Lewis Glyn the barrister, whom Kerr hated to see come into his court, once got very much the better of the learned Commissioner. Glyn, in addressing the court, had indulged in a French expression.
“Talk the Queen’s English, Misther Glyn. We don’t want anny of your bad French in this coort,” snapped out the Commissioner.
“I beg your Honour’s pardon, but I thought that by this time the court had become so accustomed to strange dialects that one more or less would not matter,” answered Glyn sweetly.
But though rude and brusque in the extreme, Kerr was a sound lawyer and a strong Judge. It must be recalled to his credit, also, that he was invariably the champion of the poor and oppressed who appeared before him. He was down on usurers, and his constant attacks on the immunity of those plunderers of the poor, under the law as it existed, did much to hasten the reform in the legislature—small as it is—under which money-lenders now ply their calling.
Undoubtedly the most colossal joker of my time was that huge mountain of flesh who came from the antipodes to claim the title and estates of the Tichborne family. When that obese impostor copied from Miss Braddon’s novel the inspiring sentence, “Them as has money and no branes was made for them as has branes and no money,” he declared the spirit in which he played the game. He must have enjoyed the joke immensely—while it lasted. And it lasted long enough, unfortunately, to ruin the twelve jurymen who sat for the greater part of a year on the second trial.
Whether the Claimant was really Arthur Orton or Castro I never troubled myself to determine. That he was not Tichborne, or, indeed, a gentleman of any degree whatever, I satisfied myself at my first interview with him. It was during the trial before the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, and I was as yet a novice in Fleet Street. Mr. G. W. Whalley, the eccentric Member for Peterborough, was an acquaintance of mine, and he believed that were I to meet the Claimant I would be convinced that he was Roger Tichborne, and that I would do my little utmost for him on the Press. Whalley was a tremendous Protestant, anti-Ritualist, and “no Popery” man, and I believe that he espoused the cause of the Wapping butcher from Wagga-Wagga, not because he was in any degree attracted by him but because he believed him to be the victim of a gigantic Jesuitical intrigue in which Parliament, the Judicial Bench, and the British Press, were all concerned to keep the man out of his own.
Whalley took me to visit his adipose protégé in a street in Pimlico. I think it was called Bessborough Street; I recollect that it was a continuation of Tachbrook Street. Here “Sir Roger” had installed Miss Norrie Jordan, a member of the chorus at the Globe Theatre, in control of his domestic arrangements, “Lady Tichborne” being provided for elsewhere. This was quite characteristic of the Claimant. He had not the slightest affection for Miss Jordan, and appeared to feel uncomfortable in her presence. But it was the fashion for gentlemen of title to run “side-shows,” as they were called; and “Sir Roger” was determined to stand by his order, and show himself a man sensitive to the slightest movements of Society, however personally unpleasant to himself the experiments involved might be.
My subsequent meetings with the fellow proved to me that the sum of his so-called accomplishments might be set down in a line or two. He had an unbounded capacity for swallowing gin-and-soda; he had a good eye and a steady hand as a pigeon-shot; and he possessed an unrivalled faculty for exploiting “mugs.” In dealing with possible subscribers to the Tichborne “stock,” it was a favourite ruse of his to ask the intended victim to try on the Claimant’s gloves. This trial proved that the hands of the Claimant were small, whereas those of Orton were said to have been large. When the “unfortunate nobleman” went to Dartmoor to “languish” for a term of years, it was a great relief to the Press and an infinite advantage to the community at large.
He had indeed proved himself the very Prince of Jokers, but his joke had begun to pall.