A Thousand Blows and the criminal girl gang that terrorised 1920s London

Telegraph

21-02-2025

As Christmas 1927 approached, London's swanky department stores braced for a surge in shoplifting. Female shoplifters were a phenomenon of the day and their light-fingered antics were often reported in newspapers.
One store bolstered its ranks of store detectives and employed a coded light system, which would warn employees whenever a known thief had entered. But the upmarket stores didn't anticipate the scale and strength of the military-like spree that would hit them. On December 23, a fleet of cars – police estimated at least 14 – departed from Elephant and Castle and ferried thieves to stores across the city: Gamages in Holborn, Harrods in Knightsbridge, Selfridges on Oxford Street, Debenham & Freebody on Wigmore Street, and numerous others.
In the modern world, where crime stories are dominated by male gangsters, the idea of an all-female crime syndicate – from a century ago, no less – seems shocking. At the time of the Christmas 1927 raid, however, the most accomplished of London's female shoplifters – a gang known as the Forty Elephants – had been at work for decades. Their antics are now depicted in Steven Knight 's new historical crime series, A Thousand Blows, on Disney+.
Knight's series begins a generation earlier than the 1927 Christmas raid, though, telling a fictionalised account of the original real-life 'Queen' of the gang, Mary Carr (played by Erin Doherty), alongside Victorian boxers Hezekiah Moscow and Sugar Goodson (played by Malachi Kirby and Stephen Graham).
In reality, Carr was succeeded by Alice Diamond, who masterminded the gang's activities during the interwar years, their most prolific period. In the series, Diamond appears as a supporting character (played by Darci Shaw) who joins the ranks of the gang.
There was an artistry to their shoplifting. The women were known to use creative methods such as wearing big billowy dresses with interior pockets and netting in which they could stash pilfered items. Other raids were riotous. The women would charge into stores, terrifying staff and shoppers, and brazenly snatch goods. Their tricks and exploits were detailed in the 2015 book, Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants by Brian McDonald.
'Raids were all over the country, some on a huge scale,' says McDonald. One London store estimated that it had lost up to £7,000 in goods over a year – more than half a million in today's money.
Steven Knight places the Forty Elephants in the East End but their base of operations was – as the name suggests – Elephant and Castle in south London. Though it's true, as seen in the show, that they targeted the wealthy West End.
The gang was an offshoot of the male crime syndicate, the Elephant Gang, which had formed in the 1780s in the Elephant and Castle Tavern, for which the area is named. Elephant and Castle became urbanised in the late 1700s as a key junction that linked major London locations and bridges, and provided access to the City of London. 'It was like a Piccadilly of south London,' says McDonald.
As Britain entered the Victorian era from the 1830s, the country experienced continued industrialisation, economic growth, and the strength of its powerful empire. Yet there was also significant inequality. London's expanding population led to squalid, unsanitary, overcrowded slums. And, in turn, poor living conditions in the slums – unemployment, hunger, high rents – led to a rise in gangs across the 1800s. There were racing gangs, who terrorised horse racing meets; garrotting gangs, who strangled victims to incapacitate them; footpads, who robbed waylaid pedestrians; and pickpockets who stalked busy thoroughfares such as The Strand, and lingered in dark alleys.
As McDonald describes in his book, the city's wealth was held north of the river, and the Elephant and Castle just across the Thames on the southern bank became a hub of dangerous criminal gang activity. Female gangs were also born out of social conditions of the time. Multiple family members – or, indeed, multiple families – shared houses, and women banded together for protection against men. They formed tight knit crews and were encouraged by the men in their family to join in with criminal activities. Many of the Forties had links to their male counterparts in the Elephant Gang; they were wives, lovers, sisters, and daughters. By the 1890s, though, the women operated independently and were soon known as the Forty Thieves (they didn't get the Forty Elephants moniker until the 1920s).
The gang's original queen, Mary Carr, was born in Holborn in 1862. A Thousand Blows depicts Carr's mother (played by Susan Lynch) as a matriarch crime boss, but in real life her mother died when young Mary was just nine. Carr was a thief by her teenage years and spent time in a convent reform institution for wayward women.
She grew up to be a beauty, working as an artist's model and dressing elegantly. Indeed, while the Forties fenced the clothing they stole, they also wore high fashion, which allowed them to navigate posh department stores without suspicion, and they enjoyed a lavish lifestyle. At one point, Carr – who went by numerous aliases – passed herself off as a socialite, Lady Mary Carr. Other Forty Thieves members disguised themselves as maids so they could blag their way into fancy houses.
Another ploy was pretending to lose her purse and luring an unsuspecting gentleman into walking her home. At that point, she would lead him to a compromising spot and scream. The Forties would then surround him, claiming to be witnesses to an assault, and blackmail the gentleman. 'It said in the newspapers that at least three MPs had been caught up in it,' says McDonald. 'One of them paid up to £400, which was an enormous amount of money in the late 1800s.' (More than £650,000 in today's money.)
In 1896, Mary was sentenced to three years for the kidnapping of a gypsy boy. The boy had been taken by an East End villain – or possibly sold by his own mother – and given to Carr to look after. Carr apparently took very good care of him, though the boy's mother declined to take her son back and he may have gone into foster care.
Mary Carr came to court wearing a fur-trimmed velvet cloak, a black silk dress, a Rembrandt hat with five ostrich feathers, and diamond rings estimated to be worth £300. But as soon as she was released from her kidnapping sentence, Carr began fencing goods stolen from West End hotels and was sentenced to two years in Wormwood Scrubs. She also went on a shoplifting spree that proved so fruitful she needed a horse-drawn cab to carry her loot.
