A Wapping butcher from the Australian outback walked into a London courtroom and swore he was the missing heir to one of England's oldest baronetcies. His mother believed him.

Roger Tichborne drowned at sea in 1854, or so everyone assumed until a 25-stone Wagga Wagga butcher named Arthur Orton answered Lady Tichborne's newspaper ad and got a kiss on the forehead. The civil trial ran 102 days, the criminal trial another 188, and by the end the working class of England had a folk hero, a defense fund, and riots in his name. Wendell unpacks how a man who couldn't speak French convinced half a country he'd been to Stonyhurst. Drawn from the trial transcripts and the Pall Mall Gazette's day-by-day coverage.

The Footnote is a vøiddo studio production. Visit voiddo.com for more cool things.

The Footnote runs on cold coffee, old newspapers, and an unreasonable amount of time spent in archives nobody else visits. None of which pays. If the show is worth a few dollars a month to you, this is where you say so — and you’ll be personally funding a man’s refusal to get a normal hobby. Either way, thank you for listening. — Wendell

Some stories don’t fit the main show. A fraud too small for a full episode. A second swindle by the same con artist. A tangent about a forger I couldn’t stop reading about at two in the morning. That’s what the subscription is — bonus episodes, footnotes to the footnotes, and the occasional longer dig into a story that deserved more room than I gave it. Five dollars a month. It pays for the archive subscriptions that make the whole thing possible. You’re not buying content. You’re keeping a small, strange operation running. — Wendell

Support the show