My Turpin Family
From the East End of London to Brisbane, Australia and beyond...

My father came to Birmingham and then the Black Country after the end of the Second World War. His side of my family is made up of the Brown, Vousden, Springall and Turpin families, from London's East End and Kent. I have traced these families also, but with more modest success. I was contacted recently by someone researching a William Turpin who took his family from London, England to Brisbane, Australia in the 1880s. As well as William, he found a Thomas Turpin in the 1881 UK census, living nearby, both following trades as butchers. He discovered through the Genealogical Research Directory that I also have London Turpins in my family and wrote to me asking if I knew of a connection between these two butchers. There is a connection; they were brothers! Coincidentally, my fellow researcher lives in Nanaimo, British Columbia, Canada, a town where many of the pioneer settlers were coal miners from the Black Country.

When we were young children, grandma Brown (née Vousden) used to tell us a story that we were descended from Dick Turpin, the famous highwayman. I do not remember what we made of this story at the time, but later in life we remembered it. When I obtained a copy of grandma's birth certificate and found that her mother's maiden name was Turpin, the memory of the childhood story quickly came back.

We now know that her mother was born Agnes Turpin, and that she came from a family of butchers who lived in the East End of London. Our grandma Agnes Minnie Lucy Vousden was born in Shoreditch in 1893; great grandma Agnes Turpin in Mile End Old Town in 1864; great, great grandfather Thomas Turpin in Bethnal Green in 1842 and his brother William in Shoreditch in 1833; and great, great great grandma Esther Turpin was also born in Bethnal Green, in 1805. All were butchers. We also know that Richard ("Dick") Turpin (1705-39) and his father John were both butchers by trade.

My ancestral research does not lay claim to Dick Turpin. In any case, much of his story is folklore: there is little about him that is known for certain apart from some dates, and his reputation. The version presented here is put together from various sources and reports passed down the ages.

Dick Turpin was born either in the Old Post Cottage or the Rose and Crown (then the Bell Inn) in Hempstead, Essex, the son of Mary and John Turpin, a butcher and publican. He was baptised on September 25th 1705 at Hempstead. At the age of about sixteen he was apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel - in those days, a village on the fringes of London. When his apprenticeship was over, he opened a butchers shop, but moved into selling stolen deer and then began to steal sheep, lamb and cattle. At some point he married a Mary Millington, who long-suffered her husband's wayward lifestyle.

In 1733, aged 27, Dick fell on hard times and joined the Gregory Gang, a band of housebreakers, poachers and livestock thieves. Later he started a short but notorious career in highway robbery, joining with Robert King to hold up stagecoaches on the roads to and from the capital. In 1737, outside the Red Lion Inn in Whitechapel, Turpin accidentally shot dead his partner's brother, and fled, first to Epping Forest, then Holland. He returned to England, living in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, where he thought he would not be recognised. He lived under the assumed name of John Palmer (Palmer was his mother's maiden name) as an ostensibly respectable cattle- and horse-dealer.

"John Palmer" was arrested and gaoled for a relatively minor offence, but was identified as the highwayman Dick Turpin. He was hanged in York on 7 April 1739 for horse-stealing and buried in Fishergate, York, in St. George's Churchyard, his headstone bearing the simple inscription "R.T. 33". The grave was robbed by bodysnatchers but friends recovered the corpse and re-buried him. A more informative replacement headstone was erected later, and still exists today. The Gentleman's Magazine carried an obituary.

Are we descendants of Dick Turpin? I have no idea, but our Turpins certainly followed the same trade and not so very far away, in London's East End. Dick was apprenticed there for a time, about one mile away in Whitechapel. Perhaps we are related, although he would hardly make an illustrious ancestor.

Compiler:
Nigel Brown

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