In folklore, Dick Turpin is seen as dashing hero, but new research suggests he is not the man he seems, as Steve Pratt finds out.

SHARING a prison cell with highwayman Dick Turpin isn’t a pleasant experience.

He’s far from welcoming. “Get you gone, hop it and if you see that pig of a jailer, tell him I need more wine,”

he snaps as you enter his cell in York Castle Prison.

His fellow prisoners were locked up for a variety of crimes – a spinster who killed her illegitimate child, a woman who solicited her lover to kill her husband, and a tailor who stole a gun after breaking into a farmhouse.

Then there was Simon Hargreaves, a wheelwright’s apprentice, best described as a 19th Century lager lout, who was caught with a boiled egg in his pocket, charged with burglary and sentenced to death. This was later changed to transportation and he was shipped to Australia, but not before he scrawled graffiti on the cell wall that remains to this day.

Infamous highwayman Richard – we know him better as Dick – Turpin has the biggest claim to fame among prisoners in this, the first purposebuilt county jail in the country. He takes centre-stage in the prison, newly-opened after a £200,000 refurbishment at York Castle Museum, funded by York City Council and Yorkshire Renaissance.

The secrets of the cells are unlocked as visitors explore dark, dank corridors and cramped cells to see and hear about old-style crime and punishment.

Being banged up with Turpin and other unsavoury criminals can be disturbing, although the poor conditions were somewhat alleviated at the launch by waiters following prison visitors with champagne bottles to replenish their glasses.

What was envisaged as a museum attraction has become more important historically than anyone ever imagined. Projecting criminals – or rather actors in period clothes posing as them – onto the cell walls is an effective way of bringing the past to life and, as historian Dr Katherine Prior explains, has a ring of truth about it.

Issuing an e-fit poster of Turpin, drawn up by West Yorkshire Police, is a neat publicity gimmick that brought the prison project a potential audience of 82 million once it was picked up by YouTube.

No one predicted the historical finds that Dr Prior made along the way in her role of researcher and curator.

She quickly established that Dick Turpin, who was kept in the jail before being hanged on the Knavesmire (now York Racecourse), was one of the stars of the story. One of the best-cellers, you could say.

A major discovery was establishing that the rather luxurious cell in which it’s always been thought he was kept was the wrong one.

The popular image of Turpin was another problem. He was far from the romantic legend that most people regard him. That stems mainly from a 1834 novel, Rookwood, in which the author William Harrison Ainsworth portrayed him as a likeable rogue who rode from London to York in a day on his beloved horse Black Bess.

That wasn’t true but the image stuck, with Turpin regarded as a dashing hero and gentleman highwayman when in fact he was an Essex-born butcher suspected of stocking his shop with stolen deer and cattle. He joined the gang of poachers supplying him when they turned to the more lucrative trade of housebreaking.

Their methods became increasingly violent as they mounted more than a dozen raids on isolated farmhouses in the London area in 1734 and 1735. After hiding out in Holland, Turpin returned to this country to take up highway robbery, murder and horse stealing.

Captured and imprisoned in York Castle jail, he was tried and found guilty on two charges of horse stealing.

On April 7, 1739, he was taken to York Tyburn on the Tadcaster Road and hanged.

He bought a new suit for the occasion and paid for men to act as mourners on the day. When the moment of his execution arrived, he threw himself off the ladder. He’s buried in St George’s Churchyard, in York.

“I knew he wasn’t a great hero, a dashing highwayman, but I wasn’t sure how we would get that across to the public,” says Dr Prior. “We can’t claim any real innovation in telling the story of Turpin’s life or uncovering the nastiness of his crimes and saying he wasn’t this great hero. We thought the main difference in achieving a wider audience was using the e-fit, which is quite a dramatic way of saying that he’s not this dashing hero but a rather ugly-looking thug. When you see that face on a modern wanted notice with a list of his crimes, that’s a help in getting that across.

“People like to imagine he was robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, but he was pretty much into sadistic violence. He’s the sort of character who, if he existed now, the Daily Mail would be running a campaign to string him up.”

Her research revealed that the cell pointed out to visitors in the past as being Turpin’s was the wrong one.

She discovered this through a 1732 plan of the building held in the East Riding Archive, in Beverley. “That completely rewrote our understanding of the jail as an 18th Century institution and where Turpin had been held,” she says. “Now we can see where the door, now a window, was where he went to his execution. The area is still intact but some of the cell walls have been shifted. Suddenly, it all made much more sense.”

The cell previously thought of as Turpin’s was more luxurious with fireplace and stove. It appears that was where female prisoners were held in one group.

The Turpin that greets visitors to his cell is well-dressed, as he would have been, says Dr Prior, because he was living off his ill-gotten gains.

She concedes he may be a bit too smartly dressed in his light-coloured waistcoat and breeches.

“Anything dark disappears into the film being projected, so he needs to be more glowing,” she says. “But it gives a flavour of the fact he was a flashy dresser and bought a new suit for his execution.”

Elsewhere, authenticity is a keynote. All the characters whose stories are featured in the cells are real. Researchers weren’t expecting that. “We expected to end up with composite characters saying, for instance, this jailer is very like the one who would have been here,” says Dr Prior.

“We didn’t expect to get so much raw information about who these people were, why they were there and how they lived. It was fabulous as a research job, bringing back to life real characters.”

Much of the information came from regional archives in Beverley and Wakefield, as well as national archives in London. Getting facts has been made easier with the indexing of records and putting them online. “If we’d done the project ten years ago we wouldn’t have been able to do what we’ve done. The information is much more accessible now,”

she says.

“There’s something very special about this project because of the sense of getting the voice of real people, who were very humble people and in many ways right at the bottom of society.

“I got very attached to my characters.

I was very pleased when I saw the actors and actresses chosen by the design and film company because I thought they’d understood the information we’ve been able to put together. They look right and have the right feel.”

■ York Castle Museum is open daily from 9.30am to 5pm.

Admission £7.50 adults, £6.50 concessions and £4 children. Free to under-fives and York residents with a York card. For more visitor information call 01904-687687 or visit yorkcastlemuseum.co.uk