Arthur Orton

Arthur Orton (20 March 1834 – 1 April 1898), the son of a London butcher, went to sea as a boy, spent a year in Chile, and worked as a butcher and for squatters in Australia in the middle-to-late 1850s. He has generally been identified by legal historians and commentators as the "Tichborne Claimant", who in two celebrated court cases both fascinated and shocked Victorian society in the 1860s and 1870s.

In 1866 Thomas Castro, a butcher from Wagga Wagga in Australia, claimed to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to the Tichborne estates and baronetcy who had been declared lost at sea in 1854. During the protracted court proceedings that followed Castro's claim, evidence was produced that Castro might in fact be Arthur Orton, attempting to secure the Tichborne fortunes by imposture. The verdict of the jury in Regina versus Castro (1873–74) was that Castro was not Roger Tichborne, and that he was Arthur Orton. He was sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment for perjury. After his release he lived in great poverty, still insisting that he was Tichborne. In 1895 he confessed to being Orton, but retracted almost immediately. He died in 1898; the Tichborne family allowed a card bearing the names "Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne" to be placed on the coffin.

Commentators have generally concurred with the court's verdict that the Claimant was Orton, but some 20th-century analysts have raised uncertainties about this accepted view, and have suggested that although the Orton identity remains the most likely, a lingering doubt remains.

Orton was born at Wapping, London, the son of George Orton, a butcher and purveyor of ships' stores. He left school early and was employed in his father's shop. In 1849, he was apprenticed to a Captain Brooks of the ship Ocean. The ship sailed to South America and in June 1849 Orton deserted and went to the small Chilean country town of Melipilla. He stayed in Chile for a year and seven months and befriended the Castro family. Orton then went back to London as an ordinary seaman.

In November 1852 he sailed for Tasmania aboard the Middleton and arrived at Hobart in May 1853. There, Orton worked for several butchers. There is some evidence he was a heavy drinker; and for minor trade malpractices, he appeared before magistrates.The Hobart Mercury of 1 Aug 1855 reports on the case of 'Fane v. Orton' in the Mayor's Court in which the City Surveyor brought a charge of 'offering for sale...unwholsome meat, unfit for human food' against 'Arthur Orton, butcher, Macquarie-street' to which Orton pleaded guilty. In October 1855, Orton appeared on a charge of obtaining money under false pretences brought by Frederick Dight, after Orton had been a witness against Dight in an earlier Supreme Court trial, but the case was dismissed.

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