THE REAL DICK TURPIN

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 108, 3 November 1923, Page 16

THE REAL DICK TURPIN

SON OF AN INNKEEPER IN ESSEX.

Alftsr a long- career as a. hero of romantic literature and of old-fashioned circus entertainment, Dick Turpin has entared the moving pictures. Mr. Matheson Lang has impersonated him in English film. Writing in the "Nations,] Heview" of the Turpin of romance and of reality, Mr. W. Roberts records thatthe real Dick was the son of an Essex innkeeper, and was trained as a butcher. In 1737 a reward was offered in the London "Gazette" for his appi'ehension' on a, charge of having murdered Thomas Morris, servant of Henry Thompson, one of the keepers of Epping forest. . The murderer was 1 described as. "aboiut oft 9in high, of a brown complesfan, very much marked with the smallpox, his cheekbones broa-d, his face thinner, towards, the bottom, his visage shorfj, pretty upright,' arid broad above the shoulder." Nearly every one of the pictarcesque deeds attributed' to Turpin —above all, the^ famous Ride to York on Black Bess—has been denied, and placed to thta credit or discredit of some other scoundrel.

These are some points on which thera can lie no doubt:—Turpin disappeared from public notice for a year' or two He was apprehended as John Palmer ' (his mother's maiden name was Palmer) for having 'shot a game-cock at Beverley He wrote a. letter while in prison to his brother-in-law, and this was the means of Paving hmi to be Dick Turpin. At York Castle, on 7th April, 1739^ Turpin was hanged for having stolen a black mare and foal at WeltoS. I n p rison T^r . Pin. and two other felons had planned to murder officials and to escape, W "he plot-was detected. _ As in the case of other notorious criminals of his time many chapbooks and ballads were written concerning him. A new notoriety began about a hundred years later, when Harrison Awswovth made Turpin's Bide