My most recent on-the-bus reading was The Great Pretenders, by Jan Bondeson. In brief, it’s a collection of historic impostors–most of them con artists, but also a couple of accidental impostors who made no claims of their own but became the subject of conspiracy theories after their deaths.
The cases that caught my attention were two tales of purported lost heirs to 19th-century British peerages: The Tichborne Claimant and the Druce-Portland case.
(I first saw the word “claimant” on the spine of Mark Twain’s novel _The American Claimant_. I was a kid at the time, and not knowing what the word meant but seeing the resemblance to “lament” and “climate,” I got the notion that it was about a guy who complained about the weather. As it turns out, _The American Claimant_ is the book where Twain put all the weather in an appendix to obviate the need to mention it during the actual novel. Ah, the irony. It’s enough to make Alanis Morrissette screech unmelodically.)
Anyway. French-speaking, alcohol-abusing Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne was lost at sea in 1864. Years later, a guy turned up in Wagga Wagga, Australia claiming to be Sir Roger. Apparently in the intervening time he had forgotten how to speak French and increased in weight by over two hundred per cent. And yet the claimant–who later turned out to be a butcher named Arthur Orton–still managed to take his case to court. A *lot* of people believed he was Sir Roger. Some of these people were the same kind of people who these days believe the _National Enquirer_ is fine journalism. Some weren’t. Some were people who had known Sir Roger and were happy to testify that he and Arthur were the same guy.
The detail that gets me–the reason I’m writing this post–is the way our pal Arthur financed his lawsuit. He sold bonds. Seriously. For £20 you could buy a Tichborne Bond with the promise that, once “Sir Roger” had his fortune, you’d get a fivefold return on your investment.
And people *bought* them. They bought *£40,000* worth. And the damndest part was that it was apparently legal. It must have been, because a few decades later it happened *again*.
The fifth Duke of Portland (a pathological recluse and a fascinating subject in himself) died in 1879. Years later a woman named Anna Maria Druce claimed that her late husband, Thomas Charles Druce, had been the Duke wearing an unconvincing fake beard, and that her son was therefore the Portland heir.
Mrs. Druce wasn’t the con artist that Arthur Orton was. Actually, she appears to have been genuinely nuts. It’s been just a couple of days since I read Bondeson’s book and already her story is a crazy blur. At one point she claimed that the Duke had for some reason disguised himself as a homeopath named “Dr. Harms” and gotten himself checked into an asylum by pretending to be a dancing bear.
(I badly want to find out more about this thing. Unfortunately, I found just one in-print book about the case–The Disappearing Duke by Andrew Crofts and Tom Freeman-Keel–and on examination it turned out to be worthless… completely unsourced, and full of dialogue which as far as I could tell the authors invented from what’s usually referred to as whole cloth but which in this case probably didn’t even have all its threads.)
Anyway, at one point Mrs. Druce published a pamphlet called _The Great Druce-Portland_ mystery which ended with an invitation to buy “Druce bonds” entitling the bearers to shares in the Portland estate. A few years later another Druce heir turned up–from Australia again, no less–with an improvement: he formed a limited liability company for the sole purpose of suing to claim the Portland fortune.
Passing yourself off as the heir to a fortune takes gall. Taking your purported family to court to get your hands on takes *unmitigated* gall. Forming a startup company to sell shares in the fortune to finance the legal campaign to take your purported family to court takes gall, unmitigated gall, and chutzpah. You just don’t get this class of con artist anymore.