Heir not so apparent: the Tichborne claimant

The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Mystery by Douglas Woodruff

The case of the Tichborne claimant was a sprawling legal and media story in the second half of the nineteenth century which tied up the courts, worried the establishment and provided an endless source of gossip, argument and outrage for the whole of Britain for several decades – and even, see Zadie Smith’s novel The Fraud (2023), to this day.

At its heart was the loss, supposedly at sea off South America in 1854, of the young heir to the Tichborne estate and baronetcy in the south of England. His mother, hoping he was still alive, advertised far and wide for news of her son, offering a reward. A man came forward from a village in Australia called Wagga Wagga, claiming to be the lost Roger Tichborne.

From the start, what should have been simple was complicated: the Claimant bore a certain likeness to the lost son but while the son had been slim, this man was huge. And despite having had a good private education, this Roger Tichborne spoke with a Cockney accent and seemed barely literate. But his mother accepted him as her son and his story was believed by many who had known him around the Tichborne estate in Hampshire. 

The Claimant

On arriving in England, the Claimant almost immediately made a mysterious trip to East London, the first move in a persistent sub-plot which led to the theory that the Claimant was in fact a butcher called Arthur Orton who had emigrated to Australia from Wapping.

Evidence was gathered, sides were taken – the powerful Tichborne family trying to deny the claim - and the case became so voluminous that whatever you chose to believe, there was more than enough evidence to make an apparently incontrovertible case for it. The only definite fact was that the Claimant either was or was not Roger Tichborne.

The simplicity of that question and the complexity of answering it turned the case into a kind of Rorschach test of social attitudes. Everyone saw something different in it. Were you with the Tichborne family or against them and the Catholic establishment - which the Claimant believed was conspiring against him? Or were you for the downtrodden individual in his fight against an overbearing state, because, strangely, the Claimant’s supporters, whilst believing he was the aristocrat he said he was also saw him as a symbol of the oppressed proletariat?

There were two trials, one civil (on the identity question) and the second criminal (for perjury allegedly committed by the Claimant in the first). Hundreds of witnesses were examined and cross-examined. The speeches and summings-up lasted months and the Claimant’s defending barrister in the second trial brought out an account of the proceedings in no less than nine volumes.

And yet for Douglas Woodruff and others wanting to tell the story, the trials themselves were by no means the end of it. The second trial ended in February 1874, with the Claimant being sentenced to fourteen years in jail. He was released after ten years and lived for another fourteen, during which he toured the country making money by giving speeches about his continuing claim and sometimes, in his desperate need for income, being reduced to little more than a circus exhibit. He married for a second time and had more children and died in penury.

In the years following his sentencing more evidence trickled in and the mysterious Arthur Orton (who, if he could be proved to be a separate person to the Claimant would hugely strengthen the Claimant’s case) was strongly suspected to be a man who was living in an insane asylum in Australia under a different name.

Roger Tichborne

Woodruff’s balanced account of all this comes to a weighty but not excessive 450 pages and whilst it would be impossible to tell the story in a linear fashion, he irons out many wrinkles, grouping subjects together without trying to argue a case for one side or the other.

As to where his own sympathies lie, having been immersed in the detail, he ends up more on the side of the Claimant than were the courts. He blames lack of funding of the Claimant’s legal team for their inability to present a stronger case from the evidence that would have been available.

Where the Claimant’s opponents painted a picture of a clever schemer, carefully amassing detail about the man he was pretending to be, Woodruff talks about a man whose “claim bored him and he was not prepared to take very much trouble about it”. Woodruff describes someone who was telling the truth, albeit in a muddled way - because he was “not at all clever, reckless and short-sighted and improvident to a breath-taking degree”.

As a reader of Woodruff’s version of the story, I would be inclined, if pressed to pick a side, to believe the Claimant, for two main reasons. First, while his early letters appear almost illiterate, by the end, he was writing in an educated, well-argued, almost stylish way, completely unlike what one would have expected from someone of Orton’s background. Perhaps he suffered some extraordinary trauma in the years between his disappearance and reappearance as the Claimant - possibly connected with very heavy drinking. Whatever happened in that period changed both his body and his mind in ways which were slowly restored over the years. Those who saw him in jail after its regime of enforced abstinence said they wished the trial could be reheard because now he looked so much more like the pictures of Roger Tichborne.

