, is of a delicate constitution, rather tall, with very light brown hair, and blue eyes. Mr Tichborne is the son of Sir James Tichborne, now deceased, and is heir to all his estates.

 

In 1865, Lady Tichborne wrote to a man in Sydney whose name she had spotted in connection with a ‘missing friends’ service. He was Mr Cubitt, and he posted advertisements in several Australian newspapers. In October 1865, Cubitt had a response from an old acquaintance, a lawyer called Gibbes, who lived at Wagga Wagga. Gibbes wrote to say that he had ‘spotted R. C. Tichborne’ in Wagga Wagga. One of Gibbes’s clients was a man going by the name of Thomas Castro and Gibbes reckoned that Castro was really Tichborne. This marked the start of one of the oddest legal tangles of the nineteenth century.

Wagga Wagga was a small town, where everyone knew everyone else. Gibbes in fact knew Thomas Castro very well. He was an old drinking companion. Castro was a butcher who had gone bankrupt and Gibbes was handling the bankruptcy arrangements. The idea that Castro the bankrupt butcher was the missing English aristocrat should have been rejected as absurd, but the outside world was surprisingly willing to believe it. Castro was affable and had told people that he came from a titled family and was living under an assumed name. Gibbes made the connection with the Tichborne case, and from a financial point of view it would have been opportune for Castro to be Tichborne in disguise; Castro owed a great deal of money to Gibbes, and if Castro inherited the Tichborne estate he would be able to pay his debt.

Castro was confronted with Gibbes’s claim that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, and he laughed at the absurdity of the idea. But Gibbes would not give up the idea. He pressed Castro to write to the mother and make arrangements to return to England, just as if the pipe dream were true. Castro was in serious financial difficulty and decided to give it a try. He had a criminal background as a horse-thief and fence. He agreed to launch a correspondence with Lady Tichborne, at first via Gibbes. Roger was alive, bankrupt and needed funds in order to return home. When Castro started writing the letters himself, his poor education showed him up badly, but the fact that they arrived under the aegis of a solicitor somehow gave them a false credibility. And, of course, Lady Tichborne wanted to believe that her son was alive.

The Tichborne family generally became suspicious. Roger’s reappearance in Wagga Wagga, the unlikeliest place in the circumstances, and after ten years, seemed improbable. They also knew that the sinking of the Bella was an established fact, and that there was no rational basis for Lady Tichborne’s conviction that he was still alive. They quickly became convinced that the claimant was an impostor.

Thomas Castro was bare-faced in asking Lady Tichborne to send him cash, and she stopped short of doing that. Instead she wrote to Cubitt, ‘You do not give any details whatever about the person you believe to be my son, you do not name even the town where he is, and you do not say anything about the way he was saved from the shipwreck.’ No evidence, no money. She offered the man £200 if he could prove he was Roger. She sent Cubitt and Gibbes detailed biographical information about her son which they could use to question Castro. She assumed Cubitt and Gibbes would act in good faith. But in practice Castro was given this information to help him flesh out his impersonation.

Castro discovered that the Tichbornes were Catholics, so his first act was to go to Goulburn to get himself remarried by a Catholic priest. He also studied Burke’s Peerage to learn more about the family.

Castro wrote to Lady Tichborne to give an account of his rescue from the wreck of the Bella. She still was not completely convinced. She proposed to Cubitt that he should contact an African called Andrew Bogle; a rescued slave from Jamaica, who had known Sir Roger well, he was now living in Sydney. Another man living in Sydney who had known Sir Roger was Michael Guilfoyle, a one-time head gardener from Tichborne Park. Castro travelled to Sydney, where he was given red-carpet treatment. Suddenly he was a celebrity.

Bogle went to Castro’s hotel and was startled to find the slim well-mannered young man turned into a rather rough fat middle-aged man. Yet it only took a few minutes for Bogle to change his mind. Guilfoyle was also easily persuaded that Castro was Roger Tichborne. Both Bogle and Guilfoyle were bowled over by Castro’s comprehensive and detailed knowledge of the family and the estate. They duly wrote letters to Lady Tichborne to say that they had no doubt this was her son.

