The Great Cat Massacre (3 page)

On the other hand, Shelley’s friend Byron wrote:

Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne was due to become Sir Roger Doughty-Tichborne, baronet, upon the demise
of his father in 1862. The only barrier to his assumption of the title was that he was dead too. Still, that didn’t prevent him from claiming it. Or, to be more precise, it didn’t prevent an obese butcher from the Australian outback claiming it, and demanding the inheritance.

Roger had rather shot himself in the foot a decade beforehand when he decided his cousin, Katherine, was the girl for him. But, as in a tale by Shakespeare, the two families were less than overjoyed with the prospect. There was nothing wrong with cousins marrying – a little bit of ‘keeping it in the family’ was quite normal with the aristocracy and most of the royals were so inbred it was a surprise when one turned out to look almost normal – it was the fact that he was usually so drunk he could hardly see.

In 1852 Roger therefore sold his army commission and went travelling in the Americas until he had dried out enough to stand up unaided, at which point his uncle and aunt might relent and hand over their offspring. On his travels, he saw all the normal sights – the Andes, Rio – and was on his way to Jamaica in 1854 when his ship sank to the bottom of the sea.

News reached Britain and he was legally declared dead. But his excitable French mother, Henriette Felicite, refused to believe he was gone.

When his father fell off the twig in 1862, the heir presumptive to his title became Roger’s little brother, Alfred, who spent money like it was going out of fashion and nearly bankrupted himself. But Henriette Felicite, convinced for no apparent reason that her son was still
breathing, began placing adverts in newspapers across the globe, asking for news of him.

In 1865 the reply came from a lawyer in New South Wales. Her son was alive and well – and masquerading as a fat butcher in Wagga Wagga. His name was now Tomas Castro.

Castro was not the natural choice as the alter ego of Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne. Roger had been slim, whereas Tomas weighed 27 stone. Having lived in France until he was 16, Roger had spoken fluent French, whereas Tomas had mysteriously forgotten every word. Interestingly, Roger’s mother had brought him up in France because he had a rare genital malformation and in France boys were dressed in girls’ clothes until the age of five so it was felt that wearing knickerbockers would give his nether regions more space to develop normally. This is more important to the story than you might think.

Castro’s genitals were the ace up his sleeve – because they were coincidentally misshapen in the way that Roger’s had been. Reports of his organ therefore had Henriette Felicite convinced and she sent Castro the money to return to her bosom. When he arrived, Castro ‘revealed’ that after being shipwrecked he had been rescued by a passing ship bound for Australia. On arrival, he had decided to discard his comfortable life as a member of the aristocracy to start a new one as a petty criminal. From there, he worked his way up to butchery, so he informed her.

Henriette Felicite was so overjoyed that her son had returned to her that she overlooked the fact that he was
now an obese tradesman with a criminal record. In the Paris hotel where she met him, she ‘recognised’ him instantly – which must have come as a surprise to anyone else there who had ever clapped eyes on Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne and was now presented with a man who looked as if he had eaten a town.

Her family, in fact, pointed out that the man in front of them was no more Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne than she was. Nonsense, she told them, as she handed him £1,000 – worth perhaps £100,000 today – and promised the same sum each year.

It was only after she too died, in 1868, that things got a bit tricky for the man who was to become known as the Tichborne Claimant. The family, knowing he was a ringer, began civil legal action to strip him of the wealth he had got his ham-like hands on. It became the trial of the decade, lasting nearly a year and calling more than 350 witnesses, some attesting that this was the Roger they had known since childhood, others saying if he was Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne they were chimpanzees.

During the trial, more facts began to emerge that cast doubt on the Claimant’s case. His first act upon arrival in England, for instance, had been to visit Wapping in east London and enquire about a local family by the name of Orton. It didn’t take a genius to connect this to the fact that a former employee in Australia had identified him as one Arthur Orton. In addition, his English ex-girlfriend confirmed he was Arthur Orton and in Chile a young sailor by that name was identified.