The Claimant never wavered in his basic story that he was Roger Tichborne. The details were all over the place, but having appeared in Australia with his claim, he never showed any doubt about it, against all the odds. Is it likely that if it was an idea which had simply occurred to him when he was in Wagga Wagga in response to hearing of a reward for the finding of Roger Tichborne, he could have adopted it with such complete life-long assurance? Whoever he was, his claim was as sure as the public response to it was divided.

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Profile of a great editor: Harold Ross and The New Yorker

The Years with Ross: A Classic Memoir of The New Yorker's Unforgettable Founder and Golden Era by James Thurber

James Thurber's memoir of Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker, is fascinating for the author's evident affection for Ross despite his unreasonable, dictatorial, often ignorant and always infuriatingly detailed comments on his writers' work. Together with his inability to deal with what he considered awkward personal situations - such as the unexpected presence of a woman in his office - he seemed ill-suited for a role that required constant dealings with sensitive people.

Despite all that, Thurber paints a picture of Ross as a man who won the loyalty of his colleagues because his heart was in the right place - in his commitment to excellence in his magazine, his many untrumpeted kindnesses and even for his weaknesses, for gambling and in putting his trust in the wrong colleagues, sometimes with disastrous financial consequences.

Thurber was a relatively early contributor to the magazine and witnessed Ross nursing the business through multiple crises. In detailing them, he gives an insight into the economy of pre-war American journalism, a world in which, for instance, writers were paid by the word (leading to arcane disputes over whether they should refund money to the magazine if their copy was cut down between submission and publication). The writers could also sell to rival papers or magazines, sometimes after a 'first refusal' contract with The New Yorker. And the magazine itself would do its best to sign deals for reprinting of its work elsewhere, in The Reader's Digest, for instance.

While Ross was a stickler for detail, with a particular obsession with commas, he was also a no-nonsense newspaper man who had come from Colorado and learnt his skills, starting as a reporter, on a range of publications. He wanted The New Yorker to be a funny magazine and was always appealing for jokes and funny stories. The magazine's cartoons, especially those by Thurber, were one of its trademarks. But Ross was also willing to support more serious journalism, such as an influential report from Hiroshima after the dropping of the bomb, to which he devoted a whole issue, and was proud to have done so despite often complaining he was offered too many "grim" stories.

Thurber himself continued to work through various health problems and, eventually, blindness. His book is admirably free of any self-regard or self-pity, although, as others then and since would testify, he was himself as remarkable a figure as Ross. The book leaves a lasting impression of The New Yorker being an honourable enterprise which produced great work, and, more broadly, a life-affirming sense that true friendship among a group of creative people can be immune to any number of rows, insults and humiliations. But of course they are what makes Thurber’s tales interesting.

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It seems like a good time to think about appeasement

Munich by Robert Harris

'Munich' is a clever combination of historical novel and spy thriller. It has something worth saying in rehabilitating, to some extent, the reputation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Criticised an appeaser, he was, in Harris' telling, simply a leader who had seen the suffering of the First World War (in which he was too old to fight) and was sincerely determined to do whatever he could to avoid another.

Harris overlays the tight timetable that preceded the Munich Agreement of 1938 with a parallel story of his own. Two student friends, one British and one German, get themselves into the negotiations between Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and the French prime minister, in order to try to persuade Chamberlain that Hitler had much larger ambitions than the Sudenland - the immediate subject of the Agreement - and was not to be trusted.

In its early part, the book neatly alternates chapters between Britain and Germany - a triumph of structure and planning, building momentum and culminating in some spectacular set pieces at the end.

I am only giving it four stars instead of five because I wanted to leave a notional star that I almost certainly would have awarded Graham Greene if he had written it.

Incidentally, the film 'Munich: the Edge of War' (2022) more than does justice to the book, with outstanding performances from Jeremy Irons and George MacKay among a uniformly impressive cast delivering an excellent script.