Hellish Fiends, and Brutish Men

The man now most closely associated with Jerry Abershawe was Richard Ferguson Born in either Herefordshire or Hertfordshire, sources differ; sometime in the 1770s, Ferguson earned a reputation as a juvenile delinquent as a young man, leading a gang of teenage boys in myriad criminal activities.
  Richard’s father was employed as a gentleman’s servant and, consequently, was often away from home in London, Bath and various other towns and cities; due to the regular absences of his father, Richard had less attention on him than his peers received.
  When Richard was fifteen, the senior Ferguson obtained a position as a stable boy for Richard, working for the same gentleman who employed him. Perhaps Mr Ferguson desired his son close at hand so he could keep an eye on him and set him on the straight and narrow.
  The boy proved to be proficient in the management of horses, and around a year later, when Richard moved to London with the family, he took over as postilion, the man who usually filled the position having fallen ill. It was only a temporary appointment; the man soon recovered, and Richard resumed his job as a stable boy.
  A postilion is a person who guides a horse-drawn coach while mounted on the horse or one of a pair of horses, in contrast to a coachman who controls the horses from the vehicle itself.
 While he acted in his temporary role of the postilion, Richard would have dressed in full livery, including a short jacket that reached the waist and was adorned with lace and gilt buttons. A white shirt, stock tie, leather breeches, gloves, and decorated cap would have completed his ensemble. Once the original postilion returned to his post, Richard would have gone back to wearing his ordinary clothes.
Not long afterwards, Richard gained employment with the family of a lady who had visited his old employer and wondered what had happened to the postilion; informed that Richard had returned to his duties as a stable lad, the lady offered Ferguson a position of postilion which he accepted with alacrity.
 Richard was popular with his new employers, especially the female members of the family; when Ferguson was twenty, everything changed, ‘his mistress discovered him in an improper situation with one of her female servants, when she immediately discharged him. ‘ His employer refused all of Richard’s pleas to reinstate him, and he was forced to find a position elsewhere.
 He wasn’t out of work for long, soon finding another position before falling in ‘with some other servants of a loose character and, their manner of drinking, gaming and idleness suiting his disposition, he soon became one of them.’ Other jobs came and went until Richard found employment at a livery stable in Piccadilly.
 It was at about this time that Richard’s father died, leaving his son with the tidy sum of £57 (about £2,500 today.) He left the Piccadilly livery stable and became a man of leisure.
 One evening, while at Drury Lane watching a performance, he sat beside a young lady to whom he paid excessive attention. When the play finished, Ferguson asked the lady if he could accompany her home and was surprised when she agreed. He stayed with her at her house in St. George’s Field, not leaving until the following day.
 Ferguson swiftly became smitten by his new companion, Nancy, so much so that he could scarcely bear to be parted from her. For her part, Nancy judged Ferguson to be a rich man based on the gifts that he had bestowed on her.
 Richard Ferguson was not the only man who received Nancy’s affection. When he met Nancy, ’she was the first favourite of several noted highwaymen and Housebreakers, who, in turn, all had their favoured hours.’ While these men showered Nancy with gifts, she declared that ’no other man shared her affections.’ But once the money was used up, ‘cold treatment…compelled them to hazard their lives for the purpose of again enjoying those favours which any reasonable thinking man would have spurned.’
 Unfortunately, Richard was not a ‘reasonable thinking man’, and he soon found that the sum his father had bequeathed him was quickly diminishing. With no money, Nancy would replace him with a gentleman with deeper pockets. In need of a steady income, Richard found employment as a postilion at a Piccadilly coaching inn.
 It was while he was in the employ of the inn that he assumed the nickname with which he grew famous, ‘Galloping Dick’ for his prowess as an equestrian. One day, while carrying a passenger in the post-chaise on the North Road, the conveyance was held up by ‘the noted Abershaw and another,’ Ferguson and Abeshawe had previously met at Nancy’s; Jerry being another of the ‘Courtesan’s’ admirers.
  Abershawe watched Ferguson with pistol drawn while the second highwayman robbed the male passenger. In the course of the robbery, the wind, which was gusting, blew the crepe which covered Abershawe’s face away, revealing his identity to Ferguson. Before the postilion could speak, ’some company came up,’ and the two highwaymen escaped.
  Concerned that Ferguson should convey to the authorities that Abershawe and his crony were the men who had robbed the post-chaise, it was decided that the two highwaymen would retire to the inn where Galloping Dick worked.
  The two criminals were in the hostelry when Ferguson returned. The postilion was watering the horses when a fellow inn employee was sent to fetch him. After a conversation in which a bribe was offered and accepted, the parties agreed to meet later that same night ‘to partake of a good supper.’
