REAL DICK TURPIN

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6408, 30 October 1923, Page 5

REAL DICK TURPIN

After a long career as -a hero of ■romantic literature and of old fashioned circus entertainment, Dick Turpin has entered the moving pictures. Mr Matheson Lang has impersonated him in an English film. Writing in the National Review of the Turpin of romance and of reality, Mr W. Roberts records that the 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 . apprehension on a charge of having murdered Thomas Morris, servant of Henry Thompson, one of the keepers of Epping Forest. The murderer was described as about sft 9in high, of a brown complexion, very much marked with the smallpox, his cheekbones broad, his face thinner towards the bottom, his visage short, pretty upright and broad above the shoulder. Nearly every one of the picturesque deeds attributed to Turpin—above all, the famous Ride to York on Black Bess —has been denied/and placed to the credit or discredit of some other scoundrel. .

There are some points on which there can be 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 proving him to be Dick Turpin. At York Castle, on April 7, 1739, Turpin was hanged for having stolen a black mare and foal at Welton. In prison Turpin and two other felons had planned to murder officials and escape, but the plot was detected. As in the case of other notorious criminals of this time, many books and ballads were written concerning him. A new notoriety began about 100 years later, when Harrison Ainsworth made Turpin’s Ride to York on of the chief episodes in his “Rookwood.”