Tichborne Reclaiming
Yesterday’s post, rehearsing the quote-unquote ‘official’ version of the celebrated Tichborne case, repeatedly falls into sheer incredulity. ‘How could they believe it?’ the author repeats — believe, that is, the claim by Roger Tichborne, after his return from Australia, to his rightful estate. How could they not believe it? might be a better question.
The author, who is, we can be frank, not a respected figure in the world of writing, hangs his anti-Tichborne case on a number of showy but fundamentally circumstantial arguments. Item: Roger Tichborne, on his return to Europe, was fatter than Roger Tichborne when he had first left for South America. As if no man in his forties ever grew stouter than he had been in his twenties! And yesterday’s author (apposite description!) ignores not just the more compelling witness claims — such as J.P. Lipscomb, the family’s doctor, who examined Roger as a young man, and also examined the ‘claimant’ on his return, pronouncing under oath that they were the same man, making all allowances for the gain in weight, down to certain unfakeable deformities of the lower regions. He also ignores the most compelling witness of all: Roger’s own mother. Do Tichborne doubters really believe that a mother cannot recognise her own son? The son she had brought up, in France, herself? Inconceivable!
Of course, these doubters, these quasi-zetetic scoffers and mockers, have an ‘explanation’ for Henriette’s reaction: she had lost (they say) her capacity for rational judgment, through grief at the death of Roger decades before compounded by the recent death of her second and last child Alfred. But all who knew Milady Tichborne spoke of her resolution, the firmness of her character.
Still, what is sauce for the goose must be sauce for the gander. Since the Tichborne-doubters are prepared to hang their case upon a proposed derangement of (female) sensibility, the consequences of trauma upon the tender matrix of a human personality, then let them consider the truth of events, turn and turn about. Let us consider young Roger Tichborne, a sensitive, impressionable and unrobust individual, who suffered through an extraordinary series of adventures, nearly dying, being cast out, ground down by events. This young lad, who had grown-up in circumstances of the most pronounced luxury, abruptly found himself adrift in a small boat when the Bella capsized in the south Atlantic. He drifted for days, without food or water, until he was, by chance, spotted by a ship, the Osprey, bound for Melbourne, Australia. But though the crew brought Roger aboard they refused to believe his claims that he was an English nobleman, and instead put him to work — hard, degrading work, the first such he had ever experienced. When the Osprey (as records have confirmed) arrived in Melbourne in July 1854, Roger was put ashore, a stranger in a strange land, without a penny to his name, or a friend to turn to. The shock of this, to a consciousness such as his, cannot be overstated. He wandered for a time in a dissociated state, falling in with a low and criminal group, and making his way, under a number of pseudonyms, and not without committing crime, to Wagga Wagga. For two decades he laboured at menial jobs, as a bush ranger, working squatters’ rows, picking up some skills as a butcher, losing not only his French accent in that exclusively anglophone place, but forgetting, or repressing, all knowledge of French at all. He became, under the pressure of his trauma, a new man: ‘Arthur Castro’, alias ‘Arthur Orton’. Do these names mean nothing to you? Arthur, the rex quondam who lies, in a stupor, under the hill at Avalon — but who will come again? Castro or-tichborne — Castro-Or[Ton]? Roger’s subconscious, as we would nowadays say, was prompting him still. Over two long decades he was remade by this place, and by his trauma: nearly dying, being uprooted from the cossetting luxury of his upbringing and placed on the far side of the world, in a hostile and vulgar land where nobody believed him. In time, he came to believe their disbelief more than he believed himself.
People misprise the so-called ‘Tichborne case’ when they read it as being about imposture. It is about trauma, and the effect trauma has upon a person. Everything that reminded Roger of his gilded youth, his classical learning, the topography of Tichborne Park, even the French language itself, became so repressed that his conscious mind lost contact with them — and yet, as with trauma, these things were not altogether lost: Roger was able, under oath, to recall some aspects of Tichborne Park that would have been opaque to a true stranger (the identity and location of certain pictures, for instance) and some essential core of his true nature remained. Lady Tichborne, his mother, was instant and unwavering in her recognition, as were many others who has known him as a young man, including many fellow soldiers with whom he had served in the 6th Dragoons, not least his former batman.
Of course, the reappearance of Roger Tichborne, after so many years away, was inconvenient for many, not least those family members who had been eyeing his inheritance and had come to regard it as their own. Naturally they did what they could to discredit his claim. But the so-called evidence against him was flimsy. Take the submission by Edward James Bellew (afterwards Baron Bellew) that he had seen, when he was at school with Roger, certain tattoos upon him which were no longer to be found on the body of the claimant. As if the young heir to an English baronetcy would sport multiple tatoos, like a criminal ruffian! Under cross examination, Bellew claimed first that Roger had a heart, a cross and ‘R.C.T.’ tattooed ‘on his arm’, and that he had himself made these tattoos upon his friend. Questioned further Bellew claimed not to remember which arm the tattoos were on. Asked how he was able to undertake the inking, Bellew claimed he was ‘assisted’, and when asked assisted by whom he first claimed not to remember, and then said he had been assisted by Roger himself (can a person ‘assist’ at their own tattooing, do you think?) He then claimed not to remember if he had ever performed the tattooing at all. The so-called ‘evidence’ of these tattoos was so flimsy that when, on 4 March 1872 the jury notified the judge that they had heard enough and were ready to reject the Claimant’s suit, the judge first made sure that ‘their decision was based on the evidence as a whole and not solely on the missing tattoos’, and only when he had been reassured did he permit the trial to end.
No! Despite the preponderance of ‘Tichborne denialists’, even Rohan McWilliam, in his largely anti-Tichborne study The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (2007) has to concede ‘the sheer improbability of anyone conceiving such an imposture from scratch and at such a distance … it was carrying effrontery beyond the bounds of sanity if Arthur Orton embarked with a wife and retinue and crossed the world, knowing that they would all be destitute if he did not succeed in convincing a woman he had never met and knew nothing about first-hand, that he was her son.’ Yes indeed!
