Dick Turpin

Many pubs are named after this famous highwayman, notably one in York, where he was hanged; and one in East Finchley (London), near Hampstead Heath, scene of some of his crimes. The Spaniards Inn on the edge of Hampstead Heath claims that he was born there (his father being the landlord), later used it as a base for his robberies, and that his ghost haunts it. It displays many supposed relics of his career, and a notice claiming that ‘young Dick Turpin allegedly watched passing coaches full of wealthy ladies and gentlemen from the upstairs windows. It is in these very rooms that Dick Turpin’s life of crime began.’ This legend is quite unhistorical; it must have arisen by confusion with Hempstead in Essex, his true birthplace, where his father was indeed an innkeeper.

There are also a good many pubs, especially in London, Essex, and along the road to York, where tradition alleges that he used to drink, though they have not renamed themselves in his honour.

Turpin was born at Hempstead in 1705. In 1734 he joined a gang of violent robbers who used to break into a house and beat up the occupants until they handed over their money and valuables. Within a year most of the gang had been caught, so Turpin turned instead to highway robbery and horse stealing. He was eventually arrested under a false name, recognised by sheer chance, and hanged at York in 1739. He faced death boldly, drinking and joking with friends, and bowing to the crowd as he was driven in a cart to the gallows.

Turpin’s contemporaries did not see him as a romantic figure. This idea originated in a best-selling novel written almost a hundred years after his death, Harrison Ainsworth’s Rookwood (1834). Ainsworth described highwaymen in general, and Turpin in particular, as dashing adventurers, fearless, yet always gentlemanly. He also invented Turpin’s famous non-stop ride from London to York to establish an alibi, and the pathetic death of his mare Black Bess at the gates of the city. Here, he was adapting a story which had been told much earlier about a certain ‘Swift Nick’ Nevison, hanged in 1684. Readers mistook Ainsworth’s fiction for fact, and the Turpin legend was born.

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Jacqueline is the author of Green Men and White Swans, an enchanting guide to the stories and legends behind Britain's traditional pub names.