Dirty Rotten Scoundrels Read online

  Lady Tichborne needed no more convincing and sent the money for the family to head to England. In fact she was now positively begging him to come. ‘My dear and beloved Roger,’ she wrote:

  I hope you will not refuse to come home to your poor afflicted mother. I have had the great misfortune to lose your poor dear father and lately I have lost my beloved son Alfred, I am now alone in the world of sorrow I hope you will take that in consideration and that you will come to join me as soon as possible you need not be afraid about the money as you will have all the money necessary to pay your expenses, only come to see your poor lonely mother and remember the promise you made to your dear father before going away that if God called him to Himself that you would then come back to be your Mother’s protector certainly in that melancholy case and now that your poor dear brother is dead, I have nobody to look to but you.

  Our hero needed no more encouragement and quickly took to the titled life. By the time the Claimant arrived at Tilbury Docks in December 1866, he was even more unrecognisable — the good living conditions aboard the ship had added another 30 kilograms to his already ample girth.

  Once the family was comfortably settled in a London hotel, the Claimant went to Lady Tichborne’s address, only to hear that she was in Paris. He then toddled on to the district of Wapping in the East End of London. There he told a local resident he was a friend of a man called Arthur Orton, who had asked the Claimant to look into the whereabouts of Orton’s family on his behalf. The neighbour told him in return that the Orton family had moved on.

  The Claimant then took out his own insurance and hired a solicitor to travel with him to Paris to meet his mother. He needn’t have worried. As soon as he walked through the doors of the Hotel de Lille, Lady Tichborne accepted him as her son.

  Even when Roger’s childhood tutor, Father Chatillon, unequivocally stated that the Claimant was a fraud, she remained unmoved. She lodged a declaration at the British Embassy that the Claimant was her son, informed The Times that the rightful heir was back and granted him a yearly income of £1000.

  Things were looking good for the butcher from Wagga. Back in the Old Dart, he quickly gathered together supporters who recognised him as Sir Roger. The family solicitor accepted him, and Sir Roger’s batman who had served with him in the Royal Dragoons said he knew him. The family doctor conducted a detailed medical examination, which revealed the Claimant had a distinctive genital malformation; unfortunately, records did not indicate whether Roger had had the same abnormality. Nevertheless, even the doctor agreed the Claimant was Sir Roger.

  Despite all the support he was gathering, the ballooning Claimant (by now the good life had piled on the weight to 140 kilograms) was not accepted by the rest of the Tichborne family. They recognised Alfred’s infant son, Henry, as the true twelfth baronet and decried the Claimant as a fraud. But their complaints did not particularly trouble the Aussie butcher while he had the support of Lady Tichborne.

  In July 1867, he went through a judicial examination at the Royal Courts of Justice. He said that, after being rescued, he had gone to work for a man called William Foster on a cattle station in Gippsland using the name Thomas Castro. There he had met a splendid chap called Arthur Orton and the pair had gone off travelling together before the Claimant had set up as a butcher in Wagga Wagga.

  That evidence provided the rest of the Tichborne family with enough clues to hire a private investigator to go to Australia and see how many of those facts really stood up. Fortunately for them, the widow of William Foster had kept the old cattle station records. She happily retrieved them from a cupboard, blew the dust off and showed them to the investigator. There was no mention of a Thomas Castro, but Arthur Orton was on the books. The investigator produced a photograph of the Claimant and the widow promptly identified him as Orton. The investigator then moved on to Wagga Wagga, where a local remembered Castro telling him that he had learnt his trade in Wapping. Further probes back in England then uncovered the Claimant’s trip into Wapping to inquire after the Orton family.

  This information was made all the more damning when Lady Tichborne popped her clogs in March 1868, depriving the Claimant of his key supporter and income in one fell swoop. But he wasn’t out of money for long. After the trial, the matter had become something of a cause célèbre and the Claimant’s supporters quickly set up a fund that delivered him an income of £1400 a year.

  The Tichborne family knew they had a fight on their hands when the man they claimed was a fake took up the position of chief mourner at Lady Tichborne’s funeral. Money and titles were at stake, and the family was not going to let him just walk in and steal the silver. As a result of the dispute, the Claimant had not yet received his inheritance from Lady Tichborne’s estate. Looking for a knockout blow, he took his legal team to South America to purportedly find people who could confirm his identity. En route to Valparaíso, Chile, where Roger had spent some time, the Claimant hopped off the ship in Buenos Aires, Argentina, another place Roger was reported to have been. He told his lawyers he would travel overland and meet them in Valparaíso after they continued the journey by sea.

  After two months of casting around, he lost his bottle and, blaming sickness and brigands, he turned around and went home empty-handed. The farce cost him much of his support.

