London's Criminal Underworlds, c. 1720 - c. 1930

A Social and Cultural History

Heather Shore

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137313911
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

This book offers an original and exciting analysis of the concept of the criminal underworld. Print culture, policing and law enforcement, criminal networks, space and territory are explored here through a series of case studies taken from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

1

Introduction

COURT. Soams is your Name? How long have you gone by that Name?

ISABELLA EATON. About a 12 Month.

COURT. I think I have try’d you here by another Name.

EATON. Very like you might try me, my Lord, and by another Name too; but what if you did, I was Innocent, and my Jury acquitted me. I never came here for my Crimes, but my Passions.¹

WILLIAM SHEEN: ‘I have known what it is to stand at that bar myself, and have been as lenient to the prisoner as if she had been my own child – I have no doubt you are aware of what I was here for – they think they have a right to rob me – I was never a thief in my life – I feel for the prisoner, but she has robbed my sister four sessions ago’.²

We are not an ‘organised’ gang and never have been. So far from encouraging feuds and outbursts I have endeavoured in every possible way to keep the warring factions wide apart so that there should be no violent conflicts of any description.³

These vignettes remind us that criminals have more than one identity. As the accused, as witnesses, as victims and as members of communities, they contribute to the narratives of crime that were woven around them by magistrates and lawyers, policemen, journalists and other commentators. Isabella Eaton gives evidence at the Old Bailey trial of Jane Murphey alias Macloughlane in December 1732, and in doing so defends her own right to a voice. In February 1847, William Sheen stands his ground in the courtroom, when he accuses his servant Mary Ryley of taking various items from his lodging house in Whitechapel. In September 1922, Charles ‘Darby’ Sabini defends his reputation and that of his associates in an interview with the Sunday paper, the Empire News. Whilst we can never be sure of the extent to which published words are an accurate reflection of reality, these statements capture fleeting moments of negotiation with respectable society. They demonstrate that the underworld and the upperworld overlapped. As Richard Evans noted in his study of German criminals, ‘the boundaries of the underworld were always more fluid than commentators maintained’.⁴

The underworld and the ways in which it has been constructed in different historical periods inform this book. Theoretically, cultural, social and political ideology about criminal subcultures accelerated during the twentieth century.⁵ However, in terms of the ties that bind criminals to their communities and to kin, and in the spatial footsteps from where they originate, connections with traditional ‘underworlds’ remained. Thus, this book is an attempt to think about the changing nature of the language used by police and law enforcers, by journalists and writers, by victims and witnesses and by criminals themselves. It looks at some of the interactions that have shaped the historical construction of the underworld. Regulatory frameworks, criminal law and practice, styles of journalism and popular crime writing have all influenced the way in which the public has come to understand organised crime. This book considers some of these processes over a broad chronological period. That the examples come from the early eighteenth century until the interwar period of the twentieth century is not accidental. It was in the eighteenth century that the idea of a criminal underworld became more coherent and more embedded in popular culture. In a period in which the criminal justice system was being vigorously remade, cultural production, the texts, literatures and narratives through which the underworld was and is narrated, was expanding and becoming more accessible to a wider range of society.

The book ends in the interwar period of the twentieth century.⁶ Both criminals and representations of criminals were influenced by external factors in this period, marking it as a significant watershed. Thus concepts of organised crime were much more distinctly influenced by North American representations of gangsters by the early 1930s.⁷ Arguably it is in the 1920s and 1930s, and amongst the networks and alliances concerned in converging illegal economies, that the roots of modern organised crime can be found. Whilst considerations of change over time are inevitable, the intention of this book is not to provide a sequential history or complete survey of the underworld. Rather, key examples and case studies are used to explore a set of themes that have been identified from the press, criminal and police records, and the historically constructed narrative of the underworld.

