He was chubby, overweight, didn’t speak French. Despite this, the mother firmly believed that this man must be her son. Your Roger. Her boy, who disappeared more than ten years ago and who everyone said was dead. Drowned, probably somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.
The year is 1866, and the man who restored happiness to a grieving mother was to stand trial as a defendant in a historic trial a few years later. It’s about fraud, inheritance sneaking, identity theft. But the question that still stands today: Are the allegations true?
The case concerns Roger Charles Tichborne, born in 1829, the eldest son of a noble English family from the county of Hampshire. Tichborne grew up in France because his mother hated the English prairie. He only came to England as a teenager; his father wanted him to attend Stonyhurst College there, one of the oldest Jesuit schools in the world to this day. At that time, Roger spoke perfect French, English only with an accent. He spent his free time with his uncle, his aunt and their daughter Katherine, even long after he had finished school and joined the army. He fell in love with Katherine. And she fell in love with him. But they were cousins - and the Catholic Tichbornes not amused. The family suggested that Roger go away for a while to distract himself. Should he return and still have the same feelings for Katherine that he did when he left, the couple would get the blessing.
The mother placed missing persons reports that reached as far as Australia
So Roger set sail for South America. There are daguerreotypes of him, early photographs that show him at the time as a slender man with a hat, mustache and bow tie. The year is 1854. Roger is sending letters home to his mother, telling them about his plan to take the ship “Bella” to Jamaica. Then no one heard from him again. Only from the sinking of a ship. About how the “Bella” never got to Jamaica. Let alone Roger.
At home they pronounced him dead. Katherine, the cousin, was now married to someone else and was no longer waiting for him. Only his mother remained optimistic. She placed missing persons reports that reached as far as Australia. for years. Finally, in 1865, a chubby, overweight man from Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, came forward and claimed to be the prodigal son. In Australia he was known as Tom Castro. A butcher who didn’t speak a word of French but had some other clues that made the Tichborne family sit up and take notice back in England. For example, he suffered from the same genital malformation as Roger Tichborne. He smoked a pipe with the initials RCT He gave a surprisingly convincing description of his experiences in South America, exactly where Roger stayed before he disappeared. Two eyewitnesses in Australia who happened to be acquaintances of the Tichborne family confirmed that he must be Roger. That resemblance is obvious.
For the mother of the alleged Roger Tichborne it was clear without a doubt: This is her son. Did she deliberately want to ignore some of the inconsistencies in his story?
(Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
So this Tom Castro made his way to England, and when he finally faced his mother, she knew it was him. In retrospect, some people will write that Lady Tichborne clung to the faith so much that she consciously ignored all the inconsistencies (the lack of a French accent, the overweight). She wanted her son back. Or better: any son.
It was at this point that the media of the time began to take an interest in the story. Drama at its finest: a shipwreck, a distraught mother, a promising legacy and an outback Australian contender who has garnered huge working-class fan bases. Not because they believed in his honesty, but because they celebrated that a man like him had managed to put himself in such a position in the first place. After all, a lucrative future beckoned for him, should his identity no longer be doubted.
If only his strongest supporter hadn’t died in 1868: his mother. Now the rest of the Tichborne family took action against the contender. Went to court. Deployed an entire investigative team to uncover this man’s past. Gradually, a picture emerged that from now on was considered the truth: Tom Castro from Wagga Wagga is actually called Arthur Orton, who only claims to be Roger Tichborne.
After his death, the name Tichborne was inscribed on his coffin
Meaning: The man from Australia was neither Tichborne nor Castro, but rather a butcher’s son from England (at least that was true), who had ended up in Australia via some detours, at that time little more than a British penal colony for criminals. Arthur Orton was sentenced to 14 years in prison for perjury. He died a penniless man in 1898.
Curiously, after his death, Orton was officially recognized as “Sir Roger Charles Tichborne,” and his coffin even had a plaque emblazoned with his name. A concession in case they were all wrong and Arthur Orton wasn’t a fraud? But maybe also a confession? How could an identity be proven in an age when passports were not taken for granted and DNA analyzes were still science fiction.
In 1998, director David Yates filmed the case. However, the work is difficult to obtain on DVD. And yet you can read about all of this in detail: in the book by Douglas Woodruff from 1957, for example. Or in “The Tichborne Claimant” by Rohan McWilliam, 2007. Because even a hundred years later, there is still a spark of skepticism as to whether the returnee was not the prodigal son after all.