The prank that grew to giant proportions

The story has been told dozens of times already, but never gets dull, and until the 1996 McDonald’s libel case there had not been a longer saga played out in any English court. From 1867 the Tichborne claimant dominated conversation for years, and people openly despaired they might die before a verdict was reached. Photographs of the claimant outsold those of the royal family, and such was the hypnotic fascination of the case that even they fell victim to it, the Prince and Princess of Wales sitting next to the judge on the bench on one occasion (on another, George Eliot was in the public gallery). The whole country was gripped by a tale so preposterous, it was either a wicked wrong which needed to be repaired, or, in the words of prosecuting counsel, ‘a detestable imposture’.

The facts of the case have not changed much since the admirable entry in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. In 1854 the heir to the Doughty-Tichborne estates, young Sir Roger, was drowned at sea when the Bella disappeared off the east coast of South America. There was a crew of 40, with Sir Roger the only passenger. His mother, the Dowager Lady Tichborne, brilliantly depicted in this book as a bitter, sniping, stubborn old skeleton, never accepted that her son had been lost and offered half-crowns to any passing sailor in the determination to find evidence of his survival. She was ‘as mad as a haddock’, and without her frenzied faith the entire story would never have even begun.

She eventually advertised in Australia for information leading to her son’s discovery, and before long a butcher from Wagga Wagga emerged to announce that he had been living under the pseudonym of Thomas Castro since his rescue. He and his mother started a devoted correspondence, she accepting his authenticity before even seeing him, and the course was set for this taciturn, sweaty individual to set sail for England and take his place amid the lower ranks of the aristocracy and set the nation panting with interest.