Riding into the myths of time

DICK TURPIN: THE MYTH OF THE ENGLISH HIGHWAYMAN by James Sharpe (Profile Books, £15.99)

HE went to the gallows in a new frock coat and shoes. He paid five men to be his mourners, bowed to onlookers as he passed, handed out hatbands and gloves as souvenirs and, when his final moment approached, gazed around him with what an observer called "undaunted courage".

For the first, and perhaps only time, Dick Turpin matched what became his gallant, romantic image. With a heavily pockmarked face, he was a brutal, ruthless thug. He never rode non-stop from London to York, and there's little evidence he had a horse named Black Bess.

Though notorious in his day, he was no more renowned than many other highwaymen. Fifty years or so after his execution, on York's Knavesmire in 1739, he didn't figure in what James Sharpe, professor of history at York University, calls "the pantheon of really important highwaymen", recalled in books and pamphlets.

Exploring and analysing how the legend arose is the core of Sharpe's book, which skilfully sets the little that is known about Turpin in the context of 18th century crime and the extraordinary transformation of Turpin into, as Sharpe puts it, "the only criminal of the many hundreds executed in 18th century England whom the modern public still remembers".

His fame is far wider than many might realise. A symbol of Englishness abroad, he has given his name to pubs in Bordeaux and Stockholm and a restaurant in San Remo, Italy. Reviewing the scores of places back home that claim a Turpin connection - pistols in pubs in Chigwell, Essex, and Shepperton, Middlesex, for example, or his fireside chair once in the Red Lion, Digswell Hill, Herts, and ghosts just about everywhere - Sharpe remarks: "Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Dick Turpin".

The glamour of the highwayman in general has a certain truth. Usually drawn from a higher class than were footpads and pickpockets, many highwaymen were farmers or tradesmen who had fallen on hard times. At least one was a priest, and another a baronet. The horsemanship, skill with weapons and sheer audacity of the highwayman commanded respect, even admiration.

But gentlemanly they were not. Rape was not uncommon. One woman victim had her tongue cut out, another her ring finger cut off.

It was when former butcher Turpin, member of an Essex gang, added murder to his crimes by shooting a man who tried to apprehend him, that a reward of £200 was placed on his head. Eventually arrested in Yorkshire for horse stealing, under the alias of John Palmer, his fate was sealed when he was recognised as Turpin by a former schoolmate.

What resurrected him long after he had been forgotten was his romanticised appearance as the chief character in a sub-plot of a bestselling 19th century novel, Rookwood, by William Harrison Ainsworth, an author who, for a time, outsold his contemporary and friend, Charles Dickens.

For Ainsworth and Turpin, the book's publication, in 1834, came at a perfect moment. The last mounted highway robbery had taken place at Taunton in 1831. Armed police patrols, the spread of turnpikes and changes in banking, which meant less money was carried, had consigned the highwayman to history.

Sharpe observes: "Ainsworth invested Dick Turpin and the English highwayman with heroic qualities at exactly the point when the reality of highway robbery, in its classic form, had ceased to be a threat.''

Ainsworth probably lifted the idea of Turpin's non-stop ride from an 1808 pamphlet, which wrongly attributed the feat to him. In the first-known account, by Daniel Defoe, the rider is simply "one Nicks", believed to be either a Yorkshire highwayman, William Nevison, or Richard Dudley, a former royalist officer, nicknamed Swift Nicks.

Turpin wasn't linked to any particular horse until a ballad of 1825 placed him on "his black mare Bess". Sharpe suggests that Ainsworth, with "a stroke of alliterative genius", renamed the "black mare Bess", Black Bess.

But the biggest surprise is the pervasiveness of the Turpin myth. There are pottery Turpins, pantomime Turpins, pop-gun game Turpins, cigarette lighter Turpins. Film Turpins go back to 1906 and include the 26th in the Carry On series - Carry on Dick (what else?). To promote the object of its affection, the British Sausage Appreciation Society once declared that "the legendary highwayman Dick Turpin was known to moonlight as a butcher, making sausages from the finest meats in Epping Forest".

"The broader culture has constantly found new ways to appropriate our most famous highwayman," says Sharpe.

Then whoa, hold on. Like Turpin waylaying a coach, Sharpe brings the reader up with a jolt. Does the distortion of the Turpin story matter? Yes, and how. Sharpe explains: "It is a matter of interest, and, to the academic historian, of concern that many of the alleged Turpin associations are spurious. The past, with its overtones of heritage and tradition, is obviously a desirable commodity... This does not, apparently, mean that we have to get the past right.''

The dark shadows of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Stalin's Russia then fall across the page. They signal the sinister consequences of falsifying the past.

In his grave in York's St George's churchyard, Dick Turpin might be less surprised by his enduring celebrity than by the revelation that the myth of him as a swashbuckling daredevil, recognised by most people, surely, as harmless nonsense, embodies a warning more sombre than Stand and Deliver.

Published: 14/12/2004