How a historic women-only gang menaced London for many years

The all-female Forty Elephants lived by their very own shoplifting and pickpocketing code. Now a brand new Disney+ collection from the creator of Peaky Blinders tells the wild true story of the gang and its “queen”, Mary Carr.

An organised crime gang working in a capital metropolis is hardly uncommon. The Mafia, the yakuza and the triads, to call however a number of, have all discovered wealthy pickings in cities the world over. What makes the Forty Elephants totally different, other than their unusual identify, is the truth that they have been a women-only syndicate. They usually have been led by a queen.

The story of the primary of their leaders is dramatised in a lavish new six-episode Disney+ collection from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. A Thousand Blows revolves round Mary Carr, performed by Erin Doherty, hitherto greatest recognized for her position as Princess Anne in The Crown, and one other actual historic determine, the gloriously named Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby), a Jamaican man who got here to London within the late nineteenth Century. 

Knight was initially approached by the manufacturing firm arrange by husband-and-wife crew Stephen Graham and Hannah Walters (who each seem within the collection) with the thought of writing a drama about Moscow. “A narrative about an actual one who got here from Jamaica with an ambition to turn out to be a lion tamer and have become a very well-known boxer? That is just about irresistible,” Knight tells the BBC. “And once I dug into it and discovered about this particular person and his experiences, it was very compelling. Earlier than then, for a very long time, I might wished to inform the story of the Forty Elephants. Each of these true tales are superb, and the very fact is that they have been each taking place on the identical time and in the identical place. I believed it will be fascinating to think about what would have occurred if Mary and Hezekiah had met – and that is what this present is about.”

A Thousand Blows opens with Moscow and his pal, newly arrived within the British capital, witnessing Carr and her Elephants working a pickpocketing rip-off close to the docks. We quickly be taught that Carr has far grander ambitions and is planning an audacious heist. “Anybody can steal from the underside,” she tells her lieutenants. “It is time we stole from the highest.” She crosses paths with Moscow on the Blue Coat Boy, a pub owned by Henry ‘Sugar’ Goodson (Graham) – a fighter and one other actual historic determine – and he or she introduces herself as “the Queen of the Forty Elephants, the most important, quickest, most unbiased gang of feminine thieves in the entire of London”.

Dependable details about the true Mary Carr is scarce. We all know that she was born in 1862 in Holborn, London, and that by 1881 she was an inmate at a feminine penitentiary in Kent, a strict facility for “fallen girls” run by the Church of England. The exact cause for Carr’s admission is unclear, however she had been convicted of shoplifting on the age of 14. Her mom was useless by then, and her father, a thief and fraudster, may have been in jail or overseas. 

In keeping with Brian McDonald’s e book Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants, Carr had placing seems and labored as a flower vendor in London’s Covent Backyard. She was additionally an artist’s mannequin for Dorothy Tennant, who revealed an illustrated e book referred to as London Avenue Arabs, and for Frederic Leighton, whose best-known work is Flaming June. Someday round 1890, she was elected as “Queen” of the Forty Elephants, an organisation of round 40 girls whose origin is shrouded in thriller.

The historian and writer Hallie Rubenhold, who has written quite a lot of books about girls and crime, is a historic advisor on A Thousand Blows. “I had heard of the Forty Elephants, however till [joining the series], I hadn’t performed any actual analysis on them,” she says. “They’re fascinating however very enigmatic characters. Some individuals have prompt they have been round as early because the 18th Century, however I do not consider there was rigorous scholarship which might affirm any of this. After all, there have been many ladies who have been thieves and pickpockets in that interval, as trial information present, however that does not essentially imply there was a connection to the Forty Elephants. We solely first hear about them within the 1870s.”

Carr’s gang was based mostly across the Elephant and Citadel space of south London, and plenty of of its members have been the girlfriends or family of males in a gang of thieves referred to as the Elephant Boys. The realm itself was named after a tough pub within the district. The Forty Elephants’ essential felony actions have been pickpocketing and shoplifting, continuously concentrating on London’s high-end outlets. Carr and associates crop up many times in police information and trial transcripts and, sometimes, newspaper tales, usually being charged with theft and dealing with stolen items.