Carr was notorious enough that she inspired a fabulously titled play – The Worst Woman in London, Her Second Time on Earth, The Female Swindler, But A Disgrace to Her Sex by Walter Melville – which was staged on Broadway and in the West End in 1899, and continued in theatres until 1906. But all that's known about Carr's demise is a note in a police blotter, which suggested she died in 1924. Alice Diamond had assumed control of the Forties a decade earlier.
In A Thousand Blows, Alice is portrayed as a Selfridges shopgirl who wants to join Carr's gang. Carr tasks young Alice with some jobs to test her criminal mettle, but also tells her wannabe protégé, 'You don't become an Elephant. Elephants are born.' That may have actually been the case with the real Alice Diamond.
Born in 1896 in a workhouse infirmary, Alice grew up in Southwark – a very tough ghetto – and moved between horrendous lodgings while her father went in and out of prison. She was in trouble for stealing as a teenager and, at the age of 18, she was sentenced to a year for warehouse theft. Even at this young age, police already knew her as the Queen of the Forties.
McDonald later heard stories about her exploits. 'I grew up around the Elephant and I was told tales by my Aunt Ada,' he says. 'She used to fence stuff for Alice Diamond and the girls, and it was said to me by another aunt that if customers wanted something, like a sable coat, they'd go to Aunt Ada. She would then go to Alice, and Alice and one of her friends would go out and pinch one.'
The First World War put a temporary pause on the gang's operations – the men went off to fight and the women earned a decent wage working in munitions factories – but Diamond oversaw an interwar boom in shoplifting. Department stores, many of which opened in the 1910s, changed the shoplifting game by laying luxury items out on tables for shoppers to inspect. And the shoplifters came up with ingenious tricks to swipe clothes, hats, muffs, bags, silks, jewelry, anything.
'The girls became so expert that they created their own special clothing,' says McDonald. 'They had large bloomers and skirts with slits in them where they could push plunder through. They could conceal a fur coat or bolt of silk, tightly folded, which the girls called clouting. At times they had a bag suspended under their skirt that dangled between their legs. Changing rooms provided huge opportunities because it was unthinkable to search a woman in those days. They also excelled in walk-in theft at tailoring shops. Anything left on a bench disappeared. False arms in coat sleeves enabled women to reach out of their coats with a free hand.'
Later, when chewing gum was imported from America, they'd stick a ring under a counter with gum, then leave it for another woman to grab.
In his book, McDonald links the activities of the female criminals to changes in British society, such as the shift from Victorian to the Edwardian era from 1901. Edward VII, he writes, 'ushered in a libertine way of life... It became acceptable to be bold, daring, and even brazen.' McDonald also calls the suffragettes a 'surprising' influence on the Forties. Some members were involved in the movement's violent protests; others stole goods while suffragette riots hit the West End.
Store detectives were employed to tackle the shoplifters. Private detective Gertrude Hunter, for instance, was hired as a store detective at Brixton's Bon Marché after it opened in 1877 and notched up 800 arrests across her career. There were numerous female private detectives working in Victorian Britain – a phenomenon of the time in their own right – as well as other notable female store detectives, such as Annie Betts, who was dubbed 'Lady Sherlock Holmes'.
During the 1920s, British newspapers became fascinated with the exploits of the Forty Elephants. They seemed particularly fascinated with how tall Alice Diamond was – 'over six feet in height,' wrote the Evening Standard in 1926 (she was 5'9') – with headlines that described them as, 'tall women who prey on the West End'.
Diamond managed the gang by dividing them into smaller cells of roughly five women. These cells could raid numerous stores at once and even travelled to other cities – including Bristol, Bath, Birmingham, Manchester, and Newcastle – to hit less-well-protected provincial stores. Cells could also storm a department from several entry points, causing chaos. The men from the Elephant Gang would often drive them and were on hand if there was any trouble. Not that the ladies couldn't handle themselves. Diamond had also ratcheted up the levels of violence in the Elephants, which extended to its own members.
'Under Alice Diamond there was strict discipline,' says McDonald. 'Any of them breaking the rules would be beaten and their family ostracized… Her niece told me that people were frightened of her. Rival gangs steered well clear.'
Alice's rules – which were unwritten but documented by an associate – included: 'Members must not aid police in any way'; 'Families must be looked after while a member is in prison'; 'No drinking before a raid, and early hours to bed', and 'members must not steal from each other (their money or boyfriends).'
In December 1925 there was a violent clash within the group – known as 'the Lambeth riot' – which was kicked off by one of the Elephants, Marie Britten, marrying outside the group without permission. Britten had fought with another Elephant, and Alice Diamond led a drunken mob to Britten's house. Police estimated there were between thirty and forty of them – both men and women. Armed with bottles and lumps of stone, the mob smashed the windows and attacked the Britten family inside.
One gang member who'd been part of the riot, Maggie Hughes – known as 'Baby-Face' – was especially dangerous. 'She was a vicious razor girl,' says McDonald. 'She attacked a number of rival women with open razors and broken bottles.' Indeed, Maggie was sentenced to three years after one victim lost an eye. Baby-Face Maggie would go on to lose one of her own eyes fighting with another prisoner.
The Forty Elephants' last big year was 1939, before the country was plunged into war. There were some flurries of activity later, but the phenomenon had largely faded after the death of Alice Diamond in 1952. Brian McDonald suggests that improvements in shop security and beefed-up security staff also led to its demise.
Queen Alice Diamond – and raids such as the one carried out at Christmas 1927 – would reign supreme in London's female underworld history. An overlooked history now brought to bruising, brawling life in A Thousand Blows.