The Hon. Harold Nicolson, C.M.G.
The idea of this series of fortnightly broadcasts by various speakers is to commemorate some great event now more or less forgotten, or some personality famous in his day for good or had, and now become perhaps a legend. The scene will be reconstructed, the story retold.
Today the well-known broadcaster, the Hon. Harold Nicolson, is to talk about Dick Turpin, who was executed at York in 1739, practically 200 years ago. Born in 1706, he was the son of an innkeeper at Hempstead, Essex, joined a gang of robbers, and entered into partnership with the highwayman Tom King, on the Cambridge Road in 1735. Turpin shot him by accident, escaped to Yorkshire, was arrested for horse-stealing, and hanged. Posterity chooses to think of him as a very different man from what he was.