Castro was cunning. He did his preparation well, and he kept adding little bits of new information to flesh out his knowledge of the family he claimed to head. He was affable, and found it easy to get others talking. When he met members of the Tichborne family, he got them talking and collected their memories; he was good at utilizing odd crumbs of information to appear more knowledgeable than he really was.

Gibbes arrived in Sydney to find that Castro was a major focus of interest. Gibbes used his status as a lawyer to get Castro generous credit; between them they generated thousands of pounds in cash and goods. At last Gibbes was getting back the money Castro owed him. Castro meanwhile was wondering how much more money he could make out of this deception.

Andrew Bogle was apparently going along with Castro’s deception for reasons of his own. After the death of his own master, Sir Edward Doughty, he was redundant. He had been given a good pension and Doughty had rescued him from slavery, but Bogle felt stranded in Australia, and cut off from the aristocratic lifestyle he had become accustomed to. He seems to have seen latching onto Castro-Tichborne as a way of getting to England and becoming ensconced at an English country house. He would certainly have known the difference between a butcher and a baronet, but it was in his interest to support Castro’s claim. Bogle was able to offer Castro his services, and help him acquire the necessary social skills to enable him to act the part of a baronet. It is not known for certain, but there was probably a deal; probably Castro agreed to take Bogle with him to England and provide him with a position there, perhaps even agreeing to give him a percentage of the inheritance, in exchange for this crucial help. Interestingly, once Lady Doughty discovered how committed Bogle was to helping Castro, she stopped his annuity.

On 25 February 1866 Lady Tichborne accepted Castro as her son, though the rest of the family and her staff were unreservedly against her decision. The Tichborne party set sail, first-class, for England on 2 September, leaving £20,000 worth of debts in Roger Tichborne’s name in Sydney. The voyage ‘home’ took four months and during that time Bogle worked hard to give Castro as full an education on the Tichborne’s and English upper class behaviour as he could. It was turning Castro into a gentleman that was the hardest part. During the voyage, Castro had too much to drink, telling inappropriate stories and breaking wind at the dinner table. His behaviour was downright offensive to the other first-class passengers.

On arrival in England, Castro and his gang settled at Essex Lodge in Croydon. Now he faced his biggest challenge. In England, there were many people who had known Roger Tichborne, and all of them were sceptical about the claimant. His behaviour on landing itself aroused suspicion. He passed within a few hundred yards of the homes of relatives Roger had known and liked, yet he did not call on them. Instead Castro stopped in Wapping, where he tried to find out where his real family was.

Castro thought he was under surveillance, which is quite possible, so he took to wearing a heavy cloak and holding a handkerchief over his face. He contacted lawyers to search for the probate of Roger Tichborne’s will, and got a copy made. He visited Lloyd’s, to find out details of the Bella and the Osprey, the ship he claimed had rescued him. Suddenly Castro realized he needed much more knowledge to carry off the deception in London than in Sydney.

Castro, the now celebrated Claimant, next had to travel to France, which is where Lady Tichborne was. She had already put some distance between herself and the rest of the family, shunning them for their scepticism. She sacked her closest adviser, James Bowker, who had urged her from the start to be cautious. She had shown him the claimant’s letters and he was forthright in pointing out the inconsistencies and improbabilities. Bowker was convinced from the start that it was a cycnical fraud, entirely motivated by money. She did not want to hear it.

After thirteen long years of waiting to be reunited with her son, Lady Tichbourne waited a little longer at the Place de la Madeleine. The Claimant lost his nerve, and lay on his bed saying that he was not well enough to see her. She abruptly entered the room, with its blinds half drawn. She leant over the butcher, kissed him and commented that his ears were like his uncle’s. The Claimant was so worried about exposure that he lost the power of speech. Lady Tichborne sent for a doctor, whom she told that the man on the bed was her son.