An important focus of the book is what might be broadly described as crime networks. As Paul Griffiths has noted of early modern London:

The evident distortions of a constructed ‘underworld’ or calculated political boundaries do not mean that we should limit criminal communities to a minor role in early modern London. Instead of a parallel criminal universe, we should hunt for the jigsaw pieces that, when put together, show associations or networks of criminals.⁸

Some of those jigsaw pieces are examined in three chapters (3, 5 and 8) which provide detailed studies of individuals and groups of closely connected criminals who became known to the public for parts of their life. For these mainly plebeian Londoners, interactions with the courts could be significantly shaped by the socially constructed representations of the gangs and confederacies to which they were believed to belong. However, the book argues that kinship, ethnic and community networks also structured these connecting criminal lives. Whilst these individuals and groups were not always welcome residents, they were neighbours and did flow in and out of local communities. Moreover, the way in which the press and other crime literatures contributed to the visibility of certain ‘noted’ individuals is also crucial. This visibility can also be seen in other chapters in this book (2, 4, 6 and 7), which focus on the relationship between criminality and press and courtroom constructions of criminal typologies. Gang crime, informers, hustlers, the swell mob, swindlers, the long firm and fighting gangs are some of the labels used by the press and other authorities to describe forms of criminal activity. These chapters cover longer chronologies, combined with close examination of a smaller group of trials from the Old Bailey. The rest of this introduction outlines the key themes and chapter structure of the book. To start, a brief exploration follows of the use of the word ‘underworld’ in both contemporary writings and in the more recent work by academics and authors of popular crime histories.

Underworld Terminology

Writers continue to evoke the liminality, marginality and otherness of the underworld to cloak descriptions of criminality in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁹ The terminology of the ‘criminal underworld’ has become deeply embedded in our cultural psyche: the ‘underworld’ is presented as a solid entity, a set of behaviours, activities and spaces that exist alongside the upperworld. Indeed, the term has had a profound power in the modernity of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a collective way of describing bad behaviour it is compelling; and its imprecision ensures that it remains a key trope in press reportage. The process of how the underworld became embedded in our cultural, social and political language is partly the focus of this book. Despite its prevalence as a noun used to describe collective criminal activity, ‘the underworld’ was not used consistently until the later nineteenth century. One of the earliest books to refer to the underworld in its title was the work of the pseudonymic George Ellington, who in 1869 published The Women of New York; or, The Under-world of the Great City …. This was followed in 1899 by the work of Helen Campbell, also writing about prostitution, in Darkness and Daylight; or, Lights and Shadows of New York Life.¹⁰ By the early decades of the twentieth century the use of the term had become fairly common in descriptions and accounts of urban criminal milieux in America and Britain.¹¹

An early newspaper reference to the underworld is found in The Times in 1864, in an editorial that attempts to explain the ‘belief in an underworld of crime and horrors’.¹² According to the writer, this was a ‘fanciful idea of metropolitan wickedness’; and that ‘the dark chambers of Ainsworth’s novels, in which thieves and thief-catchers played their desperate game against each other, no longer exist’.¹³ The author saw communities of thieves as something belonging to the past: ‘the superior efficiency of our modern police saves us from depredations on a grander scale’. The police were no longer interested in the encouragement of crime and the ‘detestable trade of Jonathan Wild is suppressed’. The thieves remained but ‘are no longer so gregarious in their habits, that they do not congregate, as they once did, in certain quarters, or meet so regularly at certain “flash houses,” but are more dispersed through the whole population, and often carry on honest trade in their spare hours’. This editorial can be read as a moment of mythologisation. The references to Ainsworth’s novels and to G. M. W. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London are significant.¹⁴ Thus, at this mid-Victorian point of time the narrative trope of the underworld was one that was powerfully shaped by the relationship between the press, law enforcement and broader print culture.¹⁵ Yet, these narrative connections originated in the previous century, as the reference to Jonathan Wild suggests. Eighteenth-century print culture celebrated the criminal, and underwent a significant transformation.¹⁶ Even before this, the concept of alternative deviant worlds can be found in the detailed iconography of pre-modern underworlds. Literary and semi-literary accounts, such as John Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds in 1561, and other rogue literature of the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, described an alternative world with a specific language, codes of behaviour and a distinct geography.

