Ask most people on our London walks to name a famous London criminal associated with Whitechapel and the chances are that they will come up with the name Jack the Ripper.
Indeed out Jack the Ripper London walks go every night through the streets and alleyways of this atmospheric part of London’s East End.
But there is another famous character associated with Whitechapel who turns up, not just on our East End walking tours, but also on our Chiswick and Hampstead London walks. His name was Dick Turpin and he is without doubt the most famous highwayman to ever have rode across the pages of London legend.
Dick Turpin (1705 –1739) is one of those larger than life figures whose legend contains little resemblance to the actual facts of his, often sordid, life.
Born in the Essex village of Hempstead in September 1705, he grew up in a relatively well-to-do household and received a modest education from the village Schoolmaster, James Smith.
At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel (which is how he comes to feature on our East End London walks), then a pleasant village on the outskirts of London, where he spent five years learning his trade before setting up in business for himself at Waltham Abbey.
Here he married an innkeeper’s daughter named Hester Palmer. When business was slow, he attempted to supplement his income by cattle stealing, was detected and, to avoid capture, fled into the wilds of rural Essex, where he earned a living from robbing the smugglers on the East Anglia Coast, sometimes posing as a Revenue Officer - an ingenuity that was appreciated by neither the smugglers nor the Customs Officers, and he was soon forced to flee again, this time to Epping Forest.
Here he joined forces with a gang of poacher’s and with them graduated from smuggling venison into London beneath wagonloads of vegetables, to burgling houses on the northeastern outskirts of London.
Known as “Gregory’s Gang”, their methods were singularly ruthless and, on one occasion, Turpin is said to have held the landlady of an inn over her fire until she revealed the whereabouts of her savings.
But, with an ever expanding list of charges against them, the gang found rewards of anything between fifty and a hundred pounds upon their heads and, when three of them were caught and hanged, the others decided to disperse.
Turpin now turned his hand to the career that was to bring him notoriety, highway robbery. One day, in February 1736, on the London to Cambridge Road, he spotted a well-dressed individual, riding a fine horse, and duly attempted to rob him. His demand to “stand and deliver” was, however, met with raucous laughter. “What, dog eat dog?” guffawed the stranger, “Come, come brother Turpin, if you don’t know me, I know you and I shall be glad of your company”. Turpin had inadvertently challenged Tom King, known as the “Gentleman Highwayman” due to his liking for expensive clothes and fine horses.
Thereafter the two became partners in crime and from a cave in Epping Forest would ride out to rob almost every traveller, rich or poor, that had the misfortune to pass their hideout.
In our next part of our Turpin blog we will cover the story of how Turpin left London for York. In the meantime you might like to check out our Jack the Ripper London walks which take in the area where the most infamous East End crimes occurred in 1888.
