The Australian Butcher Who Spent Eleven Years Trying to Claim a Hampshire Baronetcy and Spent Ten Years in Prison for It

Sir Roger Tichborne (1829–1854) was heir to a Hampshire baronetcy worth approximately £25,000 per year. He disappeared at sea in April 1854 when the ship Bella, sailing from Rio de Janeiro to New York, was lost with all hands. His mother Lady Henriette Tichborne refused to accept the death. She placed advertisements in newspapers across the British Empire from 1863 onwards offering a reward for information about her surviving son.

In April 1866 a Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, butcher named Tom Castro answered the advertisement.

The arrival

Castro was actually Arthur Orton, a butcher’s son from Wapping, London, who had emigrated to Australia in 1853, drifted through various aliases, and was, at the time of the advertisement, illiterate and twenty stone (130 kg). The real Roger Tichborne had been slim, fluent in French, educated at Stonyhurst, and at his disappearance approximately eleven stone (70 kg).

Lady Tichborne, who had not seen her son in twelve years and was deep in spiritualist grief, agreed in advance to recognise the claimant. He arrived in Paris in January 1867. She met him at the Hotel de Lille et d’Albion. He had spent the voyage being coached by an old Tichborne family servant named Andrew Bogle. Lady Tichborne declared him her son on the spot.

No other member of the family agreed.

The trials

The 1871–1872 civil trial — Tichborne v. Lushington — to establish Orton’s claim ran for 102 days and was at the time the longest civil trial in English history. The Tichborne family’s defence centred on physical evidence (Orton had a tattoo on his arm; Roger Tichborne had none, contemporaries testified), linguistic evidence (Orton spoke no French), and circumstantial evidence (Orton had been corresponding with the Tichborne family servant Bogle for months before the supposed recognition).

The jury found against Orton on the 103rd day. He was immediately arrested for perjury.

The 1873–1874 criminal trial ran 188 days — exceeding the civil trial as the longest in English history. Orton’s barrister John Henry Kenealy delivered a 22-day closing speech that has not been exceeded by length in any English jury trial before or since. The jury convicted Orton on 28 February 1874. He was sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude.

The political movement

The Tichborne case became a working-class political cause. Kenealy was disbarred for his courtroom conduct, then elected to Parliament in 1875 on a populist platform that argued the Tichborne verdict was a class conspiracy against an ordinary man. The Magna Charta Association founded by Kenealy in 1874 had approximately 200 local branches at peak and was the largest organised popular movement of mid-1870s Britain. It dissolved in 1886.

Orton served ten years and was released in October 1884. He signed a written confession in The People newspaper in 1895 admitting that he was Arthur Orton and that he had never been Sir Roger Tichborne. He retracted the confession the following week. He died in poverty in a Marylebone boarding house on 1 April 1898. Buried at a pauper’s expense, his grave was marked at the family’s request with the name Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, Bart. The cemetery accepted the inscription.

The Tichborne family did not contest the gravestone.