Gangsters and mobsters are commonly immortalised in fashionable tradition and regarded again on with a kind of twisted fascination.
From the Peaky Blinders to the Kray Twins, these hard-man figures are romanticised within the minds of many.
In these retellings of gang tradition and prison exercise within the media and on TV, girls are so typically overshadowed or utterly ignored.
We typically see portrayals of girls of the previous as timid victims who have been certain to the kitchen and banished to the background.
One group of girls utterly destroy this narrative that has been constructed, and problem the way in which we see gang tradition of the previous.
For many years in London, one all-female, working-class group of girls terrorised the West End, conducting an elaborate shoplifting scheme that gave the lads a run for their cash.
The crime syndicate generally known as the Forty Elephants, was a prison group which have been referred to because the “largest and most feared” all-female gang within the London underworld.
The group have been based mostly round Elephant and Castle, therefore the identify, however at their peak they have been working everywhere in the nation.
The gang have been infamous for their thieving methods, and put in concern into the costly shops of London’s West End after they have been noticed within the space.
They have been first talked about within the information in 1873, however police information counsel they’d existed because the late 1700s. The group are thought to have operated all the way in which up till the Nineteen Fifties.
The group have been one of many gangs featured by Brian McDonald in his 2010 e book Gangs of London. The creator then returned to discover the group additional within the 2015 e book Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants: The Female Gang That Terrorised London .
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Alice Diamond dominated the gang within the early twentieth Century
(Image: The People/ Creative Commons)
They used their female clothes to their benefit
The group have been identified to conduct elaborate shoplifting scams, the place they took benefit of their femininity and position in society to steal from unsuspecting targets.
The group have been identified to raid London’s West End outlets, wearing specifically tailor-made coats, skirts and hats, sewn with hidden pockets to conceal their loot.
The similar conservative outfits designed to conceal girls’s our bodies in public, have been the instruments by which these girls have been ready to plunder items value 1000’s of kilos.
They have been identified to use a mix of intelligent distraction methods in addition to their skilled seductive methods to their benefit.
One fashionable approach was crowding across the counter within the upmarket shops, passing around the costly objects below the guise of excitable inspection, earlier than they have been then dropped to others to conceal.
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“The women benefited from prudish attitudes of the time by taking shelter behind the privateness afforded to girls in massive shops,” mentioned McDonald.
The girls have been additionally identified to use false references to acquire work as housemaid’s earlier than ransacking their rich employers’ properties, and additionally used blackmail to swindle sums of cash from males they’d seduced.
As the world modernised so did they, and by the twentieth century they expanded to different places across the nation and would use high-powered vehicles to outrun the police.
Once they’d stolen the products they might be rapidly handed off to different members of the gang to whisk them distant. By the time the police had caught them, the products have been nowhere to be discovered.
The girls used crime to discover monetary independence in a male-dominated society
The girls have been all from working-class backgrounds, and discovered that they might stay a extra luxurious life main a lifetime of crime than they might with the restricted alternatives out there to them.
Through their prison actions the ladies of the early twentieth Century have been ready to fund lives of lavishness and decadence by means of the roaring twenties.
The girls reportedly hardly ever wore their stolen items, preferring to promote the objects at an inexpensive value, and used the cash to store for themselves legitimately.
The infamous shoplifters would infiltrate the excessive class lives of the elite and wealthy, hanging out on the glamorous lodges, bars and theatres that may have been unreachable for them with out their prison exploits.
“They threw the liveliest of events and spent lavishly at pubs, golf equipment and eating places,” wrote McDonald. “Their lifestyles have been in pursuit of these of glamorous film stars, mixed with the decadent residing of Nineteen Twenties aristocratic flapper society. They learn of the outrageous behaviour of wealthy, vivid younger issues and needed to emulate them.”
“Diamond Annie” dominated the group of their heyday
From 1916 the gang was dominated by the ‘Queen’ and chief, 20-year-old Alice Diamond.
Alice reigned over the gang with navy precision, dividing the gang into cells to ransack a number of outlets throughout town directly.
She was generally known as “Diamond Annie”, due to her diamond rings coated fists which gave her a harmful punch.
The police considered her as “the cleverest of thieves”, and was in court docket on quite a few events due to her violent remedy of policemen.
She reportedly as soon as mentioned: “Police forces are arrange by governments to cease others getting a share of what they’ve obtained!”
While the long-lasting gang have been extremely intelligent and highly effective girls in their very own proper, they have been intently aligned with the infamous males’s Elephant and Castle gang.
The males have been a robust group of smash-and-grab artists, burglars and thieves who operated throughout south London.
Alice was mentioned to be the lover of one of many male gang’s leaders, Bert McDonald, and most of the girls have been associated both by household or by means of relationships to the gang of males.
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In 1925, one of many girls within the gang married a person to the disapproval of chief, Alice, main to what’s now generally known as the Battle of Lambeth.
The battle noticed Alice, and her second-in-command Maggie Hill, sister to gangster Billy Hill, lead an assault on the couple.
Both Alice and Maggie have been despatched to jail, and a brand new Queen emerged within the type of Lillian Rose Kendall.
Lillian was identified for her speciality “smash & seize” techniques, the place she could be concerned in driving vehicles by means of store home windows and grabbing objects.
The group finally fizzled out, and the group’s actions are thought to have ceased within the Nineteen Fifties.
Once Alice was launched from jail she is assumed to have run a brothel and took retirement.
