Such very seductive Shoplifters
Stuffing loot into their bloomers, how a ruthless girl gang spread havoc across London — flirting with victims or battering them with diamond-ring knuckle-dusters
ASUCCESSION of black hansom cabs from south of the Thames rolled to a halt outside Selfridges department store on London’s Oxford Street.
It was the autumn of 1915 and out of each cab, three or four smartly dressed women descended. In their individual groups, they walked purposefully into the shop, as a chauffeured limousine came gliding to a stop behind them.
From the running-board of the motor car stepped a tall, handsome woman in magnificent furs, who swept into Selfridges like a queen.
In the space of the next hour, the women proceeded to loot a fortune in jewellery and clothes. They did it without causing any disturbance, without even being suspected.
The only sign of anything untoward was that all of these elegant ladies looked much bulkier as they sauntered out of the store.
The magnificent woman who had arrived in motorised splendour appeared to be suddenly obese. And well she might. Concealed under her dress were two sable coats, bundled up and stowed in hidden pockets within her petticoats.
Her name was Alice Diamond, acknowledged by one leading detective 100 years ago to be ‘queen of the cleverest gang of hoisters’ ( or shoplifters) in London.
Her all-female gang was known as the Forty Elephants, partly because they all lived within half a mile of the Elephant And Castle pub in Southwark, and partly because, when they waddled out of shops laden with stolen merchandise, the women joked that they looked like elephants.
Their clothes were designed for largescale theft. Slits in the outer garments fed into capacious pockets cunningly sewn into the layers beneath. This was an era when bustles and acres of crinoline were still worn, and the amount of contraband a female thief could conceal beneath her dress was limited only by her daring and ambition.
A 19-year- old arrested at William Whiteley’s emporium in Bayswater, West London, was discovered to have a bag made of alpaca fur suspended from her waist, hanging down to her knees. Police counted 45 stolen items inside.
Another woman would wear a false arm in her blouse while her real arm, unseen, was busy pilfering.
The gang worked in small groups because a party of friends shopping together would not arouse suspicion, and were able to distract the store assistants much more easily than one woman working alone.
A favourite technique was for three of the girls, chattering excitedly, to start trying on dresses or hats, dropping them on the floor or draping them over counters in their eagerness to try on the next.
Behind them, their ‘ queen’, Alice Diamond, would stroll in. She didn’t pay them any attention and they didn’t so much as look at her.
Of course, the assistants would be far too busy with the noisy girls to attend to this quietly browsing newcomer.
Casually, Alice would put down her coat to examine some item, and then pick it up again. The coat was enormous, and only the sharpest eyes could have spotted that each time Alice picked it up, she scooped up other clothes, too.
Sometimes, Alice operated even in stores where she was known as a thief. This was a psychological ruse she called the ‘ decoy’ — while the staff were watching her every step, an accomplice was behind them stuffing armfuls of clothes under her own dress.
Another technique was called the ‘crush’. A crowd of women would press around the counter and one would demand to be shown trinkets or make-up. Handing the goods to the woman next to her, she would then vigorously deny ever touching them.
The second woman would pass them straight on, and so would the next, until the stolen items ended up with an accomplice at the back of the crush who would leave the store while all the other women were volubly protesting their innocence.
Jewel thefts demanded different techniques. One method was the ‘ringer’, where a gang member would ask to examine an expensive brooch or necklace, study it minutely, and then decline to buy it.
Working from memory, she would have a forger make an exact imitation from paste and glass. A second thief would then go to the shop, ask to see the item, and switch it for the fake under the assistant’s nose.
Perhaps the cheekiest of the Forty Elephants’ ruses was the ‘chewing gum scam’. After America entered World War I in 1917, gum was suddenly fashionable, and the women would walk around shops ostentatiously chewing.
One would press a ball of gum under the ledge of the jewellery counter, ask to see a selection of rings, and then stick one into the wad. If detectives searched her, she would have nothing incriminating on her. Meanwhile, an accomplice would waltz past the coun- ter, collecting the ring as she went.
After a successful day’s ‘hoisting’, the gang would descend on a West End hotel and start carousing at the bar, ordering freely and flirting with the staff. They’d be back the next day and the next, because the Forty Elephants went shoplifting five days a week.
Soon, the girls would seem like part of the hotel fabric. The waiters would treat them more like friends than customers. That’s when Alice and her crew went to work, sweeping the rooms for everything they could lift in one co-ordinated wave of theft, before vanishing into the night-time streets.
Every Monday, when the department stores were at their quietest and the assistants and store detectives were least harassed, the gang took the day off — and partied riotously. Vast quantities of alcohol were consumed, and some of the gangsters (though not Alice) were heavy cocaine users, too. Alice Diamond was such a confident trickster that once, when she was being questioned outside a jeweller’s after a theft, she managed to get rid of the evidence by slipping the stolen bracelet into a detective’s pocket.
