The Claimant: The Extraordinary Story of the Aust. Butcher who said he was a Baronet - Paul Terry

CHAPTER 1

A very unattractive man here was not much to talk about in Wagga Wagga in 1866.

Widespread rain in summer raised hopes that an 18month drought might be over but those hopes were dashed when the rain stubbornly refused to return in the autumn.

In winter, two bushrangers got tongues wagging when they robbed a man in the hills to the east, but they were soon caught and the excitement was over. In spring, a visiting musical troupe caused outrage when a female performer appeared on stage dressed as a man, and controversy raged for a while over a church choir’s insistence on chanting – rather than singing – the responses to the Commandments at services. Capping off this unremarkable year, readers of the town’s only newspaper were astonished to learn that a swooping magpie had knocked a pipe from a man’s mouth as he walked past the racecourse.

Such was the year in a town where not much happened.

It was little wonder, then, that by the end of the year, an intriguing story that had started as a rumour twelve months earlier erupted into a talking point so exciting that it made the town world famous. The subject of this story was an unlikely character to merit such interest. His name, or so he claimed, was Tomas de Castro (plain Tom Castro to his friends) and at first glance there was nothing remarkable about him.

Tom was a butcher who plied his trade from a bark and slab hut half a block back from the long and dusty main street. Few who met him could have been in doubt about his occupation. Not one to bother much with personal hygiene, his wardrobe consisted of two or three blue dungaree shirts

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and a pair of moleskin trousers, all liberally coated with the blood and marrow of the beasts that he butchered and sold from his humble store. On gala days, he added a tarnished red sash to his ensemble.

He was, it seemed, a very ordinary if particularly slovenly man living in an equally ordinary and rough-and-tumble bush town. But thanks to Tom Castro, Wagga Wagga would soon become a household name.

Tom Castro’s Wagga was a place of bark and timber, little more than a long street that roughly followed the course of the winding Murrumbidgee River as it made its way from snowy alpine meadows to join the west-flowing Murray River hundreds of kilometres downstream. The wide streets – as few as they were – were dusty and rutted tracks in the hot months and soupy strips of mud and manure in the cold, damp weeks of winter. Much of the place had an air of impermanence. The roads were dotted with the stumps of hastily-felled gum trees and the river flats were studded with triangles of canvas – tent homes for the poor who could not afford even a hut of slabs and bark.

There were, however, a few buildings of substance. A steam-powered mill ground local grain into flour, several new banks tried to give an impression of stability and there were even plans to build a post office. The Australian Hotel, an expensive 18-room edifice of brick and iron perched atop a little rise in the main street. Nearby was a rambling, solid store where stockmen and servants from runs and stations came to buy food, tools, hardware, dress-making material, lace, ribbons and hats. These fine buildings had pride of place on that high point on the main street and not just because of the social status it conferred. As the townsfolk had discovered to their cost, the low-lying areas along the river were plagued by sudden, terrible floods that carried off the ramshackle dwellings and their occupants with deadly ferocity.

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Wagga was a young town, settled some 30 years earlier by illegal squatters who saw a chance to generate wealth along the green river flats and in the rolling hills that cascaded down from the Great Dividing Range to the east. Soon, however, a rowdy element moved in to provide the labour for the squatters. By the 1840s, almost half the population was made up of ex-convicts, who were put to work in the area’s steadilygrowing agribusinesses. Wagga Wagga was now a tough little town with a reputation for violence and disorder.

With so many rough residents, there was a need for police to catch the criminals and a jail to house them. By 1858, the town had ten police and an ugly-looking prison that frowned over the rear of the court house as if daring the ruffians to try their luck.

Alcohol abuse was often at the core of the strife, which was not surprising as a man looking for a drink in Wagga Wagga did not have to look far. Hotels and grog shops had sprung up on each side of the river and the main street boasted pubs of varying sizes and quality, many concentrated in a cluster at each end of a new toll bridge that spanned the river between the main part of town and the broad floodplain of North Wagga.

The abundance of hotels pleased Tom Castro because he was a man who enjoyed a drink. That was not to say he was welcome in every pub in town. Where one chose to drink depended upon how one was brought up. A squatter or respected merchant might enjoy the company of similar folk at the Pastoral, the Commercial or the Squatters Arms.

