Everything You Know About London is Wrong by Matt Brown

Author:Matt Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849944120
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2016-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Dick Turpin was a dashing highwayman who rode from London to York in one day

Few figures in London’s history attract as much embellishment and fabrication as Dick Turpin. The exploits of the infamous highwayman have been much romanticized over the years, and it is difficult to separate the myth from the man.

The popular image of Turpin was shaped largely by William Harrison Ainsworth in his novel Rookwood. Published in 1834, almost a century after Turpin’s execution, the story weaves a fictive cloak around the highwayman. Turpin is only a secondary character in the story, but nevertheless looms large and glamorous, eclipsing the wobbly stereotypes who make up the main cast.His dashing ride to York is particularly well realized. Trusty mare Black Bess accomplishes the 322-km (200-mile) flight in less than a day (the stagecoach took four days), before dying of exhaustion at the edge of that city. ‘Gone, gone! and I have killed the best steed that was ever crossed! And for what?’, cries Dick.

For a great deal, it turns out. The fictitious ride to York cemented the Turpin legend in the popular imagination. He is now so established as an archetype that few people could name any other highwayman.

The truth is very different. Turpin operated as a highway robber for just four years, following a longer career as a housebreaker and thief. Even then, press reports unequivocally linking him to highway hold-ups are scarce, and he was eventually convicted for horse theft.

Turpin was just one of many mounted robbers to terrorize the open road. Earlier rogues such as James Hind, Claude Du Vall and John Nevison enjoyed popular fame from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, but are today largely forgotten. Their stories somehow became entangled with Turpin’s. Du Vall, for instance, was renowned for his gentlemanly behaviour when holding up a stagecoach. Nevison, meanwhile, was the original fast rider. His (probably apocryphal) 322-km (200-mile) dash from Chelmsford to York inspired Turpin’s flight in Ainsworth’s Rookwood.

Black Bess is a fiction. As a noted horse thief, Turpin no doubt galloped on many a fine steed, yet there is no record that he ever favoured one particular mare. The name ‘Black Bess’ is probably a nineteenth-century invention, taking hold in pamphlets and other ephemera before establishing its place in the Turpin canon through Rookwood. No horse can travel 322 km (200 miles) in one day under its own power.

Turpin himself was probably a thuggish, unattractive man. No contemporary illustrations exist, but a few descriptions were made in the newspapers. One 1737 account essays a character ‘about five Feet nine Inches high, of a brown Complexion, very much marked with the Small-Pox, his Cheek Bones broad, his Face thinner towards the Bottom, his Visage short, pretty upright, and broad about the Shoulders’. He murdered on at least one occasion and was implicated in many savage beatings. Far from being the gentlemanly desperado of legend, Turpin was a pockmarked delinquent.

Still, his legend began in his own lifetime with the publication of ballads of derring-do. Soon, the Turpin story was a regular on the stage.

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