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Perhaps to make a virtue of necessity, Castro gave to Cator a sealed envelope, bearing outside the words, "To be open when at sea," and inside a note which ran as follows: "WAGGA-WAGGA, April 2nd, 1866. Mr.
In the course of it we came to a town whose odd name was famous all over the world a quarter of a century ago Wagga-Wagga. This was because the Tichborne Claimant had kept a butcher-shop there.
When he got out of prison he went to New York and kept a whisky saloon in the Bowery for a time, then disappeared from view. He always claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne until death called for him. This was but a few months ago not very much short of a generation since he left Wagga-Wagga to go and possess himself of his estates.
It happened that one Cator, a Wagga-Wagga friend of the Claimant, whose letters show him to have been a coarse-minded and illiterate man, was leaving for England shortly before the time that Castro had determined to embark. Whether invited or not Cator was not unlikely to favour his friend with a visit in the new and flourishing condition which appeared to await him in that country.
"At two in the morning, at Wagga-Wagga, of Tichborne fame, they fairly bombarded my carriage shouting, 'General Booth, won't you speak to us? Won't you come out? But I thought you could really have too much of a good thing.
Foster's widow had specimens of Arthur Orton's writing, and other mementoes of his two years' service among them, and she unhesitatingly identified a portrait of the Claimant as that of the same man. Among other witnesses, a farmer named Hopwood deposed that he had known Arthur Orton at Boisdale under that name, and again at Wagga-Wagga under his assumed name of Thomas Castro.
Gibbes, an attorney at the little town of Wagga-Wagga, two hundred miles inland from Sydney, had, he said, found the real Roger living "in a humble station of life," and under an assumed name. Again money was wanted. Then Gibbes, apparently determined to steal a march on Cubitt, wrote directly to the credulous lady, and there was much correspondence between them.
In the course of it we came to a town whose odd name was famous all over the world a quarter of a century ago Wagga-Wagga. This was because the Tichborne Claimant had kept a butcher-shop there.
One of his earliest steps was to take into his service the old black man Bogle, and pay the passage-money both of himself and his son to Europe with him. Certain relics of Upton and of Tichborne which the Claimant forwarded to a banker at Wagga-Wagga from whom he was trying to obtain advances, were described by the Claimant himself as brought over by "my uncle Valet who is now living with me."
It was shortly after this period that it became known in Victoria and New South Wales that there was a man named Thomas Castro, living in Wagga-Wagga as a journeyman slaughter-man and butcher, who was going to England to lay claim to the baronetcy and estates of Tichborne.
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