The rougher classes, of which Tom was a member, took their refreshment at the Prince of Wales, the Bridge or – over the river in North Wagga – the Black Swan or the White Swan.

The Australian Hotel atop the rise in the main street was for the well-to-do and not a place where Tom Castro might find a warm welcome, which was a pity because it was

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conveniently close to his place of work. His little store and place of residence sat at the rear of the pub amid of a jumble of stables, sheds and timber cottages. Tom did not much mind missing out on the attractions of the Australian. There were plenty of other working men’s pubs in which he could slake his thirst and he did so with enthusiasm. If, after a drink or two, Tom hinted to his mates that he was secretly better suited to the finer pubs, then none believed him.

He was an affable soul with many friends. Among his greatest mates was a man named Dick Slate. Dick was a person of some education, if a little wayward. He and Tom enjoyed many a drink together until Slate left town to drive a mob of cattle to Melbourne, 500 kilometres to the south.

His departure was very sudden and might have had more to do with the late night ‘bushwhacking’ of a drunken farmer than with getting the cattle to Melbourne.

Nobody gave it much thought at the time. It was only later, when the man who had once called himself Tom Castro was famous, that people remembered that Dick Slate was from Hampshire in England and might have information of great value to his friend, Castro. Slate himself never explained what he knew. It might have helped if someone had thought to ask him.

Tom liked to big note himself. On fishing trips to the river with another friend, Tom observed the winding, sandy banks lined with stately red gums were a good place for ‘a man to build his own estate’. With a subtle nod, he indicated that that was something he just might do. He also let it be known that he could ride in a carriage, should he wish to. At other times, he mentioned an interest in buying a hotel of his own.

His friends thought little of this boasting. If Tom Castro had secrets to hide, then nobody was much interested.

But Tom Castro was no mere butcher. By 1866 his fellow townsfolk knew him to be someone else entirely – the heir

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to the fortune of one of England’s oldest fortunes. As strange as it seemed, the rough-spoken, happy-natured butcher was apparently not just another penniless bushman eking out a hard living in a rough town, but a noble-blooded gentleman with grace, title and fortune. It was almost beyond belief.

But it had to be said that there was something mysterious about him. He was not a man without talents, and his past was cloudy. Everyone knew he had lived in South America and could ride a horse and lasso cattle, but the rest of his history was filled in only by hints and nods. There were all sorts of stories about him. One linked him to a bloodthirsty outlaw, for instance, and another to the unsolved murder of a stockman a few years earlier. But the persisting story about Tom Castro, the one that always burned brightest with the hint of truth, was the one he spread himself.

According to this story, Tom came not from a humble background but from important people back home in England. One day his real identity would be known and then the world would sit up and take notice.

Tom Castro made his first confirmed appearance in Australia in1859 when he turned up in the New South Wales town of Deniliquin and took a job running the Queen’s Mail across the hot and dusty western plains. His departure from that town a few months later was sudden and rancorous, and probably related to an unfortunate misunderstanding with a bootmaker’s daughter. Tom was not missed in Deniliquin but nor was it forgotten that while there he hinted at aristocratic birth and supposedly drank from a silver flask inscribed with ‘Tom Castro’ on one side and the initials ‘R.C.T’ on the other.

From Deniliquin, he made his way north east to the pretty hill town of Tumut where he operated a butcher shop that soon went broke. A short time later he moved to Wagga and

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worked as a butcher in that one-windowed wattle and daub hut behind the Australian Hotel. A small compartment at the rear of the shop served as his bedroom and at night he was lulled to sleep by the mournful lowing of cattle at the town saleyards just a stone’s throw away. It seemed that Wagga was just another stop in the journey of this rambling bushman.

Nonetheless, Tom Castro liked to keep an eye on local affairs, and soon after he arrived in town, he was intrigued to read a story in the Wagga Express. Headlined ‘FREAKS OF FORTUNE’, it told a fascinating tale; a gardener labouring in the grounds of the humble Cookardinia Hotel, 80 kilometres to the south, was not a gardener at all. He was, in fact, the rightful Earl of Stafford.

