THE “GREEN DRAGON,” WELTON.
One did not, even in 1739, threaten people with impunity and shot-guns. Something unpleasant generally resulted; and “Palmer” was accordingly arrested at the “Green Dragon” inn, Welton, on a charge of brawling; being afterwards haled before the magistrates assembled at Petty Sessions at Beverley, where, as he could produce no friends to speak on his behalf, he was put back for further inquiries. Those inquiries resulted in his being charged with stealing a black mare, blind of an eye, off Heckington Common. In fiction—and especially in fiction as practised by Harrison Ainsworth—Turpin at this point would in some way have sprung upon the back of Black Bess, come ready to hand from nowhere in particular, and would have been carried off triumphantly from the midst of his “enemies”; but these things do not happen in real life, and he was, instead, lodged in York Castle. Thence he wrote from his dungeon cell a letter to his brother at Hempstead, imploring him in some way to cook him up a character. This letter was not prepaid, and the brother, not recognising the handwriting, refused to pay the sixpence for it demanded by the Post Office.
THE “THREE MAGPIES,” SIPSON GREEN.
See now from what trivial incidents great issues hang. The village postmaster chanced to be identical with the schoolmaster who had taught Turpin to write. He was a man of public spirit, and travelled to York and identified the prisoner there as the man who had been “wanted” for many crimes. It was on April 17th, 1739, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, that Dick Turpin was hanged on Knavesmire, York, and since then he has become very much of a hero: perhaps the sorriest, the most sordid and absolutely commonplace scoundrel that was ever raised on so undeserved a pedestal.
No district was more affected by highwaymen in the old days than Hounslow Heath, and the fork of the roads, where the two great highways to Bath and Exeter set out upon their several courses at the west end of what was once Hounslow village and is now Hounslow town, used in those brave old days to be decorated with a permanent gibbet, rarely without its scarecrow occupant, in the shape of some tattered robber, strung up as a warning to his fellows. Prominent amongst many stories that belong to this stretch of country is that of the murder of Mr. Mellish, brother of the then Member of Parliament for Grimsby, on a night in 1798, when returning from a day’s hunting with the King’s Buckhounds in Windsor Forest. The carriage in which his party were seated was passing the lonely old beerhouse called the “Old Magpies,” at Sipson Green, at half-past eight, when it was attacked by three footpads. One held the horses’ heads, while the other two guarded the windows, firing a shot through them, to terrify the occupants. No resistance was offered to the demand for money, and purses and bank-notes were handed over, as a matter of course. Then the carriage was allowed to proceed, a parting shot being fired after it. That shot struck the unfortunate Mr. Mellish in the forehead, and he died shortly after being removed to an upper room in an adjoining inn, still standing, the “Three Magpies.” The older and more humble inn, heavily thatched and with a beetle-browed and sinister look, where the footpads had been drinking before the attack, makes a picture, in the melodramatic sort, on the Bath Road, even to-day.
THE “OLD MAGPIES.”
A very curious and authentic relic of those old times is found in that secluded little inn, the “Green Man,” a most innocent-looking, white, plaster-faced house that seems a very bower of rustic simplicity and guilelessness, standing at Hatton—“Hatton-in-the-Hinterland” as one feels tempted to style it—a rural hamlet, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot,” tucked away in the beautiful orchard country between the angle formed by those branching Bath and Exeter roads westward of Hounslow town. It is to-day, as I have said, a beautiful district of orchards, where the pink and white of the apple-blossom delights the eye in spring, and the daffodil grows. There is an old rustic pound at Hatton, and in front of the “Green Man” an idyllic pond where ducks quack and dive; and everything seems as pure and unspotted from the world as those white Aylesbury ducks themselves would appear to be. But Hatton is a Place with a Past, and the “Green Man” not so green as you might suppose. For here spread the lonely and sinister Heath, in days gone by, and at the “Green Man” the highwaymen of the district, who all cherished the most magnificent thirsts, and would not readily barter them away, foregathered in the intervals between offering wayfarers an unwelcome choice between rendering money or life. Sometimes the Bow Street runners—so called, in the contrariwise spirit, because they never by any chance ran, unless it might be away—would, daring very much indeed, poke inquisitive noses into the “Green Man,” but they never found any one more suspicious there than a drunken carter. For why? Because in the little parlour on the left-hand side as you enter, there is a veritable highwayman’s hiding-hole at the back of the old-fashioned grate, filling what was once an old-world chimney-corner. Into this snug, not to say over-warm and possibly sooty place, one of the starlight conveyers of property upon the Heath could creep on emergency and wait until danger passed off.