Inside dark world of Forty Thieves girl gang who wore diamond rings as knuckle dusters and made Peaky Blinders look tame
ARMED with diamond ring knuckle dusters and hair pins that double up as knifes, the infamous Forty Thieves weren’t to be messed with.
Ransacking stores across London‘s bustling West End in the 1920s, the all-female group – also known as the Forty Elephants – were in and out of jail so often they made the Peaky Blinders look tame.
With shoplifting on the rise across Britain, even posh department store John Lewis is being targeted, with bosses declaring that gangs and shoplifters have become much bolder in their methods.
But they still have some way to go to match the audacity of the Forty Thieves, who carried razor blades in their pockets like their fictional TV counterparts.
Here, author Beezy Marsh – who has investigated the gang in her new crime saga Queen of Thieves – reveals how they operated… and how they are still at it today.
The Forty Thieves rose to national notoriety for their exploits during the 1920s when they started “steaming” through London’s top stores, in Bond Street and Oxford Street, in their daylight shoplifting raids.
Jewellery and watches were snatched from countertops, swapped for worthless fakes and hidden under their hats or even in their hair.
They were daring and, as police files in the National Archives show, were often violent when cornered.
When the heat was on in London, they went on thieving trips to Southend, Brighton, Liverpool and Manchester.
One of their favourite ruses was to post their loot back to London or deposit a suitcase full of stolen furs at the railway station’s left luggage office, to be collected later.
It was a sophisticated crime operation, with stolen goods dispatched by a network of female ‘fences’ throughout the slums.
Mothers were even persuaded to courier furs, silks and stockings from street to street in their prams, for a fee.
The gang is believed to have had its roots in Victorian London of the 1880s, around the slums of the Seven Dials in Covent Garden, which was infamous in Charles Dickens‘ day, led by a feisty but beautiful young woman called Mary Carr, who also worked part-time as an artist’s model.
But by the 1920s, the grim terraces of Waterloo and the tenements of the Elephant and Castle provided a plentiful supply of girls desperate enough to join The Forty Thieves.
Nearly 100 years on from the start of their heyday, their story shatters the myth that gangland was a man’s world.
Female Peaky Blinders
The record of their crimes reads like a female Peaky Blinders and some of these larger-than-life characters, led by Alice Diamond, inspired my latest novel, Queen of Diamonds.
Alice stood at over six feet tall, was their ‘Queen’ and ruled the Roaring Twenties with an iron (or diamond) fist.
Her deputy, Maggie Hughes, was just as brutal, and her favourite method of punishment was to stab her victims in the eye with her hat pin.
They came prepared with specially-made coats with secret pockets, or wore baggy bloomers which had been adapted with elastic at the knee to hold in their spoils.
A successful day’s work for Alice would see her making off with a sable wrap, leather gloves and silk stockings.
She would work with an accomplice, usually a good-looking, well-dressed young lady – who would feign interest in another item, allowing Alice to stroll down the stairs and into Oxford Street, where her getaway car was waiting with the engine running.
The girls looked and dressed like film stars of their day, rubbing shoulders with aristocrats and posh folk in high class restaurants, theatres and fashionable nightclubs, but any man who tried to take a slice of their profits would soon discover that Alice’s glittering rings also acted as a knuckle duster.
As Queen, Alice enforced a code of conduct, including never helping a policeman or informing.
Members handed everything that was pinched to her, in return for a generous weekly wage.
Those who transgressed could expect punishment and Alice and her mob were handy with their hatpins and razors, which they carried in their handbags.
As well as their specially adapted petticoats with hidden pockets or baggy bloomers with elastic at the knee, they learned to roll furs on the hanger and shove them down their knickers, a skill called “clouting”, in the grim tenement sculleries of South London, before heading over the river to the West End to ply their trade.
Modern menace
The notorious gang might have tormented London 100 years ago but some of their descendants are still at work today.
As I traced relatives of the original gang, I found that the family tradition of “hoisting” was still going strong, with many using similar methods today and the same daring that Alice and her gang displayed decades before.
The granddaughter of one of the leading lights of the Forty Thieves was a stunning blonde in her 40s who was incredibly stylish.
She revealed to me in 2018 how she regularly went “shopping” in large department stores equipped with a pair of scissors and a device to remove security tags. She saw this as her “work”.
She was often accompanied by her mum, who was in her 70s and looked years younger.
She was a super stylish pensioner and shoplifter of designer clothing. She admitted she had friends the same age who were still at it too.
“I was taught by my nan, who learned from Alice Diamond during the 1930s, so I suppose you could say it runs in the family,’ she told me, without a shred of remorse.
‘The way I see it, designer clothes are a rip-off price-wise, and shops have insurance, so who am I hurting really?’
Another very well-dressed relative told me that her entire Chanel outfit had been pinched and the only thing not stolen was her knickers, adding: “I like to buy those from Marks and Spencer.”
The way I see it, designer clothes are a rip off price-wise, and shops have insurance, so who am I hurting really?
Modern shoplifter
Other descendants of the gang confided that they used their skills to pinch food from supermarkets – usually a joint of meat – to help feed their families.
One even joked, “Well, every little helps,” as she told me shamelessly how she liked to hide a leg of lamb under her spare shopping bags in the trolley.
A relative of one of the original girls in the gang from the 1920s told me: “They were poor girls who really had no prospects and so they organised themselves and broke the law to make their lives better.
“They were legends round our way when my gran was growing up.”
Police files
Delving into the UK National Archives I unearthed secret police files on the gang, who were regularly dragged in front of the courts and jailed – usually for short stints.
There, I found mugshots taken shortly after their arrests, while they are still wearing their finery, paid for by the proceeds of crime.
In the photos, The Forty Thieves stare into the camera lens, without remorse, knowing that the grim confines of Holloway Prison await them.
I also unearthed newspaper cuttings of court reports from the 1920s and 1930s, featuring the exploits of Alice Diamond and her deputy Maggie Hughes.
With her pale gold hair and cool demeanour, Alice captured the imagination of reporters. As her infamy grew, so did she – literally.
Police records from 1919 have her standing 5ft 9in tall but by the mid-1920s, newspapers have her towering at 6ft in the dock, as the “Giant Queen of The Terrors” while being sentenced for larceny.
Prison won’t cure me! It will make me a worse villain
Maggie Hughes
When she was caught, she would simply reply: “I don’t know anything about it.”
Her deputy, the flame-haired, hot-tempered Maggie Hughes, was the perfect counterpoint, protesting loudly while being sentenced for stealing three trays of gold rings and ermine wraps: “Prison won’t cure me! It will make me a worse villain!”
Her police record notes she was a small woman, standing less than five feet tall, but had loose morals, a liking for drink and a violent temper.
In the 1930s, when she was sent to prison for attacking a policeman with her hatpin, she flirted with the judge as he called for her to be taken away, joking: “You didn’t say that last night, your Honour!”
By the early 1950s, Alice Diamond was in ill-health and the community had tired of her violence.
She eventually died of pneumonia in 1952, aged around 55, having officially been working as a flower seller (though those who knew her claim she was supplementing her income working as a prostitute’s maid).
The fiery Maggie Hughes descended into drink and the gang distanced itself from her during the 1940s, as she became seen as a liability.
She relied on the protection of her brother Billy Hill, a notorious Soho gangland boss, and died alone in a flat he rented for her in 1949.
If anything, their muted ending was a reminder crime doesn’t pay, but it is still shocking to discover that their casual and shameless attitude towards shoplifting has persisted for generations.