Dick Turpin (TV series) the son of a farmer, returns to England after three years military service in the Mediterranean, he discovers that he and his parents have been cheated out of their farm and his inheritance by the unscrupulous Sir John Glutton, and that consequently his parents have died of starvation. Turpin, who is now bitter and poor, becomes a Highwayman. Cleverly, Richard Carpenter has the series take place after the real life Dick Turpin has been hanged in 1739; the series is set between 1739 and 1740, leaving his fictional TV incarnation to be an anarchic freedom fighter who has been badly
Dick Turpin suspect provenance. No contemporary portrait exists of Turpin, who as a notorious but unremarkable figure was not considered sufficiently important to be immortalised. An engraving in one edition of Bayes' 1739 publication, of a man hiding in a cave, is sometimes supposed to be him, but the closest description that exists is that given by John Wheeler, of "a fresh coloured man, very much marked with the small pox, about five feet nine inches high ... wears a blue grey coat and a light coloured wig". An E-FIT of Turpin, created from such reports, was published by the Castle Museum