Noble Blood - The Butcher Baronet

Episode Date: August 6, 2019

An Australian man comes to England claiming to be a long-lost heir thought dead in a shipwreck. What happened next sparked a trial lasting 188 days—one of the longest in English history—and a scandal that captivated the Victorian public. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Aaron Menke. Listener discretion advised. In the summer of 1865, an Australian lawyer named William Gibbs was sitting in his office reading the Sydney Morning Herald. His eyes glazed over, like, large advertisement. The ad had been placed in papers for weeks, and by now Gibbs practically knew the words by heart. A handsome reward will be given to any person who can furnish such information as will discover the fate of Roger Charles Tickbourne. He sailed from the port of Rio de Janeiro on

the 20th of April 1854 in the ship La Bella, and has never been heard of since. Roger Tickbourne ship, it seemed, had completely wrecked, but rumor had reached England that the survivors had been rescued by a ship headed to Australia. And Roger's mother, Lady Tickbourne, was convinced that her son still lived, making him the rightful heir to the Tickbourne Berenet Sea. Gibbs put down the newspaper and looked at his next client, a local butcher from Wagga Wagga named Thomas Castro. Castro's situation was pretty bleak.

There wasn't much Gibbs could do to help him. Do you have any other properties that you could maybe liquidate? He asked. Any valuables you could sell? Any family abroad? Castro was evasive. Yes, there was some property. He had an entitlement back in England.

But most of his possessions and his paperwork had been lost in a shipwreck. Castro pulled out a beautifully carved briar pipe and began smoking. It was the pipe of a gentleman, and Castro had hoped it added an air of legitimacy to the excuses he made to his lawyer. Please, sir, he said, I have a wife and daughter. Isn't there something you can do for me? Gibbs asked for a closer look at Castro's pipe. On the side of the burnished mahogany wood were three gilded initials, almost invisible in the surface. R.C.T. Roger Charles Tickbourne. Gib salivated. His mouth tasted like copper. He rose to his feet and paced to the window, then paced back to his desk all while the butcher,

who had called himself Thomas Castro, watched him nervously. I think, Gibbs said, still walking, pacing in steady circles around his small, hot office. I think you've been lying to me. I don't know what you're talking about, Castro answered. I think, Gibbs said, his voice tricycle. that your real name is Roger Tickbourne. Castro's eyes caught the newspaper still splayed on Gibbs' desk. He saw the words reward, inheritance, and air.

The man cleared his throat. He inhaled and exhaled, and then looked right into Gibbs' eyes and said two words that would send Victorian England into a frenzy. Two words that would launch the longest trial England had seen up until the that point. Words that would tear families and lives apart. Words that would captivate writers like Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw and ignite a populist movement. The man using the name Thomas Castro, who, from that day on, would most commonly be referred to as the claimant, looked directly at his lawyer and said, You're right. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

The story of the Tick-Borne claimant doesn't actually begin in Australia. It doesn't actually begin in England either. It begins in France, in a cell, in 1803, where an English nobleman named Henry Seymour was imprisoned during the Napoleonic Wars. Also imprisoned with him was a man named James Tick-Borne, one of the sons of an English baronet. Henry Seymour didn't let a little thing like being a prisoner of war stop him from enjoying himself. While in captivity, he seduced the daughter of the Duke de Bourbon and became the father of a

daughter, whom they named Henriette. Years passed, and Henriette still hadn't found a husband. When she turned 20, her father, Henry Seymour, took matters into his own hands and decided to arrange a match with James Tickbourne, his former brother-in-arms as a prisoner of war in France. So what if James was twice Henriette's age, was ugly, and had the conversational about? of a brick wall. Henriette was 20 already, an old maid, and James, as the son of a baronet, was a suitable match. And so the pair got married and had a son of their own, Roger, Charles, Doty, Tickbourne. James was his father's fourth son, and so the odds weren't in his favor when it came to him or his son, Roger, inheriting the baronetcy. But as luck would have it, his older brother died with no