The village of Cookardinia, with its rectangular hotel of weatherboard and scattering of cottages lining a dry creek bed, was an unlikely place to unearth an earl, and the newspaper was sceptical. Nonetheless, it reported in good faith that the lucky gardener had already received £1000 from his estate and a further £15,000 was due to arrive in the next mail from England. The gardener, observed the paper rather pompously, was ‘much superior to his present position; this may or may or not be, but we presume some allowance must be made for the romantic halo which such an occurrence cast for the time, upon the hero thereof’.

Like the Express, Tom Castro had no idea whether the story was true or not. He might have been surprised to learn that the earldom of Stafford had been extinct since 1762. The gardener of Cookardinia, William Stafford Perrott, had laid claim to the title and was using whatever money he could eke from it to enthusiastically drink himself to death. Tom preferred to believe it was true. He enjoyed tales with a romantic twist and if he liked people to know that like the gardener, he too was of noble birth then nobody much cared.

At least, not at first.

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Later, a more significant event caught his attention when the notorious bushranger, Daniel ‘Mad Dan’ Morgan shot and killed a worker on a station near the town of Culcairn to the south. A few days later, Morgan struck again, this time in the rugged hills near Tumbarumba where he shot dead a police sergeant. The failure of the police to catch him annoyed the Sydney Morning Herald which declared: ‘The aggression of this villain Morgan caused great indignation, and the inhabitants of the district consider it a disgrace to the government and the police that he is still at large’.

Tom Castro, for his part, was more intrigued than indignant.

He was fascinated by Morgan and hinted that he had met the bushranger on a number of occasions. He had even let it be known that he was considering hunting Morgan down and personally bringing him to justice. As it happened, Morgan would fall to other hands, but his life had a postscript with that of Tom Castro’s.

Meanwhile, Tom was keen to find a wife. This was difficult enough for any man in a town of less than one thousand people, most of whom were male. But in Tom’s case it was even harder, partly because he was a very unattractive man.

Now aged about 30, he was five feet nine inches tall and running to fat. He had a broad, jowly face framed by whiskers and a twitch in his right eye that he claimed to have acquired in a riding accident. Some of his upper teeth were missing and he had a tendency to pass wind at inappropriate occasions.

All of these things were liabilities for a man looking for a mate but Tom had one more shortcoming – a serious one that might have further devalued his potential as a husband.

He had a rare genital deformity that caused his penis to withdraw into his body. Although it functioned effectively it spent most of its time hidden away like a mouse in a hole.

Later, this condition would do much to support his claims to be someone far grander than a butcher from Wagga Wagga.

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In 1864, however, Tom met Mary Ann Bryant, a servant at a pub in North Wagga while he recovered from a fall from a horse. Mary, who was remembered unkindly as ‘a big lump of a girl’ and ‘a person of low and vulgar habits’ had recently moved to Wagga from the town of Goulburn. One of 11 children to a widow, Mary had been brought up in harsh poverty. When she arrived in Wagga, she was carrying a child to an unknown father. Tom Castro was no great catch but Mary was not in a position to choose and when Tom proposed, she accepted.

A few months later, she delivered a little girl she named Annie. The happy couple decided to make it official and on and on a hot Sunday evening in January, 1865, Tom married Mary in a service conducted by a Wesleyan minister at a private home. The groom signed the wedding certificate as Tom Castro, son of a Chilean merchant. The illiterate Mary signed with a cross.

The newlyweds moved into a tumbledown shack on the banks of the Wollundry Lagoon, a shallow, tree-lined billabong that curved away from the town’s main street like a gigantic brown snake. Their home was a windowless jumble of timber that rested precariously against a chimney of decaying bark. From this unimpressive hovel, it was a short commute on foot to Tom’s place of work a few blocks away.

Not that Tom was much of a worker. He preferred to do as little as possible, a trait that did not impress his wife. On one occasion, she roundly abused him in the street after he refused to shuffle across the dirt track outside their home to fetch a bucket of water from the billabong. Luckily, the strong and thickset young bride could work hard enough for both of them and she rebuilt their home’s decaying chimney with some second hand bricks. Like Mary herself, the completed chimney was no thing of beauty but it worked well enough.

