Roddy Lumsden Reviews: Fakers, Forgers & Phoneys

The obituaries which followed the recent death of Magnus Magnusson made much of the wide scope of his talents: as broadcaster, editor, journalist, translator and conservationist, as well as his most public entity as an unlikely, quietly charismatic television personality. From the early 60s onwards, Magnusson wrote around 20 books, while editing and translating many others.

One aspect of his character foregrounded in the tributes was the assiduous and thorough approach he brought to all his work, no doubt instilled in him during an early career in journalism, much of it in an editorial capacity. At heart, though, Magnusson was a social historian and folklorist, and the latest of his popular history books, Fakers, Forgers & Phoneys (now in paperback from Mainstream) was one of his last main projects.

This book offers the tales of a parcel of rogues and must have seemed a pleasant assignment for Magnusson after the massive task of his previous book, a 750 page history of Scotland, yet the book's compass of research is impressive, Magnusson often having travelled to the scenes of the deceptions to get a feel for the stories. Several books have already covered this ground, and what makes this selection different is that Magnusson sticks to just sixteen stories of hoaxes and scams, and retells them at length, adding nuances and context to flesh out the stories found in grubwork books on the subject.

The sixteen tales are split equally between archaeological, literary, artistic and personal deceptions. They are also split between famous cases (The Tichborne Claimant, the precocious Chatterton, Tom Keating's fake paintings, which later became ironically collectible) and lesser known ones. The most fascinating of these to me is the story of von Kempelen, an 18^th century inventor who was challenged by his patron, the empress Maria Theresa, to create an amazing automaton. The resulting machine, a box of tricks housing a chess-playing mannequin which became known as The Turk, remained a sensation for seven decades, latterly with its second main owner Maelzel in the US, where, in 1854, the machine burned away in a fire, its clever secrets having been at last exposed, its game with Napoleon (who tried to fox it with illegal moves) a distant memory.

Among the personal deceits on offer here are the tales of George Psalmanazar, a Frenchman who passed himself off as an exotic foreigner and became a sensation, and Ellen Craft, a light-skinned Southern slave who managed to transport herself and her husband into safer territory in the North (and later to England) by posing as a white man travelling with his slave. Magnusson's retelling of the celebrated 'Tichborne Claimant' story is the most extensive piece here and, though I'd read on the case before, the social and legal context here is engrossing.

That Arthur Orton, a burly East End butcher, brought Victorian society to a stop, and himself to a sorry end, is still quite inconceivable. Orton convinced many he was the lost, shipwrecked aristocrat Roger Tichborne, who was shorter, blonder, spoke with a strong French accent and had a tattoo. Sensing a one-over on the upper classes, ordinary Londoners lapped up the story and helped send the case to two unfeasibly long trials which Orton was doomed to lose, not least due to his alcoholic brother who was his spitting image and who keenly milked all sides for beer money.

Hindsight makes us self-satisfied in reading these tales, of course, and it is curious that a few of them still have loose threads. Elsewhere, the book looks at the case of archaeological finds at Glozel in France. Though most of the 'prehistoric' artifacts which appeared there in the 1920s have long been considered fakes (and the real finds dated as from far later than claimed), Magnusson met the main protagonist, now in his 90s, who still maintains no deception occurred, and the aged Frenchman has his supporters in the archaeological community.

It is still possible that we will change our minds about such cases. In the chapter on Chatterton, Magnusson relates the tale of the young poet and swindler, who supposedly killed himself in the face of poverty, in the light of recent evidence which suggests the overdose was accidental, and that the poet's emaciated state was due to the drugs he was taking to keep him awake so he could continue with his manic output, so in demand was the work of his various alter egos. Overall, Fakers, Forgers & Phoneys, though not Magnusson's most important work, is one of his most enjoyable enterprises, testament to his skills as a popular history writer, and a fine addition to the literature on notorious scams and hoaxes.