QI The Book of the Dead

as the most successful impostor of all time.

     
    A single change of identity was enough to last Margaret Bulkley for a lifetime, but Ignácz Trebitsch Lincoln (1879–1943) seems to have suffered from multiple personality disorder. He was variously an actor, arms dealer, post-office worker, oil speculator, British Liberal MP, vicar and German spy. His spiritual loyalties were even looser than those of Titus Oates, veering from Judaism to Presbyterianism, working as an Anglican missionary and finally ending up as a Buddhist monk. Like Oates, he combined a desperate desire for recognition with a breathtaking dishonesty. Unlike Oates, he was also highly intelligent and immensely likeable.
    Ignácz Trebitsch was born in the small town of Paks in central Hungary, one of at least fourteen children. The scant attention he received no doubt explains much of his future behaviour. In 1895, his family moved to Budapest and the sixteen-year-old Trebitsch enrolled at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Dramatic Art. He lied to get in and dropped out after a year. Falsehood and inability to stick to one course were to be the hallmarks of his career. At eighteen, pursued by the police for stealing a goldwatch, Trebitsch fled abroad. He spent almost no time in his homeland again. As his biographer Bernard Wasserstein put it: ‘Travel for Trebitsch was not a source of amusement or of intellectual enrichment; it was a disease.’
    In London, he met the Reverend Lypshytz of the Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews. Trebitsch had been raised as an Orthodox Jew and was woefully short of cash, so he knew at once what to do. The prospect of a regular income as a Presbyterian missionary was easily enough to induce him to convert to Christianity. Sent to Montreal in Canada, he squandered large amounts of the society’s money without denting the religious persuasion of anyone. In 1901 he married Margarethe Kahlor, the daughter of a German sea captain, and brought her back to England where she had four sons and he spent her inheritance. He served briefly an Anglican curate in Appledore in Kent – just 40 miles from Bobbing where the Rev. Oates had enraged his flock – adding the word ‘Lincoln’ to his name by deed poll to make himself sound more English. It was one of over a dozen names he was to use in his career.
    In 1904 I. T. T. Lincoln, as he now styled himself, failed the exams for the priesthood and started casting around for gainful employment. His eye fell on Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, Quaker philanthropist, Liberal grandee and confectionery magnate. Expertly charming his way into Rowntree’s affections, Trebitsch Lincoln got himself appointed as his research assistant for a book he was planning on poverty in Belgium. The work involved frequent visits to the Continent and the linguistically gifted Trebitsch was ideal. He set to the task with alacrity, using Rowntree’s name, money and access to British embassies around Europe to live life to the full, and supplementing his alreadygenerous income (or so he later claimed) by moonlighting as a German double agent.
    The innocent Rowntree was impressed by his energy and it occurred to him he was just the sort of person Britain needed as an MP. He used his influence with the Liberal Party to take him on as candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Darlington: the only Hungarian citizen ever to be formally adopted by a major British political party. Hurriedly securing British naturalisation, Mr Ignatius Lincoln stood in the general election of January 1910. Endorsed by his fellow Liberals Churchill and Lloyd George, and delivering his speeches in a thick Hungarian accent, he ridiculed his opponent’s trade policy by claiming it was forcing Germans to eat their own dogs. To everybody’s amazement, he won. Though only by the slender margin of twenty-nine votes, it was an astounding achievement: the sitting Unionist MP was Herbert Pike Pease, a prominent local figure whose family had founded the Stockton and Darlington railway and who basically owned the town. Lincoln’s victory earned him a cartoon in Punch . He took his seat in the House but, as MPs were unpaid at the time, he was soon in considerable debt. When a second general election was called in December, he stood down, pleading insolvency.
    This freed him up to concentrate on a more straightforward career as a fraudster. With financial backing from the unsuspecting Rowntree, he floated a series of public