Castro was stunned at how easy it had been. He relaxed. They became inseparable, eating, walking and chatting together. When she asked him questions he could not answer, he blamed memory loss on illness, alcoholism, head injury or the passage of time. But he could not remember any French, and that should have rung warning bells in the dowager’s mind. But she wanted him to be her son, and she ignored the things that didn’t quite fit. Her servants saw her smile and laugh for the first time in years.

The Claimant was less successful with the stream of visitors who had known Roger in his Parisian youth. Not one of them believed he was Roger. Roger’s tutor and friend for many years, Monsieur Chatillon, was ready to be persuaded that he was about to meet Roger again. But he stopped dead as he was about to shake the Claimant’s hand. ‘No, my Lady, this is not your son!’ She was not listening. ‘You do not embrace Roger?’ ‘No, my Lady, it is not he.’ Chatillon persevered with a long series of questions, through an interpreter, about their many shared experiences, such as holidays they had spent in Normandy and Brittany, but the Claimant could not remember anything at all. Chatillon was finally stopped by Lady Tichborne, and they agreed that they would continue another time, but the Claimant refused to meet Chatillon again. He was always unwell. Castro had prepared himself fairly well, but Bogle had no access to the first fifteen years of Roger’s life, so Castro was totally exposed. Chatillon was a major problem.

Ignoring the clear evidence that a criminal deception was being practised, Lady Tichborne decided to return to England with the Claimant; she would set up home with her son in Croydon. She would also allocate him £1,000 a year in place of the control over the Tichborne estates. The Tichborne family in England were now very unimpressed. Their bankers in London had been contacted by creditors in Sydney about the huge debts the Claimant had run up. They naturally refused to pay the Claimant’s debts. They also told Lady Tichborne they would not let the Tichborne Estate’s trustees hand over authority to the Claimant before they were satisfied about his identity. This was the crux of the matter. The Claimant and his party knew now that they would have to go to court to win control of the Tichborne estate.

The Claimant was a very clever operator. He assembled an elaborate public relations machine and teams of agents to search out more information on the contacts of Roger Tichborne. He wanted to meet anyone who might be prepared to support him. His public relations machine was sophisticated in the extreme. It even put out disinformation. This claimed that the Claimant had rejected a secret offer from the Tichborne family that it would acknowledge him so long as the money was shared between him and the infant baronet (the true baronet). The family disputed this, of course, but the impression was cleverly created that the family had privately agreed that the Claimant was Roger, but wanted to do a deal on money. People in general were happy to believe that there was some sort of aristocratic conspiracy to defraud the Claimant.

While affidavits were collected from the many people who were prepared to support the Claimant, he carefully kept away from the family. His agents came back with more and more useful information. Now he was able to come out with the privileged knowledge that he (Roger) had gone off to South America in the wake of a failed romance with his cousin. Many of those who were ready to support him were people from the neighbourhood of Tichborne Park, who thought that there would be some benefit to them, socially or economically, when the Claimant was installed; it evidently did not occur to many of them that there would be a case against the Claimant. Some of the affidavits were evidently bought.

On 12 March 1868, Lady Tichborne died in London. The Claimant claimed she had been poisoned. He was thoroughly stranded now financially, as his £1,000 a year allowance came to a sudden end. The family saw this moment as their chance. They no longer had to respect the old lady’s sentimental delusion, and the Claimant was more vulnerable now that he had no income. They opened a Chancery suit, Tichborne v. Castro to stop Castro seizing Lady Tichborne’s property. They made it clear that he would have to go through the courts to win legal recognition as Roger Tichborne.

At the same time, the family wanted to avoid the cost of using the courts to block the Claimant. They hoped to find an easier route by exposing him. They hired detectives in Australia and South America. In Wagga Wagga there were door-to-door calls. What they found was that Thomas Castro was indeed living in Wagga Wagga under an assumed name. They also found that his real name was not Roger Tichborne but Arthur Orton. They found that he had not come from Tichborne Park but from Wapping. He had lived as Arthur Orton in Tasmania as a Hobart butcher. The detectives found scores of people in Hobart who remembered him and recognized his photograph.

