I came across this book by Brian McDonald in a more roundabout way than usual. I was listening to an episode of the Nerdette podcast in which they were interviewing a romance writer who wrote a book with a female character who was part of a street gang in London in the Victorian era, which turned out to be based on a real street gang in London in the Victorian era called the Forty Elephants. So of course I had to learn everything I could about said gang.
This book starts out, not with the Forty Elephants, but with a brief history of other notable criminal women who predated the Forty Elephants. The reader gets a history of women in the 17th and 18th centuries (primarily from England, but at least some of them got to travel the world before meeting their ends). My favorite was the one who wrote a memoir called “Crime Doesn’t Pay”, but died a wealthy woman. I had always thought those fictional memoirs were aspirational, but apparently they were based on real memoirs. That was a thing people did back then. I don’t know why I’m surprised given the proliferation of memoirs now.
I have to admit I spent most of the beginning of the book thinking, “this is nice, but when are we going to get to the Forty Elephants?”
It was a bit of a slow burn, but we got there eventually.
The Forty Elephants formed in the mid-late 1800s, but Alice Diamond took over as their Queen around the 1920s and “reigned” for a good 20 years or so.
The Author’s note mentions that he grew up not far from where the Forty Elephants operated and Alice Diamond lived, which explains why he chose to focus on this particular period of the gang’s almost century-long existence.
Regardless of where you start, it is a fascinating story. The Forty Elephants were associated with a male gang called the Forty Thieves, often intermarrying and doing jobs together.
What struck me was how organized the Forty Elephants were. Not only did they have a queen, but they all paid into a communal “pot” that was used to pay for legal fees whenever a member got caught, which was inevitable in their line of work.
I also loved reading about how they took advantage of sexism to get away with their crimes, often resorting to tears and saying they didn’t know what made them do it, or they had just fallen in with a bad crowd… anything to escape punishment.
They also used aliases at a time when it was much easier to do so, making it impossible to determine exactly how many times any one person was arrested for shoplifting and/or pickpocketing.
One of the facts that struck me most was when the author said the new practice of stores putting goods on display made shoplifting easier, but also made business so much more profitable that it outweighed the cost of stolen items.
The book ends by saying it doesn’t condone theft , which I have to think was required by the publishers, just like the moral ending of all those “memoirs” published in the 17th and 18th centuries. Nevertheless, it was a fascinating read, and I highly recommend it.