In his e book London Labour and the London Poor, revealed in 1851, the journalist and campaigner Henry Mayhew recognized the Elephant and Citadel as a criminal offense hotspot and in addition described the kind of shoplifting strategies usually employed by Carr and the Elephants. Two or three girls would go right into a retailer when it was busy and ask to have a look at a few of its wares: “They may seemingly ask to see another items, and hold wanting on the totally different articles till they get a amount on the counter. When the shopman is engaged getting some recent items from the window, or from the cabinets, certainly one of them usually contrives to slide one thing underneath her cloak or scarf, whereas the opposite manages to maintain his consideration abstracted.”

They wore garments specifically tailored to facilitate theft. “We continuously discover the skirt of their costume lined from the pocket downward, forming a big repository throughout the costume, with a gap in entrance, the place they’ll insert a small article, which isn’t noticed within the ample crinoline,” Mayhew wrote.

“Folks usually anticipated girls to be extra sincere and law-abiding, which might have given the Elephants a bonus once they went on certainly one of their raids,” says Rubenhold. “Their operation appears to have been extra refined and organised than merely opportunist theft.”

The Elephants additionally grew to become skilled in a type of blackmail. Mary or certainly one of her gang would lure an aged gentleman into an alley after which accuse him of attacking her and threaten to go to the police. Different gang members would seem and declare to have witnessed the “assault”. The sufferer would often half firm together with his valuables with the intention to keep away from embarrassment. 

One other factor which set the Elephants other than different criminals was the truth that they apparently had a algorithm, referred to as the “hoister’s code” – “hoist” being their time period for shoplifting. All members of the Elephants have been anticipated to stick to those guidelines. In keeping with McDonald, they have been written down by a male affiliate of a household linked with the Elephants with the intention of promoting them to the press, however they have been by no means revealed. The principles included:

“No ingesting earlier than a raid, and early hours to mattress.”

“Proceeds from a job are equally shared by the group members concerned, it doesn’t matter what their position.”

“Members should not steal from one another (their cash or boyfriends).”

“The Forties was a sort of co-op,” wrote McDonald. “The Queen could have been the unequivocal chief, however the equal share of booty and the communal funds accessible to these arrested helped to foster a way of equality and to knit the syndicate collectively. The stricture to not steal one another’s boyfriends – not all the time noticed – was equally designed to keep up group concord.”

Carr’s grip on the gang appears to have been lessened after a case in 1896 during which she was charged with and convicted of the kidnapping of a six-year-old boy, Michael Magee, from Epsom races. In keeping with McDonald, Carr appeared in court docket “in a splendid black velvet cloak, trimmed with fur, over a black silk costume, her head adorned by a broad-brimmed Rembrandt hat boasting 5 ostrich feathers. On her fingers glittered seven diamond rings, valued by one journalist at greater than £300, at a time when a working man’s wage was lower than £2 per week.” McDonald surmises that the kid was bought by his mom to a gangster who positioned him in Carr’s care with the intention of promoting him on to a childless couple. The teenager was discovered at Carr’s house 10 months after his disappearance, following an nameless tip-off to the police. Carr was discovered responsible and sentenced to a few years in jail. Michael’s mom apparently didn’t need the boy again and he was taken into care. 

After Mary’s launch, she was arrested once more in 1900 for receiving stolen items and was sentenced to 2 years. Thereafter, it was a downward spiral. McDonald experiences that she was implicated within the 1909 theft of a jeweller’s store in Ludgate Circus, London, however not convicted. Later, she is believed to have been “working” within the Manchester space, the place, posing as socialite Woman Mary Carr, she was invited to the kind of capabilities the place an completed thief and con artist may spend a worthwhile couple of hours. She is assumed to have died in 1924 – however the Forty Elephants didn’t die together with her.  

One in every of Carr’s successors as queen of the gang was Alice Diamond, who additionally options as a personality in The Thousand Blows, Knight having used a little bit of creative licence with the timelines. Diamond was born in 1886 to felony dad and mom in Lambeth Workhouse. On the age of 17 she was convicted of stealing from a hat store in Oxford Avenue, and by the age of 20 she was carrying a set of diamond rings that doubled as a knuckle duster. The Elephants had a larger propensity for violence underneath her rule, so there’s loads of scope for A Thousand Blows to be a returning drama, very like Peaky Blinders. 

“Season two is already shot, and I am very eager to proceed telling the story as a result of there’s much more story to inform,” says Knight. “There have been nonetheless individuals who recognized themselves as Forty Elephants within the Fifties. The reality and actuality are far more fascinating than something you may invent.”

A Thousand Blows launches on Disney+ within the UK and Hulu within the US on 21 February.