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| REVIEWS | BY GERALD ISAAMAN |
 Dick Turpin makes his escape on Black Bess – the popular image of the highwayman.  The Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath where Turpin was said to have had an escape tunnel built |
Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman by James Sharpe Profile Books, £15.99) Some even remember the highwayman’s very own pistol being fired nightly as a closing-time signal,” says one popular history of Hampstead in those golden, olden days when Dick Turpin cried “Stand and deliver” to the coaches travelling the local roads. It is one of countless colourful references to Dick Turpin and when he hid out with his beautiful horse Black Bess in the tollhouse at the Spaniards Inn, on the edge of Hampstead Heath, before his famous 24-hour ride to York – and death on the gallows. Indeed, the internet has dozens of websites devoted to the romantic highwayman – there are even more for Robin Hood – who took from the rich to feed the poor, insisted on kisses from his female victims and generally had a whale of a time. But it’s all a calamitous myth. The real Dick Turpin was a pock-faced thug, an original Essex man, a notorious young butcher who became a callous burglar and horse and sheep thief, and died a shameful, unrepentant death after the ‘John Palmer or Pawmer’ alias he gave himself was broken. He appeared at York Assizes on what appear to be absurdly trumped-up charges and was hanged on April 7, 1739, being then previously renowned as England’s most wanted criminal – with a huge £200 reward on his head for murder. Yet he was audacious enough to appoint five men as official mourners, giving them £3 10s. to share among themselves, distributed hatbands and gloves to people, and left a gold ring and two pairs of shoes and clogs to a married woman who was more than a friend. He “behav’d himself with amazing assurance” and deliberately threw himself off the gallows ladder so that he came to a quick death “with as much intrepidity and unconcern, as if he had been taking horse to go on a journey”, as one commentator put it. So came to an end the luckless life of the spurious Dick Turpin, believed to have been born around September 1706, the son of John and Mary Turpin, of Hempstead, Essex. And he would probably be lost in the din and dust of history but for William Harrison Ainsworth, who resurrected Turpin in his Victorian gothic novel, Rockwood, and set in train the poems and pop songs still sung about him. Turpin was transformed into the daredevil highwayman who was the gentleman Robin Hood of the age, complete with handsome horse on which he dared the night at remarkable speed, breaking hearts as well as purses en route. But in the case of Turpin, James Sharpe, professor of history at York, and an expert particularly on pre-modern crime, has killed off his subject with his own swift stilleto blade, and with remarkable skill in an enlightening and entertaining book. He seems to be angry that the Turpin myth has lasted so long and remained so potent, which is why he has set out with such determination to tells us that our heads are full of fantasy, tosh and too much beer. Indeed, he reports that Hampstead’s Spaniards Inn is the pub with the most strongly claimed Turpin associations, one website actually claiming that the highwayman was born there, the son of landlord John Turpin, and that he had a tunnel dug to another nearby pub to help him evade possible capture. It was claimed too that “Turpin would watch passing coaches from an upstairs room at the Spaniards, now named the Turpin Bar, and that the main bar has on display a bullet fired by Turpin at a Royal Mail coach”. Wow. What a wonderfully gullible lot we are. |
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