How was a vicious, pockmarked thug transformed into the legend of gentleman highwayman Dick Turpin?

York historian James Sharpe's new book sets out to explain, finds STEPHEN LEWIS.

HOW times change. When Dick Turpin was hanged on Knavesmire in 1739, the people of York were so keen to dissociate themselves from the notorious highwayman, murderer and thug that the York Courant published a poem pointing out that he came from Essex.

Two and a half centuries later, he is a local hero and part of the city's mythology: the gentleman robber in cape and cocked hat who on his famous horse Black Bess rode from London to York in a day.

He is the star of one of the exhibitions at York Dungeon and is so much a source of pride that when York University historian James Sharpe pointed out in print some years ago that Turpin was a vicious thug, he got in trouble with his neighbour.

"She said 'bloody southerners, coming here taking our legends away!'" he recalls, laughing.

Sadly for Turpin's admirers the facts, such as they are, bear out Prof Sharpe's version.

An Essex butcher, Turpin fell in with the wrong sort and became involved with a vicious gang of robbers who preyed on isolated homes. They were not above torturing their victims to learn where their valuables were kept.

In one notorious incident on February 4, 1735 - 269 years ago today - the Gregory gang, as they were known, forced their way into the Edgeware home of elderly farmer Joseph Lawrence. Mr Lawrence, who was more than 70, was dragged around the house, beaten, had a kettle of (presumably boiling) water emptied over his head and was forced to sit bare-buttocked on the fire while gang members tried to force him to talk.

Meanwhile one of the leaders of the gang, Samuel Gregory, took the farmer's maidservant Dorothy Street upstairs and raped her at pistol-point while her hands were tied.

These are not the acts of gentlemen. Neither was Turpin's later murder in Epping Forest of Thomas Morris, a forest keeper who tried to capture him.

So how did this thug, murderer and bully - a man who was ugly to boot, being 'of a brown complexion and very much marked with the small pox' - turn into the handsome, dashing gentleman robber of legend, star of his very own Carry On movie?

Prof Sharpe sets out to answer this question in his new book Dick Turpin: The Myth of The English Highwayman.

Towards the end of his criminal career, Turpin decided to become a highwayman. At the time of the Lawrence robbery, the Gregory gang was a feared but largely anonymous group. By the end of that year, thanks to one of their number, John Wheeler, turning 'King's Evidence', they had been smashed. Most of the members were dead, in prison or transported.

Turpin escaped and turned to highway robbery. He became for a brief period one of the country's most wanted men, until his arrest in the East Riding of Yorkshire (where he had lived since 1737 under the name John Palmer) and execution at York on April 7, 1739 for horse theft.

At least he died well, Prof Sharpe admits. Determined to look his best, he bought a new frock coat.

"He had also, as a further preparation, on the day before his execution appointed five men as his mourners, and given them three pounds and ten shillings to be shared among them for following the car that would carry him to the gallows."

Turpin mounted the gallows, and after a few brief words "threw himself off the ladder and expired directly". As a pamphlet account of his execution published shortly after his death put it, Turpin "went off this stage with as much intrepidity and unconcern, as if he had been taking horse to go on a journey".

Even in his apparently heroic ending, Turpin was not out of the ordinary, Prof Sharpe says. "It was how people expected criminals of his type to behave. It was bravado: it was accepting the role that fate had allotted to him. His execution was theatre, and Turpin was doing what was expected of him."

In that, he was no different from any of the murderers, rogues and villains who ended at the end of a rope. As with other notorious criminals, a couple of pamphlets were published after his death, one entitled grandiloquently The Trial Of The Notorious Highwayman Richard Turpin. For all that, his fame evaporated and for 100 years he was virtually forgotten.

A fondness for rip-roaring tales about highwaymen towards the end of the 1700s led to Turpin's resurrection. Several collections of highwayman stories were published, featuring colourful characters such as Captain James Hind, who claimed never to have shed blood or to have taken the worth of a penny from a poor man; and Claude Duval, who according to legend once invited a lady to dance to avoid handing over her money.

Turpin's name scarcely featured in these stories. Then in 1834, William Harrison Ainsworth published his novel Rookwood. Ainsworth was a fan of Gothic novels and the historical novels of Walter Scott.

His book, set in 1737, tells the convoluted story of the Rookwood family of Rookwood Place in West Yorkshire. Perhaps aware that his male characters were pallid, he created a sub-plot featuring a romantic highwayman. Dick Turpin, in Ainsworth's novel, is a man who "cared little or nothing for any risk he might incur" and who possessed the "chivalrous spirit which animated so many knights of the road". Ainsworth provided Turpin with his faithful steed Black Bess and virtually invented the myth of Turpin's heroic ride from London to York. Book IV of his novel consists entirely of an account of how Turpin and Black Bess, "overcoming fatigue and all opposition, rode from London to York between evening and morning, and how Bess died within sight of York Minster". A great story, no doubt, but entirely a work of fiction.

The myth of the romantic highwayman was established. But why did Ainsworth choose Turpin for his hero?

In later editions of Rookwood, Ainsworth talks about how he came to write the novel. "He says that when he was a boy his father used to tell him stories about all sorts of things, but in particular highwaymen," says Prof Sharpe. "He says his father introduced him to stories about Dick Turpin."

So the legendary highwayman's fame may hang by a thread: a chance story told to a boy who remembered it and grew up to become a novelist. Perhaps there is a lesson here on the fickleness of fame and of history itself.

Dick Turpin: The Myth of The English Highwayman by James Sharpe is published by Profile Books priced £15.99.

Updated: 09:09 Wednesday, February 04, 2004