In popular culture, Dick Turpin was a dashing, handsome adventurer who stopped stage coaches on the highway and robbed gentlemen of their purses while displaying gallantry and courtesy to the ladies whose hearts he charmed.
In reality, he was a butcher with a pock-marked face who joined a gang of Essex criminals that graduated from deer poaching to housebreaking, robbery, violent assault and rape. After the gang was eventually broken up by the authorities and most of his accomplices hanged, Turpin turned to highway robbery. After he murdered Thomas Morris, servant to one of the Keepers of Epping Forest, a reward of £200 was offered for his capture.
In the summer of 1737, Turpin changed his name to John Palmer and moved to Yorkshire where he was arrested and charged with horse theft. (Liam Donnelly is exploring a theory that Turpin may have had family connections locally.) From his cell in York, Turpin wrote a letter to his sister’s husband in Hempstead but delivery was refused and the letter found its way to Saffron Walden post office, where James Smith – a former classmate of Turpin’s who had taught him to write – recognised the handwriting. Smith travelled to York and identified Turpin, who was hanged there in 1739. His body was buried in York but reputedly had to be recovered from bodysnatchers and re-buried in quicklime.
From the London Evening Post, 5-7 May 1737
Turpin is thought to have been born in the Bell Inn (now the Bluebell) in Hempstead, where his father – a butcher – was also the innkeeper. It is certain that he was baptised in St Andrew’s on 21 September 1705.
Testimony from James Smith at the trial suggests that Turpin had a rudimentary education and he appears to have followed his father into the butchery trade, which provided a useful association for the deer poaching Gregory Gang. In about 1725, Turpin married Elizabeth Millington and moved to Buckhurst Hill in Essex, where he opened a butcher’s shop.
The contrast between the reality and the popular myth had its origins in the Genuine History of the Life of Richard Turpin by Richard Bayes, published in 1739 to satisfy the public’s thirst for sensation about famous trials and executions. Yet more fictionalised accounts began to appear in the early 1800s and, in 1834, the Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth used the myth of Turpin’s 200 mile ride to York on his horse Black Bess as a story line in his novel Rookwood. This tale, though clearly impossible, captured the imagination of Ainsworth’s readers and the modern legend was born.