male heirs. His second eldest brother died young, also with no children, and his third brother only had a daughter, a girl named Catherine. And so it was young Roger who was raised with the knowledge that he would one day become the baronet. As one might have predicted, the arranged marriage between Henriette and James Tickbourne was Rocky at best. Although they eventually had another surviving son named Alfred, the spouses lived almost entirely separate lives. With her French pedigree, Henriette believed that France would be the best place to give her son Roger a proper education, and so she brought Little Roger with her to Paris, where he spoke French before he spoke English. The little heir lived there until his father intervened and sent him to a British boarding school

where British schoolboys being British schoolboys, Roger was endlessly mocked for his thick French accent. His adolescence was not a happy one. After school, Roger joined the British Army, and during his leaves, he would spend time at Tickbourne Park with his uncle, Edward, the Baronet, his aunt, and his cousin, Catherine. It's there that he found the only joy in his young life, because even though she was his cousin, Catherine was beautiful, and Edward, who was tall and slim with dark hair and dark eyes, was very handsome. The two cousins became enamored with one another. Though marriage between first cousins wasn't strictly forbidden in the 19th century, Roger's uncle, Sir Edward, was not a fan of the idea.

He forbade Roger from seeing Catherine until their youthful attraction diminished. The plan didn't work. Whenever Roger had time away from the army, he would sneak back to see Catherine, the two meeting in secret by Moonlight. They exchanged love letters written in code. but Catherine's father, Sir Edward, was never going to agree to the match. Love sick, lonely, and desperate, Roger needed to get away. The 23-year-old resigned his military position,

where his regiment had just been stationed in the British Isles, and he left on a private tour of South America. Roger's ship landed safely in Chile, where he received a letter informing him that his uncle had passed away, just weeks after Roger had departed on his voyage. Now, Roger's father was the baronet. The air continued his journey, traveling through South America for nearly a year, crossing the Andes, traveling to Buenos Aires, and then to Brazil.

It was from a port in Rio de Janeiro that Roger boarded a boat called La Bella, sailing for Jamaica, what would be one of the final stops on his tour. No one aboard La Bella was ever heard from again. Four days later, a wreck was discovered off the beach. Brazilian coast, presumed to be the ill-fated Bella. By all appearances, every passenger, including Roger Tickbourne, had perished. But Roger's mother, Henriette, now Lady Tickbourne, refused to believe that her eldest son was dead. Roger had been her shining boy, the beautiful child she had raised in Paris, and spent the mornings with chattering in French. He was the dashing

soldier, well-read, quiet, always polite, and he couldn't possibly be dead. Without telling her husband, one afternoon, Lady Tickbourne snuck out to see a psychic in London at the type of place where a woman of her stature would have been more than a little embarrassed to be seen. But Lady Tickbourne didn't care. She brought with her one of Rogers' hats and a newspaper clipping about the wreck of the Bella and laid her beating heart onto the psychic's velvet-covered table. The psychic smiled and told Lady Tickbourne that without a doubt her son would be able to be. was still alive. There were rumors that the passengers of the Bella, or at least some of them, had been picked up by a ship and brought to Australia. Roger must have been among them. That was the

conviction that Lady Tickbourne carried with her after the death of her husband when her indolent younger son Alfred became the new baronet. It was the conviction that Lady Tickbourne carried with her when Alfred's drinking and gambling nearly led him to bankruptcy, and he had to begin to lease out the estates of Tickbourne Park to tenants. And it's the conviction that she carried with her when she issued out a series of advertisement in Australian newspapers, including the Sydney Morning Herald, which a lawyer in Waga Waga named William Gibbs just happened to read. The man who had been going under the alias of Thomas Castro, whom history would refer to as the claimant, made his way from Waga Waga to Sydney, where he raised money from banks on the

declaration that he was Roger Tickbourne, heir to a title and a vast fortune. The claimant said he had been on the singing Bella, but had been rescued by a ship and made it to Melbourne. And with his memories adult from the trauma of the shipwreck, he had made up the name Thomas Castro, taking on the surname from a kind family he had met in South America. The so-called Thomas Castro, then settled in Wagga Wagga, began working as an apprentice butcher, got married, and had a daughter. But now the memories were flooding back. He was actually a Roger Tickbourne, and all he needed was enough money to get back to England to see his mother in order to prove it. While in Sydney, the claimant met a man from Roger Tickbourne's

