The Forty Thieves: Alice Diamond
Mary Carr might have started the gang, but Alice Diamond is the one we remember best. A real-life all-female crime syndicate that made shoplifting into a production line.
As we get closer to the big launch of Stephen Knight’s A Thousand Blows on Disney+ it’s worth taking a closer look at Alice Diamond, the successor to Mary Carr as the leader of the Forty Elephants crime gang.
At just 19, Alice Diamond stepped forward to take up leadership of the notorious Forty Thieves gang from Mary Carr, sometimes known as the Forty Elephants due to their connections to Elephant and Castle in London. Fashion conscious and outgoing, Alice's interwar Forty Thieves knew how to enjoy themselves. They specialized in immaculately planned and executed shoplifting raids in the most fashionable stores of London’s West End.
Alice was an expert in physical disguise and used pseudonyms to evade capture. Many of the Forty Thieves had experience in the textiles industry. There were plenty of jobs for working-class women, although they were poorly paid. This gave them a sense of fashion and an ability to understand which rolls of fabric might be the most valuable to steal, and some of them had tailoring skills which allowed them to make voluminous skirts in which to hide stolen goods.
They adapted all kinds of dresses, coats and other items by adding hooks and belts, allowing them to carry off surprisingly large amounts of contraband undetected. Caitlin Davies, writing in her brilliant book, Queens of the Underworld, found that there might have been as many as 10,000 professional female shoplifters by the end of the 1920s in London. Solo operators would not count as gangsters, but this is a surprising number given how few of their stories are remembered today.
I loved reading about the female gangsters in your book British Gangs. Other historians focus on wealthy ladies, but these working-class girls were braver and more resourceful than the rebellious debutantes. That book needs to be turned into a film.