But she was no gentle-lady. Standing nearly 5ft 9in tall, a full fist higher than the average London man in 1915, she was broad-boned and strong. During her first arrest, as a teenager, it took three policemen to hold her down. Whereas some women fought with hat-pins, Alice carried a steel blackjack and wore diamond rings for knuckle-dusters.
The oldest of eight children, she was born at Lambeth Workhouse Infirmary, where the actor Charlie Chaplin lived as a child, in 1896.
From her first moments, life was tough. Workhouse conditions were
They found two sable coats hidden
in her petticoats
On days off, they partied with booze
and cocaine
deliberately harsh, to discourage their use by any but the most desperate cases. her father Thomas was an illiterate, violent man, who had been jailed for assaulting a policeman and who stole whatever he could lay his hands on.
In 1913, aged 17, alice received her first jail sentence, six weeks in holloway prison for stealing blouses from Gamages department store in holborn circus.
her criminal tendencies were fuelled not only by the poverty of her childhood and her father’s lifetime of petty theft, but also her aspirations. alice wanted much more than money for food and lodgings. she wanted glamour. This was the era of silent film, when the first cinema heroines, such as Pearl White in The Perils Of Pauline, were enticing young women to dream of romance and adventure.
There was no hope of this on a housemaid’s pay. For the likes of alice Diamond, destiny was bleak: become a servant or a laundress, marry into poverty, have countless children and own nothing. There were three escape routes.
One was suicide, an increasingly frequent resort for women with no means of support, especially once gas ovens became commonplace.
another was prostitution, though this was a grim prospect, often leading to alcohol abuse and disease.
The third was crime. For a stupid thief, this was perhaps the worst choice of all, because it could quickly lead to a lifetime of hard labour in jail. But alice was not a stupid thief. she was a professional — and meticulous — one.
Before alice was 20, she had learned how to ‘put on the posh’ as she called it — dressing, talking and looking like her film idols.
her gang did not wear what they stole. That would be asking for trouble. Instead, they took it to fences such as alfie hughes, who paid only a small percentage of the contraband’s real worth but settled, crucially, in cash and on the spot.
alfie was husband to maggie hughes, alice’s closest ally in the Forty Elephants. Nicknamed Babyface, maggie was tiny, under 4ft 11in, with brown hair and grey eyes, but her personality was less nondescript.
With tattoos on both arms and a psychotic temper, maggie was uncontrollable when drunk — and she was almost always drunk.
she also had a flair for the bizarre — she drove a Ford V8 car with a periscope on the roof, so she could spot police before they saw her. as the Forty Elephants became well-known in London’s West End, they began to target stores across the country. In their powerful cars, it was easy to raid Bath, Brighton, Bristol and the midlands, and get back before midnight to the south London lock-ups, where they stored their bounty.
By the Twenties, maggie’s violent outbursts meant she spent most of her time in jail and, when she was out, she could no longer be trusted as an accomplice.
But however strained relationships became within the gang, there was one unbreakable rule: the Forty Elephants stood by their own. They were a clan, and all outsiders were enemies.
Gang members, such as Eva Fraser — big sister of the kray Twins’ associate, ‘mad’ Frankie Fraser — were Elephants for life.
It was inevitable, then, that when that code was broken, the reign of Queen alice would end. One of the girls, marie Britten, fell in love with a boy who didn’t come from southwark. Pregnant, she defied alice’s orders and married her lover.
On the night of December 20, 1925, alice, maggie and most of the gang gathered at the canterbury social club near Lambeth’s New cut market and drank themselves into a fighting mood. armed with bottles, stones and lumps of concrete, they marched to marie’s lodgings, smashed their way in and held marie at gunpoint while her husband was beaten senseless.
Police broke up the riot and arrested the gang. alice was jailed for 18 months. maggie, who had incited the riot, got 21 months.
While they were inside, a new queen took over the gang.
Lilian Rose kendall, known as the Bobbed-haired Bandit because of her short fringe and side curls, specialised in smash- and- grab raids. Lilian was a daring getaway driver, who used her car to smash through jewellers’ windows, such as cartier’s in Bond street.
By now, alice Diamond was out of prison, but she couldn’t hope to compete with such energetic crimes. she ran a brothel in Lambeth for years, a godmother figure to the new generation and always willing to pass on tips for shoplifters. During World War II she refused to be evacuated from London, and died in 1952, aged just 55, from multiple sclerosis. From time to time in later life, she would be arrested, but she was usually too clever for the courts. after one acquittal, an exasperated magistrate asked her why she did not like policemen.
her reply was vehemently political: ‘Police forces are set up by governments to stop others getting a share of what they’ve got!’
Whatever else alice Diamond did, she got her share.
ADAPTED by Christopher Stevens from Alice Diamond And The Forty Elephants: The Female Gang That Terrorised London, by Brian McDonald, published by Milo Books at £8.99. To buy a copy for £6.74, visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Offer until December 26, p&p is free on orders over £12.
She used her car
to smash into jewellery shops