past life, a servant named Andrew Bogle. Bogle was born a slave in Jamaica, but had stowed away with Roger's uncle Edward and worked with him as a man's servant for many years, until Edward's death, when Bogle was cast off unceremoniously into forced retirement with a tiny pension. Most longtime servants at the time were given a small property upon retirement. Bogel had been given scarcely enough to support himself, which necessitated his move to Australia where living was cheaper. At first, Bogle didn't recognize the man calling himself Roger Tickbourne. As a youth, Roger was lean, all angles, and long legs.

The man before him was nearly 200 pounds, his facial features less defined. During his time in Sydney, the claimant would gain 20 pounds, and he would gain another 40 pounds on the ship from Australia to England. Sympathizers explained he was just enjoying his newfound indulgent lifestyle. Skeptics would say the man was purposely trying to distort his appearance. But Boggle looked closely and he made his determination. The man was most certainly Roger Trey. Tickbourne. And so, with the money he had raised in Australia, he, his wife, his daughter, and Bogle would all depart back in order to claim his inheritance from his mother, Lady Tickbourne.

So the claimant made his way to England. He stayed at a hotel in London and whispered to the man at the front desk that his identity was actually that of the missing baronet, Roger Tickbourne, but that it was top secret. Moms the word, the receptionist promised. First thing, the claimant set out to see Lady Tickbourne at her London residence. But when he got there, he was told that the lady was residing in Paris. Then the claimant went somewhere else. He went to a rough, cockney neighborhood in East London called Wapping, and asked the first man he saw if he knew the whereabouts of a family called Orton.

Who's asking? The stranger responded. The claimant said that he was close friends with Arthur Orton. They had worked together in Australia on a cattle station. Orton, the claimant said, had done incredibly well for himself, and was now one of the wealthiest and most successful men in Australia. The claimant was told that the Orton family had left the area a while back. Just over a week later, the claimant met Lady Tickbourne at the Hotel de Lille in Paris. Upon seeing his face, Lady Tickbourne burst into tears. It's my son, she cried.

She embraced him and declared for all the world to hear that her lost son Roger had been found at last. Although Lady Tickbourne was fully convinced that the claimant was the lost heir and happily bestowed an income of a thousand pounds a year on him, the rest of the Tickbourne clan remained less than convinced. The claimant's physical stature aside, and by now he was nearly 400 pounds.

He didn't speak a word of French, nor did he speak with a French accent. And after all, French had been Roger's first language. The claimant mixed up Greek and Latin, didn't know as Virgil, couldn't identify distant family members. But then again, he did know small, strange details about Roger's life. He knew the type of fly fishing tackle Roger had used and the name of the dog he had adopted during his travels in South America.

On one hand, he knew where certain paintings were located at Tickbourne Park. but on the other hand, he had referred to his mother, Lady Tickbourne, in a letter as Hannah, even though her name was Henriette. Still, Lady Tickbourne would hear nothing against the miraculous return of her son, and though the family didn't allow him to formally claim the baronet title. After the degenerate Alfred's death, that title went to his infant son. The claimant still received a thousand pound a year annual income from her ladyship, and he was quite content enjoying his new position,

in society as a rogue noble. That is, until Lady Tickbourne died. To the outrage of the Tickbourne family, the claimant took the position of Chief Mourner at her funeral. To them, he was a low-born imposter, an embarrassing blight on their family name, and he would receive no title and no more money. Bankrupt, the claimant set up a fundraising venture in which he issued Tick-Born bonds that holders could purchase and then receive interest for once he had claimed his rightful inheritance. He made a living that way, affording enough to temporarily maintain his posture living as a noble-born gentleman. But if he actually wished to prove to the world that he was Roger Tickbourne, then the claimant had only one option. He needed to go to court. While the claimant was living

as either a pretender or a populist hero, depending on your perspective, members of the tick-borne family sent private investigators to try to look into the story that they were told. The claimant had mentioned that he used to work with a man named Arthur Orton on a cattle ranch in Australia. Maybe if they could find Orton, they would uncover the truth about the claimant. The tick-borne family agent traveled down to Australia and made it to the old cattle station where the claimant had claimed to work, a place run by a man named William Foster. Foster's widow checked the old employment records. There was an Arthur Orton listed, but no one by the name of Thomas Castro, the claimant's

alias. Maybe he had been using another alias at the time. The agent showed the widow the photograph of the man claiming to be Roger Tickbourne. Oh, I do know him, she said. That's Arthur Orton. Arthur Orton, born in Wapping in England, was the son of a butcher who had traveled to Chile as a young man and later moved to Australia. He worked at the cattle station owned by William Foster,

but his paper trail ends there. It's as if he disappeared from existence or took up a new identity. When the claimant's civil trial came to court in 1871, the defense lawyer asked about the mysterious Arthur Orton. The claimant was evasive, saying they had been friends in Australia, but that saying anything else about the time they had spent together would incriminate him.

Finally, the lawyer asked the man on the stand point-blank. Are you Arthur Orton? No, the claimant responded, I am not. At stake in the trial was Tickbourne Park, which consisted of over 2,000 acres, manors, farmland, and Hampshire, and a number of other properties in London and beyond. The baronet title would afford whoever held it in annual income of what today would be several millions of dollars. The witnesses lined up to testify. Some pointed out the claimant couldn't speak French or claimed that the real Roger Tickbourne had had tattoos.

But some witnesses, former soldiers in Rogers' battalion, a servant that Roger had traveled with in South America, maintained that after spending time with the man, the claimant was Roger Tickbourne. The defense lawyer had 200 witnesses ready to go to disprove that claim, but the judge held up his hand. no more witnesses would be necessary.

The case was dismissed, and the claimant was arrested on charges of perjury. During that civil trial, the claimant had become a massively popular figure of the public imagination. He was a working-class hero with a cockney accent, going up against the aristocracy and the criminal system, being denied something that belonged to him.

I appeal to every British soul who was inspired by a love of justice and fair play, and is willing to defend the weak against the strong, the claimant wrote in an essay appealing for donations for his upcoming criminal trial. Support poured in. His story was a Victorian sensation. His trial followed breathlessly. Knickknacks were sold featuring the major players of the story.

Tick-Born was recreated in wax at Madame Tussauds. In a political cartoon published in Punch Magazine in 1871, the claimants to distride the shoulders of a man demarcated as, quote, representing the British public. The, quote, British public man is sweating and red under the significant weight of the claimant. His cheeks puffed out with effort. On either side of the men are crowds holding signs. Australia, police, socialism, politics. The caption of the cartoon reads,

I cannot be expected to attend to any of you with this interesting topic on my shoulders. George Bernard Shaw wrote about the case and its peculiar contradictions in the introduction to his play Andercles and the Lion. As Shaw wrote, the claimant's attempt to pass himself off as a baronet was supported by an association of laborers on the grounds that the tick-born family, in resisting it, were trying to do a laborer out of his rights. To Shaw, the paradox was obvious. You had to believe simultaneously that this man was a cockney workman just like you, and at the same time that he was a born and raised legitimate aristocrat. Mark Twain also paid attention to the massively popular trial.

While in London, the celebrated writer was at a party with the claimant, where he noticed the way uppercruss men and women in high society always referred to him as Sir Roger. It was Sir Roger always. Sir Roger on all hands, no one withheld the title. Of course, the uppercruss didn't really believe that the man was Sir Roger. The only reason that this man had been invited to all these parties in the first place had been as sort of a joke, a hilarious little pantomime like seeing a monkey dressed in human clothes.