The Claimant had developed an incredibly elaborate knowledge of the real Roger Tichborne, but also became too used to improvising gap-filling. One really damaging story he told was that he (ie Roger Tichborne) had lived in Melipilla in Chile. Detectives hired in South America by the Tichborne family explored this story, travelling to the small town of Melipilla. They asked the locals if a young English aristocrat had been there. They replied that they had not seen any gringo there at all, and the only Englishman they could remember was a sailor who jumped ship in Valparaiso – and his name was Arthur Orton.

The coup de grâce was delivered by the Tichborne family when their agents found the Claimant’s brother, Charles Orton. Charles Orton had been blackmailing Arthur for months after he realized Arthur had money to share round the family. Charles was getting money from Arthur, and gave up his job as a butcher on the strength of it.

Lawyers arranged a meeting of the two brothers, hoping that Charles would betray Arthur, but he refused to identify him. In return, the Claimant increased his allowance, on condition that he changed his address and his name. But Charles was greedy and impatient. He sold his brother out, giving the Tichborne family yet more information about Arthur Orton’s past.

The Claimant’s financial position was now very dangerous. He sold Tichborne Bonds, which were in effect shares in the Tichborne Estate. The Claimant addressed public rallies in music halls and London squares, urging the common people to help him overturn this upper class conspiracy – and gain a percentage of the estate. Really, the Claimant should have given up at this point, before going to court. The court case was long and complicated, and very expensive: it cost £200,000. Some of the greatest lawyers of the day were lined up on the opposing sides. The Tichborne family’s legal team was led by the Solicitor-General, Sir John Coleridge. The Claimant was represented by Dr Edward Vaughan Kenealy. It became the longest running legal battle in British history, attracting attention from all round the world. Gilbert and Sullivan based their operetta Trial by Jury on the case.

The case against the Claimant was assembled out of all the blunders, large and small, he had made in reminiscing about the life of Roger Tichborne. Some points were very telling indeed. The Claimant had referred to Lady Tichborne, his supposed mother, in written statements as Hannah Frances, when her real forenames were Henriette Felicité. However poor the Claimant’s memory was, he could not have forgotten his mother’s name. The Claimant’s story about being rescued after the sinking of the Bella by the Osprey sounded all right, until, as the lawyers pointed out, it became clear that he was claiming that he had been taken to Australia after being rescued. Maritime law dictates that survivors picked up after shipwrecks must be taken to the nearest harbour, so it was utterly incredible that the Claimant was picked up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and then taken by the Osprey round the Cape of Good Hope and right across the Indian Ocean to be set ashore in Australia. Why not Cape Town?

In private, Kenealy advised the Claimant to give up the case and flee the country. But the Claimant would not listen. The jury had enough after 102 days in court. They intervened to say that there was no need for them to hear any further testimony from witnesses. They knew he was Arthur Orton and not Roger Tichborne.

The Claimant was then tried for perjury and found guilty after a trial lasting 188 days. He was found guilty and sentenced to seven years penal servitude for perjury and another seven for forging the Tichborne Bonds, the two terms to run consecutively. The Claimant later wrote that he felt the weight of the world lifted from him.

It was an extraordinary case that was somehow transformed from a despicable deception of a heartbroken old woman into a noble foray in the class war. It revealed many strange quirks of human nature. A glance told any unbiased observer that the Claimant was not Roger Tichborne – he looked nothing like him – yet there were scores of people, with many different motives, who were prepared to say that he was. Another curiosity of the case is that Arthur Orton had a very rare anatomical abnormality. His penis retracted right inside his body when not erect. It transpired, as the evidence was gathered, that he shared this abnormality with the real Roger Tichborne. The odds against that coincidence are enormous and it has made one or two historians wonder whether maybe the Claimant really was Roger Tichborne after all.

After his release from prison in 1884, Orton wrote a detailed confession, but changing his story only clouded the issue. When he died, in poverty, in April 1898, he was buried in a coffin bearing the name Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne.