Roger Tichborne, heir to a baronetcy and one of the largest Catholic fortunes in England, sailed from Rio de Janeiro in April 1854 aboard the Bella, which was lost with all hands.
His mother refused to accept it. Lady Tichborne placed advertisements in newspapers around the world for years, offering a reward for information about her son, who she was certain had survived.
In 1866 a butcher in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, named Thomas Castro responded. Lady Tichborne, without meeting him, sent money for his passage.
The differences were not marginal. Roger Tichborne had been slight — around nine stone — educated in France, and spoke French as a first language, with tattoos on his arm and a distinctive feature of his anatomy noted by the family doctor. The Claimant weighed over twenty stone, spoke no French at all, had no tattoos, and did not have the anatomical feature. He knew almost nothing about Roger's schooling or his regiment. He was, on the evidence eventually assembled, Arthur Orton, a butcher's son from Wapping.
Lady Tichborne met him in a darkened room in Paris in January 1867 and identified him as her son. She maintained the identification until her death.
Once she had, the case became almost impossible to resolve, because her identification was the primary evidence and everything else was argument. Several family servants and an old family solicitor supported him. Others did not.
Two mechanisms sustained it for a decade.
The first is what chapter 134 describes: a bereaved parent's recognition system operating against discrepancy detection, with grief supplying the motivation. Her certainty was genuine and it did not waver.
The second is why it survived her, and it is the more interesting one. The Claimant became a popular cause. Working-class Britain read the case as the aristocracy and the courts conspiring to deny a man his birthright, and Tichborne demonstrations, newspapers and defense funds proliferated. Belief in the Claimant tracked class identity far more closely than it tracked evidence — which is Tajfel's finding from chapter 12 operating on a question of fact. His supporters were not evaluating the tattoos.
The civil trial ran from 1871 to 1872 and collapsed when the Claimant's counsel withdrew. The criminal trial for perjury ran 188 days, one of the longest in English legal history, and produced a conviction in February 1874 and a sentence of fourteen years' hard labor.
He served ten, was released, toured in music halls as himself, confessed in a newspaper for money in 1895, retracted, and died in poverty in 1898. He was buried, by permission of the family, with a coffin plate reading Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne.