BIG TICH

See Also: ESTATES; THE UNRESURRECTED MOLE

The Doughty-Tichbornes were an old Catholic family. They owned Tichborne Park, a large estate in Hampshire and possessed a baronetcy. Roger Doughty-Tichborne was the older son and heir-apparent of Sir James Doughty-Tichborne the 10^th Bt.. In 1854 the young man was seen waiting to board the Bella, a ship that sailed from Rio de Janeiro. Subsequently, some wreckage that could be linked to the vessel was discovered at sea. His mother, Lady Harriette Doughty-Tichborne believed that he was still alive. The rest of the family did not regard this view as being realistic.

The 10^th Bt. died in 1862. The family title was inherited by Roger s younger brother Alfred. Lady Harriette believed that her older son was still alive. Following the Bella s disappearance, the family had been told that if there had been any survivors then they might have been picked up by a ship that was sailing to Australia. She had advertisements placed in Antipodean newspapers on her behalf.

Sir Alfred died in 1866. The baronetcy passed to his infant son Henry. Towards the end of the year a man who until recently had been known as Thomas Castro arrived in England. He was a butcher from Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Australia. His weight was closer to 30 stones than it was to twenty, his manners were not refined, and he had a pronounced Cockney accent. He declared that he was Sir Roger Tichborne 11^th Bt..

Lady Tichborne had been raised in France and, because her marriage had been unhappy, Roger had spent a large portion of his childhood in the country with her. He had been a fluent French speaker. Castro s command of the language extended to Oui, madame. The way in which he referred to his earlier life tended to be vague. It was apparent there were large lacunae in his recall, yet he also seemed to be able to remember some of it in remarkable detail. Lady Harriette acknowledged him as being her long-lost son and started to support him financially. A number of people in the Doughty-Tichborne family circle also took him to be who he claimed he was. Their number included the peer the 6^th Baron Rivers and the M.P. Guildford Onslow.

The following year Castro allowed himself to be cross-examined by members of the Court of Chancery. During the session, he gave an account of his life between the Bella s sinking and his identification of himself as Sir Roger. Among the statements that he made was that, while working on a cattle station in Victoria, he had come to know a man by the name of Arthur Orton. The Doughty-Tichebornes dispatched a representative to Australia in order to ascertain which portions of his testimony could be either disproved or substantiated. The fellow visited the livestock property. Its records revealed that Orton had been employed there. However, they contained no trace of Castro. The widow of the station owner was shown a photograph of the former butcher. She stated that the man in the picture was Orton.

When the information was reported back to the family, they hired the detective Jonathan Whicher to find out what he could about Orton. The investigator unearthed evidence that the man had probably been born in Wapping in 1834 and that if that was the case then he was the son of a shipping butcher. Whicher also discovered that Castro/Orton, following his arrival in London, had visited the district and had inquired after the Orton family.

Lady Harriette died in 1868. The allowance that she had paid to Orton (Castro) ceased. A number of his advocates rallied to his cause and subscribed to a fund that sustained him financially. He had asserted that people in the Chilean town of Valparaiso would be able substantiate his claims. In 1869 he and a number of his associates travelled to South America in order to gather testimonies there. However, rather than see the matter through, he chose first to stay in Buenos Aires and then to return to Britain. The rest of the party continued with the mission. In Valparaiso they were unable to find any evidence of Roger. However, they uncovered a number of people who had known an Englishman called Arturo . When these facts were learnt in England, a number of the claimant s supporters abandoned his cause. His income dried up. However, he proved to be able to raise tens of thousands of pounds by issuing debentures. These bonds stated that they would be repaid with interest when he acquired the Tichborne Park estate.

In 1871, in order to secure possession of the Tichborne inheritance, Orton launched a civil action in the Court of Common Pleas. The judge who presided over the case was Sir William Bovill. Sir John Coleridge s opening speech for the defendants lasted 23 days. His cross-questioning of the plaintiff took three weeks. The action failed in large part because of the extreme detail with which the barrister examined the former butcher s claims. Sir William ordered that Orton should be indicted for perjury. The court had sat on 103 days.

Orton was lodged in Newgate Prison. He had become a figure who commanded considerable popularity amongst working-class Britons. Many of them regarded him as being someone who was challenging vested privilege. The Evening Standard newspaper published a letter in which he asked the public to help him to meet his legal costs. Fundraising committees mushroomed across the nation. Bail sureties were posted by Rivers and Onslow. Orton, following his release, capitalised upon the interest in him by embarking upon a speaking tour. He revelled in his celebrity status.

Orton s criminal trial in the Court of the Queen s Bench was to prove to be lengthy. His advisers selected Edward Kenealy to act as his principal barrister. The man had a reputation for being a maverick. Ultimately, this was to work against the defendant s interests. During the trial the lawyer opted to employ a confrontational style. He engaged in character assassinations of the prosecution s witnesses. Kenealy, as a youth, had rejected the Roman Catholicism into which he had been born. He made a number of sectarian quips that sought to cast the Doughty-Tichbornes Catholicism in a negative light.¹

The barrister made a number of antagonistic remarks towards the presiding judge Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn.² The latter s summing up lasted eighteen days. He used it as an opportunity to rebuff the comments that he had been subjected to. At points during it, the public gallery burst into applause. At the suit s end, Orton was convicted. He was sentenced to serve two seven-year periods in prison. These were to run sequentially. The court had sat on 188 days. Kenealy s conduct during the proceedings led to his being disbarred.