That was no small comfort. In a Wagga summer an egg

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F. Castro’s butcher shop, Wagga Wagga, NSW

can be fried on a piece of tin in the sun, but on winter nights, heavy grey fogs close in like a damp shroud, sometimes not lifting until after lunch, and sometimes hanging around until nightfall. On clear nights, stars blaze in a cold black sky and in the mornings, a thick frost coats the ground like frozen white paint. At these times a warm fire was the family’s only luxury.

Mary kept busy scrubbing floors and taking in washing.

Tom went to work as often he needed to and, eternally goodnatured, he could be heard whistling as he butchered sheep and cattle and sold the cuts at his little shop. The Castros, it seemed, were no different to any other working class family in the little town on the big river.

In the year of the marriage, a book shop opened in the main street. Tom was an avid reader and it was possibly from this shop that he bought books to read by candlelight in the evenings as Mary busied herself with looking after the baby and keeping their squalid little home habitable. Tom’s taste in literature ran to the romantic. He enjoyed ‘sensation’ novels

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by Gerald Griffin, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Captain Marryot. One of his favourites was Braddon’s Aurora Floyd, the dramatic story of a beautiful and rich young woman who was concealing a dangerous secret.

It was a tale of deceit, blackmail and murder – and Tom loved it. He was so impressed with the words of the story’s villain that, in an action he later regretted, he paraphrased them on a page of his pocket book: ‘Some Men has plenty money and no brains. And some men has plenty brains and no Money. Surely Men with plenty Money and no brains were made for Men with plenty brains and no Money.’

Tom Castro was in the latter category – he had brains enough but no money. In fact, he was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, with outstanding debts of £200 that threatened to sink him. Among those seeking money from him was a local solicitor, William Gibbes, who was acting for one of Tom’s creditors. In a meeting, Gibbes discussed with Tom the possibility of insolvency. Tom was initially attracted to what seemed an easy way out of his problem but backtracked rapidly when Gibbes told him that declaring bankruptcy under a false name could render him, Tom, liable to criminal charges.

At this, Tom asked Gibbes whether it would be a problem if he failed to declare property he owned in England. This made the lawyer’s ears prick up. He was even more interested to hear that Tom had ‘a great horror of the sea’ because he had been in a shipwreck. There were rumours swirling around town about Tom Castro and William Gibbes was a man who kept his ear to the ground. These ‘secrets’ seemed to confirm that the butcher was more important than he seemed.

But rumours were just grist for the mill in a town where

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everyone knew everyone else, so Gibbes did not pay them much mind until August, 1865, when an intriguing advertisement appeared in newspapers that found their way to town. Placed by a missing person’s agency in Sydney, the notices appealed for information about a young British aristocrat and heir to a fortune, Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne, who had not been seen since sailing from the port of Rio on the ship Bella, in 1854. The Bella had been lost along with all on board. But according to the notice a handful from the ship were thought to have survived. Importantly, an alluring incentive was offered to anyone who could find the missing heir amongst those survivors: It is not known whether the said Roger Charles Tichborne was amongst the drowned or saved. He would at the present time be about 32 years of age; is of a delicate constitution, rather tall, with very light brown hair and blue eyes. Mr Tichborne is the son of Sir James Tichborne . . . (now deceased) and is heir to all his estates. The advertiser is instructed to state that a most liberal REWARD will be given for any information that may definitely point out his fate. All replies to be addressed to Mr Arthur Cubitt, Missing Friends Office, Bridge-street, Sydney, New South Wales.

It was never established whether Tom Castro saw the notice but Gibbes’ wife certainly did, and when she told him about it, he hurried to the Wagga Mechanics’ Institute where he found it printed in the Sydney Morning Herald. It seemed to Gibbes that, just maybe, he might know something about the missing Roger Tichborne. Life as a bush solicitor was not lucrative and to Gibbes the idea of a ‘most liberal REWARD’ was an appealing one. With a degree of self-persuasion backed more by hope than evidence, Gibbes began to convince himself that Tom Castro was his meal ticket.

