The Tichborne Claimant
Arthur Orton wasn’t a man born to great things but the Wapping butcher knew he wanted more than a lifetime selling sausages.
In 1852 18-year-old Arthur set sail for Australia, a new identity and one of the most costly, lengthy and extraordinary trials in legal history.
One of the novelties of the New World was that peers and paupers could rub shoulders as equals and Arthur befriended exiled Sir Alfred Tichborne, the 11th Baronet.
Alfred died in 1866 but never confided in Arthur the Tichborne family secrets, not least the “loss” of his elder brother Roger.
Sir Roger Doughty Tichborne had been born in Paris in 1829, 10 years before Alfred. And, after receiving his military commission in the Sixth Dragoons, he was expected to become the 11th baronet.
But Roger disliked military life, preferring to fritter the family fortune in the clubs of London with his friends.
He also had an eye for the ladies and soon a romance was blossoming with one Katherine Doughty. Her parents were appalled, not least by the fact that the dissolute Tichborne was Katherine’s first cousin.
The parents decided on a three-year wait before the two exchanged vows, reckoning that the feckless Tichborne would lose interest. The plan suited Roger perfectly, and he immediately made plans for a world tour.
The 24-year-old peer set sail for Rio de Janeiro in January 1853. From there he journeyed to New York, setting off on the SS Bella on 20 April 1854.
Young Tichborne never reached the US, the vessel capsizing due to a poorly balanced load of coffee. Around 40 passengers and crew were presumed lost when an empty lifeboat was found drifting a by a passing ship.
Weeks later the news reached the Tichborne estate back in England and the family lawyer’s set about executing Roger’s will, which he had completed before he set sail. Roger’s father inherited the estate but eight years later he too died and Roger’s younger brother stood in line to inherit Tichborne wealth.
But young Alfred was, if anything, even more feckless than his brother and mother, Lady Henrietta was determined he should not succeed his father.
Clutching at straws, and the rumour that Roger had survived the shipwreck, Henrietta placed advertisements in newspapers inviting information about her son’s whereabouts.
Glancing over a week old copy of the Times in a shanty hut in Wagga Wagga, Australia, one Thomas Castro’s sharp eye chanced on the name Tichborne. Castro was none other than Arthur Orton.
His plans for fame and fortune hadn’t panned out, and Orton was facing financial ruin.
Orton had not only met the late baronet years before but he had also met Sir Edward Doughty’s valet Bogle.
Orton decided on a bold gamble. Using Bogle as a go-between he travelled to Melbourne and passed himself off as the long-drowned Roger.
He returned to London, at Lady Henrietta’s expense, to meet his joyful mother.
Bizarrely, Lady Henrietta convinced herself that an obese Wapping butcher with an Australian accent was her slim, aesthetic and aristocratic son but other members of the family were not so easily fooled.
The case went before the London Court of Common Pleas on 11 May 1871. Almost three years, hundreds of witnesses and 10,000 pages of evidence later, the prosecution found Orton’s claim false.
The fact that he had forgotten any details of the first 16 years of his life and that he no longer had his school days’ tattoo of the initials RCT on his arm where just two damning pieces of evidence.
Orton got 14 years, serving 10 before his release in 1884. In poverty he sold his story to People magazine and he died on April Fool’s Day 1898.
The imposter was buried in a coffin bearing the curious legend: Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne. It seems the only person he successfully fooled was himself.