Dick Turpin by James Sharpe

Author:James Sharpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2008-12-09T05:00:00+00:00

It was at this stage that Richard Turpin finally turned to the activity for which he was to achieve lasting fame, highway robbery. On 10 and 12 April there were robberies at Mile End and Epping Forest that were carried out by three men thought to be Turpin, Rowden, and the as yet uncaptured John Jones. Highway robbery was unusually rife in the spring and summer of 1735 (there was a proclamation, dated 15 July of that year, which complained of the prevalence of highwaymen and street robbers and upped the rewards against them) and it is impossible to state with any precision which of the robberies carried out around London were attributable to this trio, or, after Jones’s arrest, to Turpin and Rowden. On 10 July, however, came the first robbery in which the press identified them as the perpetrators.

Last Thursday night about eight o’clock Mr Vane of Richmond, and Mr. James Bradford of the Borough of Southwark, going from thence to Richmond were attacked between Wandsworth and Barns Common by two highwaymen supposed to be Turpin the butcher, and Rowden the pewterer, the remaining two of Gregory’s gang who robbed them of their money &c, dismounted them, made them pull of their horses’ bridles, then turning them adrift they rode off towards Roehampton where a gentleman was robb’d, as is supposed, by the same highwaymen, of a watch, and about £3 4s in money.

Four days later they struck again in the same area, when they robbed a Mr Omar of Southwark. Turpin thought Omar knew him, and apparently had to be dissuaded by Rowden from shooting him. The next day a proclamation was published, adding £100 to the already existing rewards on offer to anybody giving information bringing either of the two men to conviction. This was a considerable incentive.

Turpin and Rowden carried out a number of robberies over the second half of 1735. At first they operated mainly in the Barnes Common area, so that by August, as the London Evening Post for 30 August–2 September was to report, the inhabitants of Putney, Roehampton, Barnes and the surrounding parishes were raising, by subscription, their own reward funds ‘for encouragement of such as shall take, or cause to be taken, any persons who have or shall commit robberies on the highway’. But by this time they were already ranging more widely, with, for example, two robberies carried out on the Hertfordshire side of the capital reported in the London Evening Post of 2–4 September. The duo’s increasing reputation, and perhaps their growing recklessness, was signalled when the same journal, in its issue of 9–11 October, reported that Turpin and Rowden had shown ‘the insolence to ride through the City at Noon-Day’. But by about this time the two highwaymen seem to have put a stop to their activities. The most likely explanation is that the apprehension of John Jones reminded them that they were not invulnerable, and that they decided to quit both highway robbery and the London area for a while.

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