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A few days later, Gibbes engineered a meeting with Tom as the butcher stood under a verandah, smoking a pipe. Gibbes decided to come straight out with it.

‘I know who you are!’ he cried. ‘Shall I call you by your real name?’

Tom was alarmed. ‘For God’s sake, don’t! I don’t want my family to know,’ he replied and turned away.

But as he did so, he slyly waved his pipe and Gibbes could see the bowl had been inscribed with the initials ‘R.C.T’.

Under persistent questioning, Tom admitted that, yes, he was in fact the missing son of an English nobleman. He had survived a shipwreck, he said, and had been picked up in a life boat by the crew of another ship and taken to Melbourne.

He had changed his name and turned his back on his family so his younger brother, to whom he had been close, could claim the title that was meant to be Tom’s.

Gibbes thought he had found his man. On 9 October, he dashed off a letter to the missing person’s agent, Arthur Cubitt, whom he had met briefly in Sydney a few years earlier.

I ‘spotted’ him, I think, some time ago, and could find him, I think, and if I could would urge him to disclose himself.

He was hugely disgusted when he found I had detected him, and his real name has never passed between us. I should like the further particulars to enable me to be certain, that is quite certain, for I have scarce any doubt.

Without waiting for a reply from Cubitt, Gibbes struck an agreement with Castro. Tom’s identity would be kept secret for five months, as would the details of his marriage to Mary.

Finally, and most importantly, Tom would require money from the Tichborne family should he have to go to England to claim his inheritance.

Meanwhile, Gibbes’ wrote to Cubitt, suggesting they share

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£250 in reward money from Roger’s mother, the Dowager Lady Tichborne. Cubitt was equally keen to get his hands on the reward, but his plans did not necessarily include Gibbes.

In November, Cubitt wrote to Lady Tichborne in Paris, declaring that her missing son had been found in Australia.

Events were being set in train that, once started, would be impossible to stop.

Gibbes’ growing conviction that Castro was a baronet was strengthened when the butcher visited the solicitor’s family home. When Gibbes’ wife got up to leave the room, her husband noticed Tom opened the door for her with ‘the easy grace of a gentleman . . . he did not bow too little or too much’. To Gibbes’ way of thinking it was further proof that the rough-handed butcher was hiding his true light under a bushel. Encouraged, the solicitor decided to press his case and he warned Tom, ‘if you don’t write home to your mother in a month, I’ll do it for you.’

Under this pressure, Tom scrawled out a poorly-written to the Dowager Lady Tichborne in December. He apologised to her for the ‘truble and anxiety I must have cause you by not writing before’ and made it clear that he had fallen on hard times since his disappearance all those years ago. Importantly, he offered two details as ‘proof’ of identity.

Of one thing rest Assured that although I have been in A humble condition of Life I have never let any act disgrace your or my Family. I have been a poor Man and nothing worse. Mr Gibbes suggest to me as essential That I should recall to your Memory things which can only be known to you and me, to convince you of my Identity. I don’t think it needful, My Dear Mother, although I send them, namely, the Brown Mark on my side and the Card Case at Brighton . . .

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Much was later made of the ‘Brown Mark’ and of the ‘Card Case’ but in the meantime, Castro and Gibbes hoped it would be enough. Tom advised the Dowager that he made up his mind to face the sea and take up his proper position and title.

To do that, he would need some money. ‘The Passage Money and other expences,’ he wrote, ‘would be over Two hundred pound . . .’

The rest of the letter has not Dowager Lady Tichborne survived but its intent was clear; the money for Tom’s homecoming would have to come from the woman he claimed as his mother.

Now, with this letter on the way to the Dowager Lady Tichborne in Paris, and others flying back and forth between Gibbes and Cubitt as they jockeyed for a share of the rewards, the man who called himself Tom Castro could do little but wait.

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CHAPTER 2

Lady Mabella’s Curse he first thing of note about the House of Tichborne was its very ancientness. The family could trace back its noble bloodline to Anglo-Saxon times when its dynasty began on the banks of a little river known as Ticceburnam – or Itchen Stream in what is now Hampshire. After the Norman Conquest, the Saxon name evolved into ‘de Tichbyrna’, then simply ‘Tichborne’. As the years passed, villages grew up around the family home and the devoutlyCatholic Tichbornes became lords of an estate that carried great agricultural wealth and a minor title, the baronetcy of Tichborne Park, which was handed from father to son, or uncle to nephew, for generations.

