He was an excellent horseman, and daring to the verge—or beyond the verge—of recklessness. On one occasion, he and two companions "spoke to" and were robbing two gentlemen on the road to Edgeware, but were interrupted by the appearance of three other well-mounted travellers, who gave chase. Ferguson escaped, but his two companions were caught, brought to trial, and executed. It was this exploit that first procured him the name of "Galloping Dick," although his name was Robert. Complimented by admiring friends on his escape, he declared he would gallop a horse with any man in the kingdom.
The name of "Galloping Dick" soon became well known, and was a name of dread. No clattering horseman could come hurriedly along the road without stirring the pulses of nervous travellers, who immediately fancied "Galloping Dick" was upon them. Indeed, he soon became too well known for any reasonable degree of safety, and he would then for a while, for prudential reasons, find temporary employment as a postilion. Frequently in custody at Bow Street, on various charges, he was many times acquitted, on insufficient evidence; but was at last arrested, at the beginning of 1800, on a charge of highway robbery, sent for trial to the Lent Assizes at Aylesbury, convicted, and executed.
JERRY ABERSHAW
The southern suburbs of London were haunted during the last quarter of the eighteenth century by a youthful highwayman of a very desperate kind. He was as successful as reckless, and captained a gang that made Putney Heath and Wimbledon Common places to be dreaded as much as were Hounslow Heath on the west, and Finchley Common in the north, and brought the name of "Jerry Abershaw" into exceptional prominence.
The real name of this highwayman was Louis Jeremiah Avershaw, and he was born in 1773, of the usual "poor but honest" parents. Indeed, it would seem, in enquiring into the lives of the highwaymen, that they in general came of such stock, whose only crime was their poverty: although that, as we well know in this happy land of ours, is a very heinous offence, it being the duty of every English man and woman to pay rates and taxes to keep a constantly growing official class in well-paid and easy employment.
We so rarely hear of a highwayman deriving from dishonest parents that, it would seem, even in the more adventurous centuries, ill-led lives were as a rule so short and sordid as to impress the children of those who led them with the idea that honesty was not only really, in the long run, the best policy, but that for evil courses there was no long run at all. Otherwise, the life of the highwayman, if not by any means, as a general rule, so gay as usually it was represented to be, was sufficiently full of that spice of excitement which to the youthful makes amends for much danger and discomfort, and sons might often have succeeded fathers in the liberal profession of highway robbery.
The boyhood of Jerry Abershaw has never been dragged from the obscurity that enwraps it. No slowly-budding flower he, but one that in one brief day flung open its petals. Or rather, in less flowery language, we learn nothing of the first steps that led him to the highway, and find him at the very first mention of his doings already a cool and assured character, robbing with impunity, and making one place in especial a spot to be dreaded. This was the hollow of Putney Bottom, through which the Portsmouth Road runs on its way to Kingston. The little Beverley Brook trickles by, to this day, in the hollow; and Combe Wood, whose thickets formed so convenient a lair for Abershaw, and a rallying-place for his gang, is still very much what it was then.
Abershaw was not, of course, the first to see the strategic value of the heath, and of such woody tangles as these, bordering the road for quite three miles; for we read in Ogilby's great book on the roads, published in 1675, of Kingston Hill, hard by as "not rarely infested with robbers"; and a gibbet long stood near at hand, to remind those robbers, and others who succeeded them, of their own probable fate. But, if by no means the first, or even the last, who practised here, he is easily the most famous, even though it be merely a pervasive fame, not crystallised into many anecdotes.