  Armed with the money that Abershawe had given him to buy his silence, Ferguson immediately set off to St. George’s Field. If Galloping Dick, now with coins in his pockets, expected Nancy to be pleased to see him, he was sorely disappointed. Nancy, in Ferguson’s absence, was entertaining another gentleman. She barred the door to him and resolutely refused him access. ‘Mad with the reception he had met with, he quitted the house, and resolved never to visit her more; which he strictly adhered to.’
  On his way home after leaving Nancy’s house, Ferguson met with the highwayman who had robbed the post-chaise alongside Jerry Abershawe. Galloping Dick accompanied the anonymous felon to a meeting of the gang headed by Abershawe; whether the rendezvous was held in a private house or tavern is lost to time now.
  After ample amounts of alcohol were consumed, it was proposed that Ferguson should join the gang, a proposition that Galloping Dick was happy to agree to. It was decided that Dick would not take part in their first robbery; rather, his role would be to furnish the gang with   information concerning patrons of the inn, what money they carried and at what time they would be travelling. As was the case with the money he had inherited from his father, Ferguson soon spent the money on ‘gambling, drunkenness and debauchery.’
  Eventually, Dick lost his position at the inn. Whether he was suspected of being in league with the highwaymen who haunted the roads around London or for his general lack of discipline is unclear.
  Jerry Abershawe was caught in a Southwark tavern, tried, convicted and left to hang in a gibbet. Dick Ferguson often guided his post-chaise over Kennington Common, where the decaying corpse of his erstwhile comrade twisted in the breeze. While the authorities hoped that the sight of Jerry Abershawe hanging in chains should caution those of a criminal bent to mend their ways, it had no bearing on Galloping Dick Ferguson.
  In need of money after losing his job, Ferguson decided to take the road himself. Once on the Edgeware Road in London, Ferguson and a pair of comrades robbed two men; three men pursued them; while Galloping Dick made his escape, his two fellows were not so fortunate; they were apprehended, tried and executed.
  On Saturday, 9 March 1799, Jackson’s Oxford Journal reported that ‘several suspicious persons’ were being held at the Gaol in Gloucester on suspicion of committing various felonies. One of the men was identified as ’Thomas Clarke, who now stands indicted at the Old Bailey, for having been concerned with Haines, executed on Thursday last, for attacking and Shooting at the Bow Street officers.’
  The ‘Haines’ mentioned in the article was John Haines. On 10 November 1798, in an attempt to apprehend some of the highwaymen that infested the Hounslow area, three Bow Street officers, H. Edwards and two Colleagues, Dowcet and Jones, hired a post-chaise and secreted themselves inside. Four miles outside of Hounslow, the chaise was held up by two highwaymen; one of the men ‘remained at the horses’ heads,’ and the second would-be robber approached the side of the chaise where Edwards was sitting. The first man exclaimed: ‘Damn it, Jack, give it to them.’ On hearing the man’s exhortation, Edwards exchanged pistol fire with both highwaymen and was sure he had found his target. The first man, supposed to be Clarke, asked: ‘Jack, are you hurt?’ Receiving no answer, he wheeled his mount and rode away.
  Haines was tracked down to number 51 Gee Street by a Bow Street officer named Townshend on 15 November, five days after H. Edwards and his colleagues had encountered the highwaymen outside Hounslow. Haines was being attended to by a ‘Mrs. Barrington.’ Edwards had been right in his assertion that he had struck one of the equestrians; ’Surgeon Andrews, who attended the prisoner, said, one ball had passed clean through his shoulder; he was also wounded in the back…and he was sure there were others still in his body.’
  John Haines was found guilty of ‘Feloniously and maliciously shooting at H. Edwards.’ He was sentenced to death and subsequently hanged just days before Clarke, his alleged accomplice, was held at Gloucester.
  The article which had announced Clarke’s capture added that a second man apprehended at the same time ‘Went by the name of Baker… Richard Ferguson, alias Galloping Dick, also charged with divers felonies.’
A three-line item in The Observer on Sunday, 8 September, noted that Galloping Dick and two other men ‘J. Slate, alias Hooker…and V. Middleton,’ were remanded for ‘further examination.’
The following February, ‘the well known Galloping Dick and Stephen Molineux, his companion…were…committed to Newgate for trial at several assizes, on charges of horse-stealing in the counties of Buckingham and Surrey.’ It is unknown who Molineux was, whether he was Slate, Middleton, or yet another of Ferguson’s associates.
  The Buckinghamshire Lent Assizes of 1800 were held at Aylesbury on March 5. The presiding judge was Mr. Justice Grose. Richard Ferguson was joined in the dock by a second man, John Canterill. One of the crimes that Galloping Dick was tried for was robbing a man of ‘a guinea and 1/6 in other money’ near Iver, Buckinghamshire.
  Both Canterill and Ferguson were found guilty of highway robbery, and Justice Grose donned the black cap before passing the death sentence on them.
  Richard Ferguson went to the gallows in Aylesbury on Wednesday, 26 March 1800. Unlike his erstwhile Mentor, Jerry Abershawe, ‘he met his awful fate with a becoming resolution.’

©Mark Young 2024

Sources

The Newgate Calendar

The Observer

Jackson’s Oxford Journal

The Times

The Derby Mercury