The second thing of interest about the family was the fact that it had laboured under a curse dating back deep into its medieval past. It was in the mid-12th century that Lady Mabella de Tichbyrna laid down the curse with the best of intentions and potentially the worst of consequences. It started when the deeply pious Lady Mabella became increasingly distressed about the plight of the poor on the family estate.

Seeing it as her Christian duty, she pressured her husband, the gruff and cynical Crusader knight, Sir Roger, to agree to an annual distribution of food to the peasants.

Sir Roger had little empathy for the poor and even less interest in giving up some of his hard-earned wealth to help them, but as Lady Mabella’s health worsened she finally convinced him to agree. Legend has it that he did so, on condition that the food to be donated must be grown on an

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area of land that Lady Mabella could encircle while a torch burned down in a fireplace. In some versions of this story, Lady Mabella had to carry the torch. Sir Roger, it seemed, had a cruel sense of charity.

But Lady Mabella was made of better stuff. Even though she was dying from a wasting disease she managed to crawl around a 23-acre section of the Tichborne estate before the torch spluttered out. Mean-spirited Sir Roger had little choice but to deliver on his promise and each year on Lady Day in March, the family handed out gifts of flour to the needy on the estate. Known as the ‘Tichborne Dole’, the tradition continues today and the parcel of land circled by the kindly Lady Mabella is known as ‘The Crawls’.

Lady Mabella died soon after completing her crawl.

However, she had known better than to trust miserly Sir Roger to keep his word and on her deathbed, she delivered a curse on the family.

If for any reason the Dole was discontinued, the Tichborne home would collapse and the family would have seven sons who would have seven daughters. After that, the House of Tichborne would fall. Suitably warned, the family continued the annual Dole until Lady Day in 1796 when gypsies, vagabonds and ne’er do wells overwhelmed the handout and caused mayhem. Under this pressure, the Dole was cancelled.

At that time, the baronet was Sir Henry Tichborne, the proud father of seven sons and three daughters. In 1879, the oldest son, another Henry, became the eighth baronet. He went on to have seven children – all daughters. Then, in an alarming turn of events in 1803, decaying timbers caused a corner of the ancestral home, Tichborne House, to collapse into a pile of rubble. To the superstitious, Lady Mabella’s curse was coming true.

The baronetcy then passed to Henry’s younger brother, Edward. At first, things looked up for Edward. In 1826,

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he had inherited the wealth and estates of a distant cousin, Elizabeth Doughty, on the condition that Edward take her name in the hope that he would have a son and continue the Doughty line. Edward eagerly accepted the offer and with his wife, Katherine, he moved into the Doughty seat, Upton House at Poole, with a new name and an improved bank balance.

But when Edward Doughty-Tichborne’s only son died in 1835 at the age of 6, it seemed the Tichborne Curse was exacting its cruel toll at last. The Dole was hurriedly re-instated but it was too late. The family would soon face another threat even greater than Lady Mabella’s curse. It presented itself not through Edward’s line, but through that of his brother James, and it came perilously close to destroying the House of Tichborne.

For James’s wife, the beautiful French-born Henriette Felicite ((accents)), the Tichborne Curse had little to do with a medieval legend and everything to do with the Tichbornes themselves. She could not stand them, and they detested her.

Her marriage to James was not one made in heaven.

Twenty-three years older than Henriette, James had been infatuated with the Parisian beauty and they had rushed into the marriage in 1827. Both soon regretted it. The illegitimate daughter of an Englishman named Seymour, Henriette did not like cold, uncultured England and refused to live at Tichborne House. Instead, she made James reside with her at luxurious apartments in Paris where the unhappy couple fought enthusiastically while still managing to produce a son, Roger, in 1829, followed by two daughters who died in infancy. Their second son, Alfred, was born in 1839.

Rather sickly as a child, Roger was thin and delicate. His mother insisted on clothing him until the age of 12 in loose-

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