The verdict had seemed to underscore the view that Orton was a victim of establishment machinations. His popularity increased. Kenealy opted to espouse the claimant s cause fervently. The former barrister set up the Magna Charta Association, an organisation that espoused a number of progressive political stances. These included individual Parliaments not being allowed to sit for more than three years (at the time they could last for up to seven). In 1874 he launched The Englishman newspaper. Under his editorship, it proved to be a defamatory rag. For a while, it enjoyed a large circulation.

In early 1875 Kenealy stood as the people s candidate in a by-election that had been called at Stoke-upon-Trent. He was returned to the Commons. When he took his seat in the Chamber no other M.P.s were willing to formally introduce him. Two months later he moved a motion in the House that a Royal Commission of Inquiry should investigate the Tichborne Case. The motion was defeated by 433 votes to one. Subsequently, the Member for Stoke opted to spend nearly all of his time away from the Palace of Westminster. A general election was held in 1880. He sought to be re-elected for his constituency. He came bottom of the poll.

Kenealy died later that year. He had turned the Case into an issue that had enabled a mass movement to emerge. It can be argued that it was the largest popular cause that existed between the failure of Chartism in the 1840s and the emergence of Socialism as a national political force during the 1890s. His son Maurice assumed the leadership of the Magna Charta Association.

Orton was released in 1884. He had served ten years of his sentence. He took no interest in the political agenda that the Association had developed. As a result, the organisation soon collapsed. Although the former butcher s popularity had largely evaporated there was still enough residual interest in him that, for a while, he was able to earn a living by appearing in music halls. From the stage he would speak about himself and the validity of his claim. It was not an act that bore repeated viewing. After a year or so, bookings for it dried up.

It seems that impecuniousness prompted Orton to write a confession that was published in The People newspaper in 1895. In the piece, he both stated that he was Orton and that the reason why he had appeared to have known some things about his non-existent life as Sir Roger was because he had paid close attention to what other people had said to him. Subsequently, he had regurgitated the information back at them or others. Soon after the item appeared, he retracted what he stated in it. The following year The Englishman closed. In 1898 the former butcher died. To the end he claimed that he was the baronet.

Orton s corpse was buried in an unmarked grave in Paddington Cemetery. His funeral was attended by several thousand people. At it, a small card rested on the coffin. On this was written Sir Roger Tichborne . In an act of generosity, the Doughty-Tichbornes had sanctioned the touch.

Of the claimant s four children, his daughter Teresa embraced his cause. She made financial demands of the Doughty-Tichborne family. These were not met. In 1912 she tried to shoot Sir Joseph Doughty-Tichborne 13^th Bt. on his wedding day.

The former butcher did have one lasting impact upon the English-speaking world. A by-product of his attempt to claim the Tichborne inheritance was to give to the language the objectionable noun Titch, which is an abusive form of address when it is employed towards someone who is short, and the neutral adjective titchy, which can be applied to something that is small.

Harry Relph s career in the music halls was far more durable than Orton s had been. He performed both as a character comedian and as an eccentric dancer.³ His most famous routine involved him dancing in boots that were 28-in.-long (0.71m.) (he was 4 6 -tall (1.37m.)). As a boy he had been chubby. During his childhood it had been a fashion for overweight children to often be dubbed Little Tichborne in reference to Orton s bulk. Relph opted to use Little Tich as his stage name. It was this decision that vested the noun and the adjective into common usage.

Location: 30 Chesham Street, SW1X 8NQ. At the Lyall Place end. Lady Harriette s home. (blue, blue)

Doughty Street WC1N 2LX

The Waterloo Hotel, 85-86 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6JD (blue, turquoise)

21 Shouldham Street, W1H 5FL. Orton s final home. (blue, turquoise)

6 Tavistock Square, WC1H 9NA. Kenealy s home. (orange, blue)

93 Shirehall Park, Hendon, NW4 2QU. Relph s home.

¹. Kenealy had created a belief system of his own. This involved his being the twelfth messenger of God. He set out his creed in a book that he titled The Book of God: The Apocalypse of Adam-Oannes (1866).

². In 1869 the directors of the banking firm Overend, Gurney & Company had been prosecuted for fraudulent conspiracy with regard to the business s collapse. Kenealy had led the prosecution, Coleridge had led the defence, and Cockburn had been the presiding judge. The suit was determined in the defendants favour. (At one point relations between Cockburn and Kenealy had been cordial enough for the former to become the godfather of one of the latter s children.)

³. One of Little Tich s routines informed Igor Stravinsky s composition of his Three Pieces For String Quartet (1915).

David Backhouse 2024