  Meanwhile, the Tichborne family had been busy tracking down leads in Wapping. They were convinced the new-look, larger-than-life Sir Roger was really Arthur Orton, the son of a local butcher. Orton had travelled to Australia in 1852, arriving first in Tasmania before moving on to work on the Gippsland cattle station. After that, he simply vanished into thin air. The fact that Castro emerged at exactly the same time added credence to the claim that Arthur Orton was also Wagga Wagga butcher Thomas Castro. The Claimant justified this by suggesting that during their time together, he and Orton had got up to no good and had changed names to dodge the rozzers.

  The Tichbornes were not helped by the members of Orton’s family they did track down, who simply denied that the new Sir Roger was really their flesh and blood. This was largely because the Claimant had got to them first and paid them off. However, he didn’t manage to get to his former girlfriend Mary Ann Loder, who had no problem confirming the Claimant was Orton. It is unclear if she referred to the genital malformation or not. The malformation may well have been ginormous brass cojones, which he would have needed to carry on unwaveringly with such a gigantic con.

  With the loss of most of his supporters, the Claimant needed to get his hands on the loot. Up for grabs were the 2290 acres of Tichborne Park, estates in Hampshire and homes in London, which collectively produced £20,000 a year in income — the equivalent of millions of pounds today. The Claimant had nothing to lose and everything to gain. He brought a civil case to eject the tenant of Tichborne Park, Colonel Lushington, and claim ownership of the property. Winning the case would have the added effect of establishing him as the rightful heir of Sir James and Lady Henriette Tichborne — losing it would confirm him as a scoundrel and con man.

  The case of Tichborne v Lushington began in 1871 in the Court of Common Pleas in London, but had to be moved to the bigger Court of Queen’s Bench because there was such a huge demand for the limited seating in the public gallery. The Claimant’s legal team was led by William Ballantine, who opened the case with a sorry tale of poor Roger’s unhappy childhood, overbearing father and poor education. And then the trauma of the shipwreck! His time in the lifeboat of La Bella had affected his memory, thus explaining why he could not remember details about his former life. Suggestions that he was Arthur Orton were dismissed as having simply been made up by private investigators working for the Tichborne family. He was backed up by a string of witnesses who testified that they recognised and acknowledged him as Sir Roger.

  Once the Claimant was called to the stand, he categorically denied that he was Arthur Orton. He was, however, less impressive under cross-examination by solicitor general John Duke Coleridge, who was acting under instruction fro
m the Tichborne family. The Claimant muddled his Latin and Greek and could not identify Virgil or chemistry. Worse, he caused an outrage by claiming he had seduced his first cousin Katherine Doughty and had left a sealed package before he set sail that laid out his wishes in case she had fallen pregnant with his child. Not only were the Tichbornes in danger of losing their money, their good name was being dragged through the mud.

  Coleridge opened the defence and stated from the outset that he intended to unmask one of the greatest imposters in history and prove that he was in actual fact Arthur Orton. He had 200 witnesses lined up, but very few were called in the end. One of the first, Lord Bellow, testified that the Sir Roger he had known at Stonyhurst College, where they had gone to school together, had very distinctive tattoos. The Claimant had no such body ink. That was the final straw for the jury, who sent a note to the judge saying they had heard enough and were ready to reject the Claimant’s suit. Not only did the judge throw out the case, he ordered the Claimant be arrested for perjury and thrown into Newgate Prison. It seems the agony was going to continue for the Tichborne family, who would now have to endure a criminal trial.

  For his part, the Claimant penned an appeal to the Evening Standard from his cell, calling for financial help from the public. ‘I appeal to the very British soul who is inspired by a love of justice and fair play, and is willing to defend the weak against the strong,’ he wrote. It worked: committees were set up across the country to support him and he was granted bail, on sureties provided by his wealthy supporters.

  He emerged from the prison to be met by cheering crowds. Author Mark Twain noted that wherever the Claimant went, he was always greeted as Sir Roger by admirers, who never held back on using his title. It was a strange paradox, noted the writer George Bernard Shaw, because the Claimant was seen both as a baronet and a working-class man callously denied justice by the ruling classes.

  Whatever he was, he was going to trial. The head of the panel of judges that would oversee the case, Sir Alexander Cockburn, had already denounced him as a perjurer. The prosecution was made up of the same defence team that had already discredited him in the civil trial, while this time the Claimant was relying on the services of a talented but eccentric Irish lawyer, Edward Kenealy. It was one of the longest cases heard in English history and caused a sensation. You can still find souvenir porcelain figurines of Sir Roger in antique shops.

  The prosecution called 215 witnesses from all over the world, who systematically destroyed the Claimant’s case — many of them identified him as Arthur Orton. The contents of the sealed packet he claimed were to be opened in the event of Katherine Doughty’s pregnancy were found to contain instructions on what to do with a number of properties and had nothing at all to do with sex.

  Kenealy pulled every trick in the book. He destroyed Lord Bellow’s character by revealing his adultery, though this revelation did nothing to disprove Bellow’s claims about Sir Roger’s tattoos. According to Kenealy, it was a giant conspiracy by the government, the Catholic Church and the Tichbornes’ lawyers. Kenealy’s behaviour earned him a savage and lengthy condemnation from the bench at the end of the trial and effectively ended his legal career. Naturally, he went into politics.

