John Thom's Sir William Farce

By Keith Bamler Category: Borrowed Identities 2nd July 2026

Picture a man who walks into a Kent village wearing a title like it was a cape, speaks with the confidence of a lord, and gets people to follow him into a wood with pitchforks and muskets. That man was John Nichols Thom, who in 1838 began calling himself Sir William Courtenay. He sounded like a promise. The locals treated him like summat different, as if a proper life might suddenly be on offer.

Thom gathered a small band of labourers and vagrants who, charmed or desperate, believed his talk. Eyup, it was a curious mix of hope and hunger. They fed him, offered him a cuppa, passed him a butty, and listened while he spun plans that smelled of country justice and distant palaces. For some he was champion. For others he was a warm un worth a pound of trouble.

Matters moved from odd to deadly on a spring day at Bossenden Wood. Armed constables and soldiers arrived to break up what the authorities called a disturbance. Shots were fired. Thom and several of his followers fell. The man who had borrowed a noble name died in the melee. The county newspapers made a meal of it. The magistrates made an example. The poor folk were left with more grief than answers.

The truth about Thom's motives slips about like oil on a puddle. He had a past of odd claims and bad luck. People called him a rogue, a seer, a preacher, a wazzock. Officials called him an impostor. History calls it a nasty episode where identity, class and desperate belief collided and left bodies behind.

I have a soft spot for the absurdly ambitious. Years ago I met a bloke who tried to sell me a map to buried treasure he swore he found in a dream. This felt similar in scale and sense. Folk who latch onto borrowed names are often trying to lurch out of the muck. Thom's tale is grim because the lurch ended with gunfire. The record stays plain. A man claimed a title, gathered followers, and a shabby rebellion ended with him dead in a wood.