The Claimant explained that he knew Arthur Orton
because they had worked together and his former employee and ex-girlfriend must be bizarrely confused. Orton, he said, was a criminal and had disappeared.

What ultimately sank the case, however, was the testimony of Lord Bellow, an old school chum of Roger’s. He testified that when they were at school he had tattooed Roger’s thigh. The lack of such a mark scuppered the Claimant’s case.

From then on, it was a criminal matter. In 1873, Arthur Orton was tried for perjury – again the trial lasted ten months and the judge spent four weeks simply summing up the case. The defendant – a claimant no more – became a convict sentenced to 14 years of hard labour. And his barrister was disbarred for annoying the judge.

The case affected the whole of England. It became a cause célèbre as the increasingly confident and vocal middle classes saw it as a battle against the toffs who were banding together to keep all the wealth to themselves. They believed poor Roger was being denied the family silver just because he couldn’t remember which knife to eat peas with and the courts were in on it, denying ordinary working men justice in the face of money and influence. Incredibly, the Claimant’s cause became the greatest mass political movement since the Chartists had demanded universal male suffrage in the 1840s and Britain didn’t see such a movement again until the formation of the Labour Party, around the turn of the century. Henriette Felicite’s mistake had changed the political landscape.

Orton was released after ten years. He attempted to
make a living on the music hall circuit but died in poverty on April Fool’s Day, 1898. Five thousand mourners attended his funeral. By permission of the Tichborne family, his grave was marked: ‘Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne’.

Franz Muller, a German tailor living in Britain, was a murderer. But not just any murderer, he was a Moriarty-like master criminal who had got away with it. Or so he thought…

Just before 10pm on 9 July 1864, a City clerk, Thomas Briggs, was in a first-class carriage on his way back to his home in Hackney, east London. Just after 10pm, as his train steamed through London, things became very Agatha Christie-like. A lady in a neighbouring carriage was understandably perturbed to notice blood flying through the open window and spattering her dress. Another passenger heard ‘a horrid howling’ but presumed it was a dog.

When the train arrived at Hackney Wick station, two young clerks entered an empty first-class carriage. They noticed that the seats were wet, red and sticky in a worrying way; they spotted a silver-topped cane, a black leather bag and a battered black beaver hat in the carriage too.

The clerks raised the alarm, the train was halted and the police called. It wasn’t long before the driver of a nearby train complained about a hump on the tracks that was looking a bit corpsey.

In fact, Thomas Briggs was still just about alive. His son
was sent for, and identified all the items in the carriage as belonging to his father. Except for the hat. His father’s hat, he said, was very special. It was a very tall top hat made by a city hatter. His father wouldn’t be seen dead in a black beaver, he insisted – especially not one that looked as if someone had sat on it. Also missing were his father’s gold watch and chain.

Briggs died the next day, setting the case in history as Britain’s first rail-borne murder. The nation was shocked that such a thing could take place on the new method of transport that was being hailed as a modern wonder. ‘Who is safe?’ asked the
Telegraph
. ‘It would be impossible to imagine circumstances of greater apparent security than those which seemed to surround Mr Briggs. Well known – expected at home. Travelling First Class … If we can be murdered thus we may be slain in our pew at church, or assassinated at our dinner table.’

Dinner-table-based assassination thus became a worry for all those who had such tables, and descriptions of Mr Briggs’s unusual topper were circulated far and wide, supplemented by an offer of £300 – around £25,000 today – for hat-related information.

Soon there was a suspect. A Mr Death informed the police that a man had come into his jeweller’s shop and asked for a valuation on a gold watch chain. The man had been disappointed by the figure but accepted it and exchanged it for another chain, which was put in a small cardboard box. The man had had a German accent.

Foreigners, it seemed, were going around murdering hat-wearing City clerks in first-class carriages for
substandard watch chains, and understandably the press went ballistic. Reading one such report, a taxi driver, John Matthews, remembered a box marked ‘Death’, which his daughter had been given by a family friend, Franz Muller. And Muller had possessed a hat that fitted the description of the beaver. Matthews gave a full description of the 25-year-old killer; he also happened to have Muller’s address and photograph. Unfortunately, Muller had set sail for America four days beforehand – he had apparently wanted to go for some time, but had suddenly found the money to buy a ticket the day after Briggs was killed.

