RECORD TRIAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 84, 10 April 1937, Page 4 (Supplement)

RECORD TRIAL.

COURT SENSATIONS.

VILIFIER AND PERJURER

GAOLED.

u rris an unwise mother that knows X not her own child." Seventy

years ago Henrietta, Lady Tichborne, widow of Sir James, baronet of that name, fell npon the neck of a prodigal whom she identified as her lost offspring, the heir to the Tichborne title and estate*. And thereby her ladyship precipitated a world-wide sensation, also a trial lasting 188 days and costing £200,000. It was the longest English Irial on record.

The strange story begins over a century ago, with Sir Edward Tichborne, baronet, whose estate yielded £20,000 R . y eal > There being no sons to bless ] im, his heir to the title was a nephew, James, with two sons, Roger and Alfred •—two Parisianised youths, whose mother disliked England. Roger, the elder boy, prospective heir to the Tichborne baronetcy and estates, was betrothed to his cousin, Katherine, but, being as wild & young subaltern a-s ever wore a sword at his hip, was required to go aVoad for a couple of years' probation before he might claim the hand of his lovely fiancee.

Thus it was in 1852 that young Roger resigned his commission in the Army and sailed for South America to begin life anew in the open. For more than a year he wandered restlessly from place to place, through Latin-America, until hearing that his grand Uncle had died, that his father had succeeded to the baronetcy and that he wa« now heir to the title. Thereupon he sailed homeward from Rio Janiero on the ship Bella, which never came to port. His mother, the aforementioned Lady Henrietta, absolutely failed to believe that he did not escape whatever ill fate might have overtaken the Bella. She had a "presentiment" that he was still alive and tha.t he would one day return to her, but while she continued to reiterate this belief and to persistently advertise lor him, offering a handsome reward for knowledge of his whereabouts, her husband died, leaving the baronetcy to her younger son, Alfred, a minor.

. Clue From \ . Fourteen years after .Lady; Tichborne had bid her son Koger f far e well one of her advertisements brought hefr a • clue, A wanderer located in -Australia, and claiming to be .-one Thomas . Castro - was, said to bear an unmistakable resemblance to her vanished Roger. Through a detective agency he was brought to her in Paris, and here it was she fell upon the neck of her alleged prodigal son, for whom the fatted calf was not; only killed but basted, garnished and cooked to a turn. Lady Tichborne had faced no danger of having the estates go out of her immediate family, inasmuch as her son Alfred was already the recognised heir to the title. But her- identifying the -man from Australia aroused a storm of resentment, resulting in the famous Tichborne trial, which she did not live to witness. At this dramatic hearing many of the lost Roger's friends, relatives and brother officers, also men who had served under him in the ranks, identified the quondam Castro as unmistakably the lost Tichborne heir. To the witness stand, in his behalf, also came sailors from the Bella who swore that they had taken him from the wreck of' that vessel. One, Jean Luie, a Dane, swore that he had been steward of the American ship Osprey, which, some 5000 miles off Brazil, in April, 1854, had picked up a ship's boat from the Bella, containing five sailors and a delirious, helpless man who later himself "Rogers." The Osprey had landed thia man at Melbourne, Australia. He and the claimant to the Tichborne baronetcy ■were positively one and the same. Other witnesses klentified a wound on the head of the claimant, also a brown mark upon his side, as having been borne also by the lost Sir Roger. But after all of this convincing testimony had seemed to filch the title and - estates from the young lad, Alfred Tichborne, that youth's counsel played a trump card and thereby caused the hundreds of spectators in the courtroom to sit with bated breath. It was a sealed envelope alleged to have been given by Roger to his cousin Katherine, when he i sailed for South America, and which had never been broken open. The man from Australia, when asked to describe its contents swore that before his dis- • appearance he had betrayed his fiancee : and that the envelope had contained instructions for her care in case of certain eventualities. Sensational Note. , The counsel for the defence then defi- ] antly broke the seal, opened the packet < and produced a note which read;

God spares me to return and marry ray beloved Kate within three years, I promise to build a church and to dedicate it to the Blessed Mother." This disclosure lost the suit to the alleged Sir Roger. Branded as a vilifier, a defamer and a cad, he was tried for perjury and, being found guilty, spent 10 years in-prison. After gaining freedom he went to New York, embarked upon a lecture tour, failed in the became a bartender in a Chatham Square saloon, returned pennii? c° >and there saved himself from starvation by accepting a commission from a newspaper to write his confession," an extravagant statement whose details few believed, although it admitted his claim to the Tichborne titles to have been fraudulent. Somewhere between this man's extravagant admissions of-guilt and the story that Roger Tichborne had been lost at «ea lay the truth. What was it? And why should the lost Roger's mother have tried to foist him upon British aristocracy if by so doing she would hav* taken £20,000 a year and a baronetcy trom her own son ?

i n c?„„ hbo " le claimant died on April * leavul S a daughter, Theresa, who 23 years ago still entertained such bitterness over her father's lose of his case that she sent a threatening letter to the fiancee of Sir Alfred's grandson baronet at the time.

What was the secret behind Ladv recognition of the prodigil wft? aa 7 Ifc seems to have died wim tnat woman of mystery.