But the claimant maintained that he was Roger Tickbourne, never wavering, even as lawyers and witnesses abandoned his case. His criminal trial for perjury lasted 188 days, one of the longest trials in English history. But the deliberation lasted only 30 minutes. The jury declared that he was not Roger Tickbourne, and he was guilty on two counts of perjury and sentenced to 14 years in prison. The loss in court did nothing to quell the groundswell of popular support

among the working class for the claimant and his lawyer, an eccentric Irishman named Keenely, who was ultimately disbarred thanks to his violent and excessive performance in court during the trial. But Keenely used that popularity to launch a campaign for election to parliament, which he won in a landslide victory. But if the people were hoping for a champion, they had unfortunately chosen the wrong one. Keenly attempted to get the House of Commons to establish a royal commission to re-examine

the Tick-Borm case, but it only received a single yay vote, his own. Popularity and fervor over Roger Tick-Born and his mysterious disappearance and reappearance and reappearance gradually dissolved, and newspapers moved on to covering newer and more exciting gossip. In 1884, after serving a 10-year sentence, the man the public had come to know as the claimant was released from prison. He had lost nearly 150 pounds. Ironically, his time in jail had made him look even more like Roger Tickbourne than ever before. His old supporters attempted to rally him into their populist political movements, but the claimant had no interest in any of that.

Instead, he made paid appearances at dance halls and circuses and married a young music hall singer. He had long since separated from his Australian wife. When no one in England seemed to care about him anymore, he went to America where he thought he still might make some money. But no one in America cared about who he was either, and the claimant worked as a bartender there before coming back to England. A newspaper paid him a few hundred,

pounds for a confession that he was Arthur Orton all along. The claimant retracted that confession as soon as he spent the money. The claimant died in abject poverty on April Fool's Day in 1898. His funeral was attended by nearly 5,000 people. For one last moment, the public seemed to care about him again. Some call it foolishness or kindness or mercy, but for whatever reason, the Tick-born family permitted a card on the client. Kleeman's coffin that said Sir Roger Charles Doty Tickbourne. And so it was a coffin that bared the title of a baronet that was laid into a pauper's grave. That's the end of the claimant's life, but his story doesn't end there.

Stick around after a brief sponsor break to learn more about how the Tickbourne case lives on a century later. Hello, everyone. I'm Ago Wodom. My next guest, you know from Stepbrothers Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo. Woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever.

I went and had lunch with him one day. And I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent,

I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. Mm. and he's like, just give it a shot. He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.

It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program.

I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because the tick-borne controversy had happened a century before the discovery of DNA, evidence, it's impossible to determine for certain who the claimant actually was.

He went to his grave still declaring that he was Roger Tickbourne. Years later, the claimant's daughter would go on to say that her father had confessed to her that he had accidentally killed Arthur Orton back in Australia, and that's why he couldn't reveal the true details of his past. The claimant's daughter would spend a lifetime declaring that she was Roger Tickbourne's daughter. Some believe that the claimant was Arthur Orton all. long and that he was helped in the details of Roger's life by the disgruntled servant,

Bogle, angry at the Tickbourne family for terminating his position and looking for revenge. Perhaps they orchestrated the conspiracy together. Another theory is that the real Roger Tickbourne had made it to Australia and befriended the man who would later claim his identity. Maybe that man had killed the real Roger Tickbourne. In his 1957 book The Tickbourne claimant, Douglas Woodruff argues that it's possible the claimant actually might have been the real Roger Tickbourne all along. After all, what kind of lunatic would travel halfway across the world with his wife and daughter in tow to meet a mother and a family he knew nothing about if he had nothing to go on?

The soap opera saga of the Tickbourne case captivated the Victorian public, but it's a story that continues to fascinate modern audiences. In 1997, the Simpsons writer Ken Keeler penned an episode, he says, was influenced by the tick-borne case. In the episode, Principal Skinner reveals that his real name is Armand Tamzerian, and that as a soldier in the Vietnam War, he made friends with the fellow platoonman named Skinner.

When Skinner was assumed dead, Tamzarian went to Springfield in order to deliver the bad news to his mother. Mrs. Skinner mistook Tamzarian for her own son, and Tamzarian began life anew under a false name. It was an episode so outlandish that some critics consider at the end of the Simpsons' Golden Age. Ironically enough, the episode takes its title from a story by Mark Twain.

It's called The Principal and the Popper. Noble Blood is a co-production of IHeart Radio and Aaron Manky. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Manky, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at noblebloodtales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Ego Vodom. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot. But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down,

it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.