  Cockburn gave a highly partisan summing up that rejected the Claimant’s arguments one by one. The newspapers loved it. So did the jury — they finally retired after 188 days of hearing evidence and came back with a verdict in just 30 minutes. They found the Claimant was not Sir Roger, had not seduced Katherine Doughty and was in fact Arthur Orton.

  Guilty of perjury, the Claimant was sentenced to two consecutive terms of seven years.

  If anything, the trial had made him more popular with the public than ever, but by the time a much thinner Arthur Orton walked out of prison ten years later on licence, the public interest in him had drifted away. It was briefly revived on his release; he still claimed to be Sir Roger, and was signed up to tour with music halls and circuses. From there he went to New York in 1886 and ended up working as a bartender.

  The following year he was back in England and confessed he was really Arthur Orton to The People newspaper. He used the money from the interview to open a tobacconist. However he quickly recanted the claim once he had pocketed the newspaper’s money. He died destitute in 1898 and 5000 people attended the funeral at Paddington Cemetery. The cemetery records state that the body buried in the pauper’s grave was Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne. This was likely because of Orton’s daughter, who insisted until the day she died that her dad was really Sir Roger.

  And then there was the assertion by William Cresswell in Sydney that he was really Roger Tichborne. A Sydney court found in 1884 that the matter was undecided and ruled against him, so the status quo should remain. In 1904 the then Lady Tichborne visited Cresswell and reported there was absolutely no physical resemblance to any member of the Tichborne family. Appropriately, she visited Cresswell in the Sydney lunatic asylum where he had lived since before he made the claims …

  The Art of the Con: Ethel Livesey

  NOT every victim of a con man or woman is as desperate as Lady Tichborne to believe the con. That’s why con artists employ the old trick of collusion. They tip their victim into a scheme that sounds too good to be true. And yes, 99 per cent of the time it is. The ‘mark’ buys into a slightly dodgy scheme, thinking they are going to make a killing. Once they are in, they just keep getting deeper and deeper, handing over more and more money. When they finally realise they have been duped, they are reluctant to go to the police or law enforcement authorities because, after all, they were buying into a crooked deal in the first place. Greed is the mainstay of every con artist and is only ever trumped by one thing: love.

  In December 1945, Sydney was gearing up for the biggest society wedding in years. Hundreds were lining the streets in anticipation. The wedding between treasury official James Rex Beech and twenty-stone cotton heiress Ethel Livesey was going to take place in All Saints’ Church, Woollahra, but the location had been changed to a doctor’s home on Darling Point Road because the bride had apparently become upset by all the publicity. The ceremony was to include a release of a flock of doves and a concert by Jean Hatten, who was described at the time as Australia’s Deanna Durbin. It was Sydney society gold and just what the city needed in the immediate hangover of a war that had cost so many lives.

  However, with just half an hour to go on the big day, the bride was reported to have collapsed while studio photographers were taking pictures of her in the extra-large Molyneaux gown that had been specially delivered from Paris. As a result, neither the bride nor the groom attended the sumptuous wedding breakfast reception that had been laid at the Australia Hotel, but, in those austere times, the hundreds of guests stoically carried on without them. At the heaving tables, they speculated on what might have happened. The mystery of the missing bride continued to ripple through Sydney’s social set for several weeks, causing a sensation at the time.

  Later it emerged that Beech’s lawyer ‘had tendered Mr Beech certain advice’. No one knew what advice could call off a wedding at the last minute and cause a bride to vanish into thin air.

  Two weeks later, a portly woman was arrested in Chester Hill in Western Sydney on a twelve-year-old charge of obtaining goods under false pretences. She was alleged to have acquired £7/3/10 worth of items from Coles and Hughes drapers at Henley Beach, South Australia, by pretending that she was a station owner in rural New South Wales, whose husband was a member of Sargood Gardiner drapers in Sydney. She was indicted under the name Florence Elizabeth Ethel Gardiner and was, police said at the time, identical to the missing Ethel Livesey.

  Adelaide police advised there were also warrants for her arrest under the name Anderson and, oddly, Steven Lockwood. But that wasn’t the half of it.

  The 48-year-old swindler had had over 40 different aliases and eight marriages — but only five divorces. During a lifetime of conning, she had connived her way from industrial Manchester, England, t
o Australia via Ireland, the French Riviera, New York, Shanghai, the Isle of Man and New Zealand. She had claimed at various times to be a casino host, artist, opera singer, spy, stowaway, charity queen, friend of the king, and the wife of Australian test cricketer Jack Fingleton. What she really was, was a con woman. And a very good one. She would meet soldiers on leave and persuade them to give her their papers so that she could collect their salaries for them while they were away. Of course they never saw a single shilling or their love ever again. Later bankruptcy proceedings against her revealed she had drawn out £40,000 from a bank account in the Isle of Man.