The game afoot, the police rushed to Muller’s lodgings, where his former landlords said yes, that was his hat (they remembered because foreigners ‘wore them funny’).

Scotland Yard was on the trail and sent three detectives, Matthews and Death to New York on a fast boat to apprehend Muller. Having arrived two weeks before their quarry – how they amused themselves during that time is unknown – they seized Muller. They knew him for certain because he was wearing Briggs’s topper, which he had cut down in an attempt to disguise its identity. He was taken straight back to Britain.

His subsequent trial at the Old Bailey, which began on 27 October, must go down in history as the most
hat-obsessed
murder trial in history. Much of the evidence was about hats and there were arguments as to how high the top hat should be and whether Muller would have had the skill to amend its height. The defence declared it was all piffle – Matthews had falsely accused Muller for the reward
money and the murder must have taken two men to carry out, hat or no hat. They also argued the mass of hysterical newspaper stories meant a fair trial was impossible. In an unusual decision, the judge said that all the media reports and accusations against Muller had actually helped matters because they had acquainted the jury with the case – i.e. they had saved time on all that dreary presentation of evidence in the court.

The jury took a quarter of an hour to convict Muller. His last words before he was publicly hanged were ‘
Ich habe es getan’
– ‘I did it’.

The hanging was such a popular affair, with more than 50,000 people coming to see it (many, ironically, arriving by special train services laid on by the railway companies due to popular demand), that there were constant drunken fights and robberies among the spectators – a shameful sight which resulted in the political pressure that ended public executions four years later. The murder itself also resulted in the invention of the emergency communication cord that train passengers could pull to slam on the brakes, and the introduction of windows between carriages, which were named ‘Muller lights’.

Muller’s name lived on in the world of fashion too. As a result of accidentally picking up the wrong hat when he fled the scene of his crime, he started a national trend among young men for shortened toppers, which were known as ‘Muller cut-downs’. If you buy a top hat now, it’s almost certainly styled on Franz Muller’s.

The sex lives of MPs never cease to amaze the British public and have been entertaining us for a very long time. Charles Dilke MP led the way in the Victorian era – his wife apparently put up with him conducting affairs but things went much more public than they had previously when his sister-in-law’s sister, Virginia Crawford, tearfully confessed to her husband that Dilke, the leading light of the Liberal Party, had ‘ruined’ her when she was a nineteen-year-old new bride, and that they had continued their affair for two years. Not only that, but he had taught her ‘every French vice’ and they had once had a threesome with the maid. What the maid had thought of it all she did not divulge.

Her husband, Donald Crawford MP, sued her for divorce and cited Dilke as a co-respondent. The case became terribly exciting – especially when Dilke claimed that he had never had an affair with Virginia, but he was conducting one with her mother. At the end of the trial, the judge gave one of the oddest decisions in English legal history – that Virginia had had an affair with Dilke, but there was no evidence that he had had one with her. As the public stood pondering this for a while, Dilke made a very foolish decision: he announced that he was going to sue to clear his name from the slur that he was the sort of man who would have an affair with his brother’s wife’s sister, when he was merely the sort of man to have an affair with his brother’s wife’s mother.

But he blundered in the legal application. Instead of
bringing the case himself, he petitioned the Queen’s proctor to reopen the original case. This, ruled the judge, meant that he was not actually a party to the trial, merely a witness. So, throughout the week-long case, he was only allowed to sit mute while all sorts of allegations were made about him, and he was not allowed to dispute them one iota. His only chance to speak was when cross-examined about exactly what he had done with whom and where. He lost the case and Gladstone, who had been expected to name Dilke in the forthcoming Cabinet, made a single mark against his name: ‘unavailable’. The effect was
far-reaching.
Dilke had been the foremost of his generation in the Liberals. Without his leadership, the party ran out of steam and imploded, ensuring Tory governments for many years.