Douglas Woodruff (1897–1978)

1520 The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Mystery, by Douglas Woodruff (read 11 June 1979) (Book of the Year) This is a most intriguing book. It tells most thoroughly and interestingly of the effort to claim the Tichborne estates, and tells of the two fantastically long trials involved. The incongruities of the trial are surely bizarre. Thirty day opening statements, 30 days to give instructions, just unbelievable to a lawyer. I incline to feel that the plaintiff in the first trial was Roger Tichborne! I vacillated all through the book. Things against it: his complete forgetting of France, his utter lack of knowledge re his time at Stonyhurst, the contrast in literacy between the letters of the undoubted Roger and the letters of the early claimant, his odd visit to Wapping on Christmas Day 1866. Things for it: so much he knew, and the very fact that over a period of 17 years one forgets so selectively, the claim he seduced Lady Rodcliff, which he shouldn't have made and undoubtedly would not have made if it had not been true, and his attitude somehow consistent with what I feel the real Roger Tichborne was like. This has been a most readable and interesting book, and I have enjoyed it all. [I am surprised by my conclusion, since I now understand that it is extremely unlikely that the claimant was not a fraud.]… (more)