The prevalence of published crime literature – the criminal biography written by hack Grub Street writers in the eighteenth century, the social investigations of the nineteenth and the true crime of the twentieth – has led to some reticence on the part of historians in dealing with the underworld paradigm.¹⁷ Exceptions to this include the work of Paul Griffiths and John McMullan on early modern London and Alyson Brown and Stefan Slater’s work on the early twentieth century.¹⁸ Richard Evans’ work on narratives of the underworld in nineteenth-century Germany provides a useful discursive framework.¹⁹ Other work has focused on cultural production and its role in shaping the representation of criminality. For example, Andrea McKenzie has written on crime print culture in the eighteenth century and authors such as Rosalind Crone and Judith Flanders have written in a similar vein about the nineteenth century.²⁰ Esther Snell and Richard Ward have explored discourses around criminality in the eighteenth-century press. John Carter Wood and Matt Houlbrook have written about the relationship between crime stories, press representation and mass culture in the interwar period of the twentieth century.²¹ Outside these serious studies there exists a parallel popular history of crime. Thus, in a number of popular texts the underworld is described as a real historical and social space.²² This is most apparent in genre studies of the underworld by true-crime writers such as James Morton and Brian McDonald.²³ The way in which such writers employ evidence and narrate stories about historical organised crime is inherently problematic. Arguably there are processes of mythologising in this history that have been shaped over time by the public demand for crime stories. As Roland Barthes suggested, ‘Myth lends itself to history in two ways: by its form, which is only relatively motivated; by its concept, the nature of which is historical’.²⁴ The late modern mythologising of crime stories mirrors the earlier proliferation of print culture; the particular success of the ‘black and red’ true-crime genre since the 1980s, specialising in villains’ memoirs, resonates with the biographies of highway robbers, footpads and fraudsters.²⁵ Moreover, the narrative of organised crime has also undergone a process of ‘genealogising’ by writers who see criminal groups and individuals such as the Sabinis (Chapter 8) on a continuum; the connections and inheritances (of criminal business, of territory) echoing the predominance of the ‘family firm’ in later-twentieth-century narratives. Thus the ‘racecourse wars’ of the interwar period, and the activities of the Sabini family in particular, have been mythologised and genealogised through a number of literary media, including press, police biography, memoirs and novels, as well as true crime writing.

However, the underworld has not only been constructed through contemporary print culture and true crime mythologies. Organised crime networks have been the subject of systematic study by sociologists and criminologists.²⁶ British organised crime has tended to be seen as a more recent phenomenon.²⁷ Dick Hobbs notes that in Britain the concept of organised crime has only relatively recently been deployed by political institutions (politicians and senior police officers): ‘this shift in perception is a direct consequence of a particular reading of globalization and its attendant attributes, in particular the expansion of illegal economic activity and its cosmopolitan associations’.²⁸ This approach, Hobbs argues, defines organised crime as a distinctly modern phenomenon that largely ignores the persistent elements of criminal organisation that can be identified in past societies. Historians also have generally seen forms of criminal organisation as culturally and politically constructed. There is no underworld, only elite interpretations of the lives of the poor and working class; a collection of ideas about crime mediated through cultural and legal apparatus. This view is supported by cultural historical approaches which privilege the place of language and discourse. The disentanglement of ‘the underworld’ from its literary and cultural contexts renders it meaningless; the understanding of criminal organisation that relates it to bureaucracy, structure and hierarchy is essentially unhelpful.

Close reading of historical sources suggests a more flexible and fluid (and arguably disorganised) set of relationships. In the 1980s, criminologist Peter Reuter coined the term ‘disorganised’ crime, arguing that in reality criminal networks were more diverse and fragmented than the traditional picture had supposed.²⁹ This is a more useful means of categorising the criminal activity in which some individuals and groups were involved, and is suggested by the fundamentally loose nature of many of the alliances described in this book. Individuals shifted allegiances and groups joined forces in response to a variety of external or internal factors. Whilst alliances could be shaped by the overlapping networks to which people belonged, other forces also engendered commonalities and confederacy. As Chapter 7 will demonstrate, groups of youths in late-Victorian and Edwardian London formed and re-formed alliances which were often transient and short-lived. What were perceived as gang formations gained a public profile as a result of shifting territorial conflicts. Similar patterns of disorganisation have been identified by Andrew Davies in his study of gangs in interwar Glasgow...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘Now we have the informing Dogs!’: Crime Networks and Informing Cultures in the 1720s and 1730s
• 3 ‘A Noted Virago’: Moll Harvey and her ‘Dangerous Crew’, 1727–1738
• 4 ‘The pickpockets and hustlers had yesterday what is called a Grand Day’: Changing Street Theft, c. 1800–1850
• 5 ‘There goes Bill Sheen, the murderer’: Crime, Kinship and Community in East London, 1827–1852
• 6 ‘A new species of swindling’: Coiners, Fraudsters, Swindlers and the ‘Long-Firm’, c. 1760–1913
• 7 ‘A London Plague that must be swept away’: Hooligans and Street Fighting Gangs, c. 1882–1912
• 8 ‘The Terror of the People’: Organised Crime in Interwar London
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index