The First Ever Likeness of Highwayman Dick Turpin

The First ever Likeness of the famed highwayman. He didn’t make a midnight ride to York, his faithful horse wasn’t named Black Bess, and he certainly wasn’t a Robin Hood-like figure.

A likeness of highwayman Dick Turpin

"Richard Turpin, a Butcher by Trade, is a tall fresh-colour'd man, very much mark'd with the Small-Pox, about Twenty-six Years of Age, about five Feet nine Inches high, liv'd some time ago at Whitechapel, and did lately lodge somewhere about Millbank, Westminster, wears a blue-grey Coat, and a light natural Wig". The First ever Likeness.

Turpin was executed for stealing horses in 1739 at York and he would have been forgotten to history had it not been for Harrison Ainsworth’s popular 1834 novel Rookwood. In it he describes Turpin galloping north in the dark: “His blood spins through his veins; winds round his heart; mounts to his brain. Away! Away! He is wild with joy.” The highwayman character etched in Rookwood, as well as local narratives, poems, and ballads that sprung from it, granted Turpin a notorious posthumous status.

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The basic facts are simple: He was born in 1705 and became an apprentice butcher; he began stealing and then joined a gang in Essex. He went into burglary as well, and when he was with the Gregory Gang in Essex, the outfit began to strike terror into areas of the county. He had started out as a man whose knowledge of butchery made him useful in cattle stealing, and then he progressed to some nasty criminal acts. With Gregory, the leader of the gang, he robbed a farmhouse and poured boiling water over the owner (an old man) and raped a woman there. His image in contemporary terms was rarely glamourised: he was once depicted in a woodcut throwing an old lady onto a fire. His first murder was of a man named Tom Morris, a servant who recognised him as a robber.

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Richard Turpin became one of the most mythologised figures in English history — but what happens when you step inside the place where the legend ended?

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Highwayman Dick Turpin

Matters stepped up a gear in terms of his infamy and sheer brutality when he joined Tom King, another highway robber; but it seems that Turpin killed his accomplice during a botched robbery. He then fled north. After that, he began to make a living from horse-stealing, and to do this, he stole horses in South Lincolnshire and took them up the Great North Road to sell in East Yorkshire. It was when the Yorkshire connection occurred that he assumed the name of John Palmer.

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